Blood Tragedy (Game Chef Review)

This year’s Game Chef requires the participants to review 4 of the other games and recommend one for advancement. So far I’ve reviewed 3 of 4 and have posted my thoughts on the Game Chef website. I’ll be copying my thoughts here as well. This is the first one.

Blood Tragedy. Okay, definitely going for a Tragedy here. That seems Shakespearean. Like all good tragedies we know that most everyone is going to die by the end. Everyone decides how they will die ahead of time. I really like this angle. It’s neat to decide what your ending is going to be and steer events towards it.

Reading on I see that characters can “dominate” a scene and this gives the player more control over the framing of the game. At first I was really turned off with the idea of scoring in each scene. “Get your points outta my rpg”, I thought to myself. That was a gut reaction and the idea of earning points did grow on me as I read on, but that initial reaction is something to keep in mind.

I’m torn over the Exile and Soliloquy rules. I really like the way that a soliloquy as been worked into the normal play of the game. It’s very Shakespearean. What I really don’t like is that a player can be “written out” of the game until the last act. That just doesn’t agree with me. I’d like to find some way to keep them included during the down time. In practice this might not be an issue at all, but it’s definitely a place where I could see myself adding a house rule.

I like the level of freedom that you are trying to give the players. In some games I think everyone will know exactly where they want to take things, but there isn’t much to fall back on if players get stuck. For this reason I think it might be nice to have some kind of central plot element that helps carry the plot forward.

I think it might be interesting to experiement with giving the different roles (rules, servant, etc.) different narrative powers that they could use at the cost of nature.

Overall, an interesting game. I think there is a lot of potential for a great game of tragedies to be made of it. With some expansion and tweaks to the midgame to help push players along and some more attention given to the scoring rules and I think you will be on to something good with Blood Tragedy.

If you’d like to play Blood Tragedy then you can find it here.

Categories: Blood Tragedy, Game Chef, Review

The Daughter of Padua (Game Chef 2011)

I’m participating in Game Chef again this year. You couldn’t keep me away after how much fun I had with it last year. This year’s theme was Shakespeare and we had to pick 3 of the 4 ingredients (Daughter, Exile, Forsworn, Nature).

My entry this year is titled The Daughter of Padua. It’s a game where one person plays as a sickeningly rich man’s daughter that has been put up for marriage. The twist is that she gets to pick her groom and the other players are her suitors.

I used the Daughter, Forsworn, and Nature ingredients for TDoP. The daughter one should be obvious, but the other two aren’t nearly as easy to figure out. For the Forsworn ingredient I have set each of the Suitors to have a secret Oath. This is a negative thing (for the Daughter), it’s an ambition or goal that the suitor has that is the true reason he seeks her marriage. Through the course of the game he will have the option to forswear that oath for the sake of true love. To satisfy nature I went with nature as in “human nature”. Each character has natures which are hidden aspects of their character. In the case of The Daughter there are 10 of these which The Suitors will need to figure out if they want to win her heart. For The Suitors, they each have one nature which The Daughter’s brothers will try to reveal (if they enter the game). All of these natures are taken into account in the epilogue of the game, which the losing suitors narrate.

One thing that I really wanted to work into a game about Shakespeare was the use of direct quotes from his works. I thought this would be a lot of fun and it was a mechanic I’ve seen used in another RPG called The Dying Earth. In that case they used Jack Vance quotes. The mechanic I used was pretty basic. Players draw random quotes and if they can work them into the game they get bonus dice.

The overall concept for this year’s game came to me pretty easily. I knew that I wanted to do a comedy because I’ve always liked Shakespeare’s sense of humour. I also thought that most of the other contestants would be going the tragedy route with their games. Daughter really stuck out at me and I thought it would be pretty Shakespearean to do a comedy about social climbing suitors competing to win the heart of a very rich heiress. For a while I had thought about going a little bit meta and making a play on words with players (as in actors) and players (as in the people playing the game). I couldn’t really make this work, but it still amuses me when reading the rules that the terms can be used interchangeably.

