One Lost Update

I’ve been busy working on a super secret project and seem to have missed an update here or there. I’ll post about the aforementioned covert project as soon as I’m able, in the meantime I suppose I should let let you know that One Lost Pipe placed 4th in System/Rules and 4th in Layout/Appearance for RPG Geek’s 48 hour RPG contest.

While I can’t say that I’m not disappointed that I didn’t place higher, I am pleased that I did so well with a quirky game like One Lost Pipe. The winners in all of the categories are darn fun looking games. My personal favourite of the competition was The Conspiracy of Unkind Constables. I thought it was a very well written and designed game. You can check out the rest of the entries here.

I’ve got to say that I’m a little burned out on design competitions right now, but I’ll be keeping my eye out for any more that might be on the horizon.

Categories: 48 Hour RPG, Impossible Boulder, One Lost Pipe, RPG Geek

Introducing One Lost Pipe

A wonderful website that goes by the name of RPG Geek recently held a 48 hour RPG contest. What this means is that the contestants have to design, write, and submit a complete RPG in 48 hours without any help. I decided to try my luck and see what happened.

The contest, this time, had each contestant randomly generate 3 words which were to become elements that had to be included in the game. The three words I generated were rat, pipe, and tavern. I came up with a number of different ideas, each one becoming increasingly more bizarre. I thought of a game were the characters were trapped in a hallucination brought on by a hallucinogenic plant that is smoked and a rat is their spirit guide. I thought of a game where an evil rat was driving people insane in the public washroom of a bar. I have a strange mind.

I eventually settled on an a game inspired by the tale of The Pied Piper. In my game the piper is long gone, but he had left his pipe behind as a kind of folkloric artifact. It became nothing more than a myth capitalized on by a pub owner, that is, until it was stolen. That’s when a plague of rats fell upon the city and the pub owner hired you (the player) to get it back. I decided to call this game One Lost Pipe. That is kind of interesting, right?

Mechanically I decided that I wanted to use playing cards. I’m not sure why exactly, maybe I was just sick of dice when I wrote it. Cards also fit nicely with the pub theme, so there is that. I had initially been trying to turn this into a kind of basic tarot system, but after outlining all the cards and looking at it I realized it just didn’t mesh with the private investigator vibe I was getting from the game. I switched directions and went for a mechanic inspired by blackjack/21. It was simple, fast, and matched the theme much better than tarot.

With this game I wanted to experiment with different ideas. That’s one reason for using the cards, but another thing I wanted to play around with was seeing if I could make an RPG that could be played by just one person. I built the game around that, but then I decided that I wanted the ability to scale the game up to more players. I decided to accomplish this by adding a pseudo-GM position called Fate. Fate is essentially the blackjack dealer and when he is included the resolution gets a little bit more crunchy. This was great, but I decided it would be fun if the two players would switch roles back and forth, so I made that the default. Any players that are happy with their roles can just choose to ignore that rule. I also added two additional roles to the game so that it can be played with anywhere from 1-4 people. The additional roles were that of the Rat King and the Reporter. Each has their own goals in the game. The Rat King wants the rat swarm to overrun the city and The Reporter wants to get the scoop from the person that stole the pipe. Adding either of these roles adds some interesting twists to the way the game is played.

Speaking of the Rat Swarm, that’s another mechanic I added to the game to play around with. It is kind of a built-in timer. The game ends if it gets high enough so this game is definitely a single session kind of thing. The rat swarm also doubles as a currency for both Fate and the Rat King as a way to mess with the detective or reporter.

The only other interesting thing to say about the game is that I included a random pub name generator table at the end. I’m not sure why exactly. I just thought it would be fun.

I’ll be adding my game, One Lost Pipe, to this website in the near future. For now, you can get it at its RPG Geek Page. If you like the game then consider voting for it, but please read at least a few of the other entries before you do so. I’m currently in the process of writing a mini-review for each of the game submissions for the contest. I’m posting them on RPG Geek as I go, but I’ll do a round up here when I’m finished.

Categories: 48 Hour RPG, Design, One Lost Pipe, RPG Geek

All’s Well That Ends As You Like It (Game Chef 2011 Review)

I really like the title. I don’t really have a reason to like it, I just do.

Another game I reviewed for Game Chef this year. All’s Well That Ends As You Like It is an unusual mashup of board game and RPG elements.

Everything about this game just screams out at me