I picked Padua because it was a pretty large Italian city around Shakespeare’s time and, to my knowledge it wasn’t used in one his plays. I thought that it was just the location that Shakespeare could have used and would make a great setting for my game. I later realized, while collecting Shakespeare quotes, that it was where The Taming of the Shrew is set. Oops. I guess I don’t know my Shakespeare as well as I should. I should earn points by correctly guessing a setting he would use though, right?

My original draft of the game ended up being dangerously close to a Fiasco rip-off. My main mechanic in the game is that The Daughter rates her suitor’s seduction attempts with either a flirty smile or an evil scowl. To represent this she hands out different coloured dice. Originally these were rolled against a chart at the end of the game exactly like you do in Fiasco. Not only was this too close for comfort, but I realized it just didn’t work. I needed a flat happy or sad ending and no scale. I kept the dice roll but ditched the chart. All the dice are used for is determining the winning suitor and whether it is going to be a good (read happy) marriage or not. The rest comes down to interpretation from the losing suitors. They use the natures of the bride and groom as well as how high the dice roll was and whether the oath was broken or not to narrate an epilogue. I’m confident that the final game is different enough from Fiasco to be its own game, but there is definitely a similarity in using two different dice for good and bad scenes.

If there is a weakness (that I can see) in my entry this year it will be in the lack of play examples and the suitor oaths. We’ll see what the reviewers have to say.

Speaking of reviewers, this year each contestant must review 4 of the other entries and recommend one to the next round. Watch this space for my own thoughts on 4 other games.

If you’d like to play The Daughter of Padua then you can find it on the Games page or just click this link. I also made a character sheet for this game which you can find here.

Categories: Design, Game Chef, RPG, Shakespeare, The Daughter of Padua

A Dwarf loadout for a game that doesn’t exist.

Just as the topic says. Remember that role playing card game I mused about several months ago? I kept thinking about it and produced enough cards to make a sample character loadout. What you see above is a loadout for a stereotypical Dwarf character.

Based on the card layout for this character our dwarf has:

• 2 Strength
• 3 Toughness
• 1 Dexterity
• 1 Wisdom
• 1 Intelligence
• 1 Charisma

If you’ve read those previous posts you would know that these stats are derived from the colour of the cards used in the loadout. That means that if you add up all of the values it should equal 9. Thus, all characters must have a value between 0 and 9 for each attribute. That’s pretty straightforward, I think.

The question is, what are these attributes used for? In a nutshell, they relate to the Hit Deck. A communal deck of cards made up of 9 suits, each matching an attribute. Depending on what your character is doing their attribute could affect anything to the number of cards they get to draw to a bonus to the card value. Typically it’s going to be card draw. If our dwarf wanted to kick down a door, for example, the GM would have them draw a number of cards equal to their Strength attribute +1 (since you can’t draw 0 cards). They get to use the card with the highest value for their attempt to knock down the door. To further complicate things, there is a system of trumps. Basically, every attribute has one other attribute that trumps it and counts as a straight up failure if used. I haven’t figured out the trump relationships at this point.

If you look through the cards you might notice a few other things I haven’t previously talked about. I make reference to wound types on some of those cards. The way I envision injuries working in this game would be that the GM has a stack of wound cards of different types. He tosses those out to characters/monsters as needed. I feel that this is one of the strengths of using a card-based system. You can have the granularity of different types of injuries without having to look rarely used rules. What you need is printed on the card that has handily been placed next to your character.

I don’t believe I’ve spent much time talking about the difference between Ancestry, Ability, and Equipment cards either. Mechanically, it comes down to how they are swapped in and out of your character loadout. Ancestry cards can never be swapped out unless something drastic happens like a polymorph spell or disownment. Ability cards require retraining of some kind to change and Equipment cards can be moved in and out on a character’s turn. Fluff wise there are some differences, but I’m sure you can work those details out on your own.

I think the cards are pretty self-explanatory and give an idea of how I imagine this game playing out. I think it’s worth noting that a player could easily mix and match cards from different loadouts to quickly and easily create all kinds of different characters.

That pretty much does it for now. I don’t know how much further I’ll pursue this idea. It seems like fun to me, but I’m not sure if it really appeals to anyone other than me. I might post up some card templates so that anyone could make their own cards. If you want to see more of this then let me know.

Categories: Card Games, Game Design, RPCG

Magic Eight-balls as a Game Mechanic

Did you know that the piece inside a magic eight-ball that produces an answer when you shake it is a dodecahedron? I didn't and when I found out that it was a twenty-sided die I was inspired to come up with an RPG that uses a magic eight-ball, or that at least approximates one with a d20 table.

Using an eight-ball as an oracle

There is an interesting game called Mythic that, instead of using a GM or placing narrative duties on the players, uses an oracle mechanic. The way it works is that players ask questions about what is happening (Is there anything in the woods? Yes, something dangerous. Is it a monster? Yes.) and the oracle responds with an answer. They have to be questions that can be answered with a Yes or a No and the players use these answers in combination with random tables to determine what happens in the game.

It seems to me that I could do something similar with a magic eight-ball. Players consult the magic eight-ball with yes/no questions and it responds.

What kind of game would use a mechanic like this?

In my mind there is only one setting that could use such a strange mechanic: corporate offices. I imagine a comedy game in which the players are workers in an office. I'm imagining an office environment like Better Off Ted, You Don't Have to Be Evil to Work Here and similar takes. A game filled with nonsensical business decisions, weird characters and general hilarity.

The Magic Eight Ball is used whenever communicating with Upper Management. If you need to ask for something, get a ruling, or find out if some alternative is an option then you work it into a yes/no question and shake the eight-ball. The resulting phrase is what management has to say on the matter.

Categories: d20, Game Design, Idea, magic eightball, The RPG Office, Weird Corporate

A review of the In Between 2.0 from Poland

Those Polish gamers are at it again. This time they have played my revised version of In Between and it looks like they had a pretty good time with it. You can read their review here. It does happen to be in Polish, though.

The review author was kind enough to send me the gist of it via email. It sounds like most of their problems were due to vagueness in the writing, something that I’ll definitely fix when I get around to updating the game again. They also spotted a few mistakes. Whoops, looks like I need to spend more time proofreading. They seemed pretty happy with the less competitive nature of the game and the system mechanics rework.

I love hearing from people that have played my games so please let me know if you give them a try.

Categories: In Between, Poland, RPG, RPG Kepos

In Between v2 is finished.

I’ve spent a lot of time procrastinating in regards to the second version of In Between. I’ve had all kinds of notes and ideas sitting in a dropbox folder for months, but when it came down to compiling them all I just kept putting it off.

No more! I sat down this week and put them all into the lackluster layout that is the official version of In Between. Those of you that are actually interested will want to know what is new. To help with that I have provided this handy list:

• No longer requires more six sided dice than any reasonable person owns.
• Play now moves through distinct phases and provides a more on topic and ritualized way of playing.
• The narration control system has changed significantly from a very open universalis-like approach to one more focused variety.
• This means less direct competition between players.
• The Power economy has been reworked to require less dice rolling and has a few more quirks than before.
• Much less competitive than before. You don’t need to possess a mortal in order to fulfill your atonement goals.
• Demons have been fleshed out. They actually affect the game now and more selfish characters can walk down the demonic path.
• Exorcists have been added to the game. A new threat (or ally) in the quest for redemption.

There are a few other things, but that'll give you a good idea. The game has gained around 4 pages of new content all in all. It still lacks a lot of examples and those may eventually come if I do another revision.

I’ve put the game up on Google Docs, so check it out! 

Categories: In Between, Release, RPG

Foundation: a kingdom-building rpg (idea)

I have always loved the kingdom and city building elements of video games like Suikoden and Actraiser. There is something compelling about searching out people to fill your city, managing the day to day conflicts and the dealing with politics and war. It is something I really enjoy, but aside from a few supplements it's also something I rarely see in the tabletop RPG world.

I remember the Birthright setting for D&D, but it seems to have slipped away into obscurity. Birthright doesn't seem to have had the staying power that other D&D settings, like Plansecape or Spelljammer, did. Then there is Reign, but while that game does have some great rules for player organizations it doesn't have the kind of focus that I'm interested in.

The popularity of the Kingmaker Adventure Path shows that I'm not the only one that thinks this style of play is fun. I got to thinking, "How would I make an RPG focused around this kind of play?"

Concept

A game in which the players build up their own fantasy city/country/kingdom from the ground up. Each player controls a Founder or Leader (if no Founders are left living). A founder is only as good as their followers and throughout the game the players will regularly role play as both their Founder and the followers that work under their Founder. Additionally, players will also have opportunity to role play as a follower of one of the other founders under certain circumstances. The followers a Founder gathers affect the skills and abilities that are mechanically available to a founder.

Design Goals

1. To capture the fun of city building and kingdom politics while maintaining an easy to use/learn system.
2. To provide a fun game for both players that want to build a mighty utopia and play through the obstacles towards that goal as well as allowing for political conflict for players that want to play something a little... sleazier.
3. Provide mechanics for conflict between other cities/kingdoms as well as internal conflict, either between players (founder) or NPC factions.

Some Rough Ideas

This game is strictly in the "batting around ideas" phase. What follows are some of the things I have been thinking about.

Player Characters as Founders

For me, at least, I see this game beginning when the player characters stake out some territory and found their new city. In Foundation each of the players takes on the role of one of the founders of a new settlement/city/kingdom/etc.

A Founder would be made up of a few key elements, but the most important of these are their Background, Influence and Entourage.

Background

Unlike with a lot of RPGs where player characters start out as relative unknowns the Founders have already made a name for themselves. They already have the necessary fame or infamy to gather people for their cause. Think of their Background as being a package that sums up their career to this point. It's equal parts character class and back story.

An example Background might be "War Hero" or "Noble". Backgrounds could give the character some abilities or starting stats. I might throw in some more narrative mechanics into the background by giving each Background some blanks that need to be filled in. For example, a War Hero would have to define the war, where it happened and if they were on the winning side. I could see this working something like Apocalypse World's Hx or Fate's Aspects. I could also imagine using some random tables with the Backgrounds that work like a limited lifepath, something like what you see with Traveller's Careers. This is definitely something that needs some more thought.

Influence
Influence is a currency stat. It would be used during play to make things happen. I see Influence as a stat that powers a Founder's abilities and can also be directed towards different factions and goals. For example, if a Founder has 10 Influence they might decide to spend 3 of it towards the Ranger's Guild, 4 to Bankers and the remaining 3 to Public Relations. This influence could be slid around during the course of play and provides bonuses/re-rolls when dealing with those factions/goals.

Entourage
The Entourage is the meat of any Founder.  Founders didn't just get up one day and decide they would build a community from the ground up. They are powerful and influential people with a history. An Entourage includes all of the Followers that are at the disposal of a Founder.

While part of an Entourage a Follower grants skills and abilities to their Founder. For example, a thief's knack for procuring items grants their Founder the ability to pickpocket while a mage allows for the casting of spells.  A Founder that has a bodyguard in the Entourage has increased physical capabilities to overcome challenges (or rather, they have someone to overcome it for them). A bodyguard might also give them the "take a hit" ability which would allow the player to sacrifice the bodyguard so that their Founder can avoid death.

Followers are not always part of the Entourage. There are times when a Founder may assign a Quest (more on this in a bit) to one of their followers and when they do that follower must leave the Entourage in order to accomplish it. If a follower leaves an Entourage then any skills/abilities granted by their presence are lost until their return.

This size of the Entourage should be limited and increasing the size of the Entourage is one of two "leveling" mechanics in Foundation. (The second is increasing the size of the city/kingdom.)

Multiple Characters for Each Player

Taking a page from Ars Magica's book, Foundation has players to take ownership and play from the veiwpoint of any of the characters in their Founder's Entourage. A Founder doesn't leave their city to track down some magical item or a skilled artisan, they send one of their trusted followers. At this point the game could change to that character's viewpoint and players could enjoy a dungeon crawl or just RP out a quick scene.

Not every group is going to like switching the focus like this. In fact, maybe the players want to keep things at the macro level. That's no problem, if I include some tables for players to get an idea of how one of their followers does on a quest then that should allow for quick resolution for those that want it.

City/Kingdom as a Character

The city/kingdom should be treated like a shared player character. It should have its own set of stats and abilities determined by its demographics and physical makeup. Founders could spend Influence to activate abilities.

Ideas

• Unrest as a stat. This would probably be a percentage and would be determined by events and actions of the Founders. Unrest rolls would be rolled regularly and if the roll falls within the Unrest % then something bad happens. (Maybe there should be an Unrest table that could be used to generate a random Unrest event?)
• Buildings and Factions each grant abilities to the city. A cathedral might allow for a Holy Day ability that could be used to lower Unrest.

Player "Generated" Starting Map

I think it would be a lot of fun to have the players generate the map that their city is founded on. This could be done using a set of hexes with players taking turns rolling on a table and then placing elements in a desired hex. Things to place could be resources, points of interest, threats (monsters/rival settlements/bandit camps/etc.) and geographical features. I could look to How to Host a Dungeon and Dawn of Worlds for inspiration on how to put this together.

Passage of Time

The game should proceed in rounds, with each round representing a chunk of time. The players should probably decide on how much time to start with, but I think either 1 month or 1 season would be a good place to start at.

For each of these chunks of time the players decide what their Founders want to do. That might be trying to make connections with a certain guild, expanding their Kingdom's borders or even trying to lure someone important to their city. In addition, for each one of these rounds some rolls should be made. The first would be the Unrest Roll discussed above and the second should be on a Random Events Table that would have things on it like "besieged by goblins" or "crime wave". These events would create obstacles for the Founders to overcome or risk the Unrest rising. Of course, not all events should be negative. There could be windfalls, important people joining the settlement and other positive results.

GM?   

This one has me a bit stumped. Should this game be GMless or should it have someone in the traditional role of storyteller/game master? It wouldn't be hard to tweak Influence to work as a narrative currency like you see in games like Universalis. It might also work to have the GM role switch to a different Founder for each Round. This one definitely requires more mulling over.

Afterthoughts

Phew. That was quite the brain-dump. I really do like the idea of this game, but I don't know if all of these ideas fit together as snuggly as I would like them to. I definitely need to let this game bounce around in my head for a while and see what happens with it.

Categories: Foundation, Game Design, Idea, RPG

Quick mock-up of a Role Playing Card Game card.

I know I said that I wouldn’t play around with my role playing card game (RPCG) until I finished up my revision of In Between, but I just couldn’t help myself.

Here is a mock-up of what one of the Persona Cards might look like.

I think I’ve missed my true calling in life: art. 

Apart from the terrible art and questionable graphic design skills what’s going on here exactly? Well, let’s start from the top and work our way down.

First off you’ll notice that the card is red. Various colors represent different attributes. In this case that attribute is STRENGTH. Don’t worry, I’ve considered colourblind players. You see that tiny little icon at the top? It’s supposed to look like a muscely bicep. It’s there as a secondary way of telling what attribute the card is linked to. I’ll talk more about attributes at some later point in time. For now, just know that they exist.

Next up is the title of the card. That would be Orc Hatred. That’s pretty straightforward, as is the the stick-art below.

Now we reach the good stuff. In the text box you’ll see the bolded word ANCESTRY on the right. That’s to tell us that it is an Ancestry TYPE card. That’s important for random character creation and also for any other cards that might affect Ancestry cards. There are other Types as well. Right now they are limited to 3 types for Persona cards. That is Ancestry, Ability, and Equipment. As an aside, Persona cards are those that make up a player’s character . Character cards just sounded kind of boring so I decided to use Persona instead.

Beneath the TYPE is the RULES TEXT. This is the meat of a card. It has some role playing information which I think is really important to help drive home that this is a RPG and not a competitive card game. Following that is the actual mechanics aspect. In this case it talks about TRUMPS. Trumps are going to be a major part of the resolution system. Everything has a trump, think of it like rock-paper-scissors. Rock trumps paper which trumps scissors which trumps rock. Only in this case everything has a positive and negative trump which for the sake of simplicity we will equate to Critical Success and Critical Failure. Essentially what this card is saying is that if you’re fighting an orc and you roll a 1 you treat it like a 10 OR if you are negotiating with an orc and you roll a 20 then you treat it like a 10. Trumping and resolution is a bit more complicated than that, but this post isn’t about that. I’ll talk about the resolution system some other time.

That’s everything that is on this card. There is room for more information and some of the non-persona cards do have other stuff on them. Monster/NPC/Challenge cards, for example, require attribute information as they aren’t built out of 9 separate cards. This will be represented by colored symbols.

That’s enough about this game for now. If you’ve got a (relevant) opinion I’d love to hear it.

Categories: Card Games, Game Design, Idea, In Progress, RGCG

Combining card games and RPGs

Gamma World relaunched as a D&D 4E based game a couple of months ago. I picked it up since I’ve always been a fan of randomly generated character creation and the wacky universe that Gamma World is set in. We only played it once and it could only be described as a failure. I had intended it as a pickup and play kind of game when our regular games get waylaid for one reason or another; that's how we use Icons. It doesn't work too well for that. 4E is too heavy a ruleset and none of us are particularly familiar with it, which amplified the problem. We did, however, somewhat enjoy playing with the cards.

I didn't really think the cards were used as well as they could have been. They really were not used to any better of an effect than a table in the rulebook. Still, an interesting experiment.

Not long after our disastrous Gamma Worlds game, when I was poking around on the ‘net, I discovered an odd game called Dragon Storm. Dragon Storm is a mashup of RPGs and CCGs. I took a look at some of the cards and art and decided that it wasn't really for me, but it did get me thinking. How would I put together a mashup of RPGs and CCGs?

I’m not really looking to take on another project right now, at least not until In Between has been rewritten, but here are a few ideas I have bouncing around.

• Character cards are split into 3 types: Ancestry, Ability, and Equipment. For random character creation these are split into 3 seperate piles and 3 from each are drawn.

• Player Characters are built out of 9 card loadouts. They do not necessarily require 3 of each character card type, but randomly created ones will.

• Ability cards may be changed through retraining and Equipment cards can be changed at any time.

• A communal “Hit Deck” is utilized. This deck would consist of numbers on different suits as well as a few other special cards.

• Cards from this deck are drawn instead of rolling dice.

• Every card is assigned a suit. This is used when determining critical success and fumbles and may be important for abilities and other things.

• There should be at least one GM only deck. This could be split into two. One containing monsters/npcs and another containing adventure seeds. These could be drawn from to create random adventures and other such factors, but would be by no means mandatory for play. The GM may or may not utilize their own Hit Deck, although its purpose would be the same.

That's all I’ve got for now. It should make for quick and dirty games right now, but maybe one day I’ll flesh it out some more.

I’m actually aware of two other RPGs that use cards as a core mechanic. The first is the StoryCards system, which is really more of a tarot deck. The second is the 6d6 Fireball RPG in progress. I don’t know much about it yet, but they seem to be playing around with some similar ideas.

Categories: 6d6 RPG, Card Games, CCG, Dragon Storm, RPG, StoryCards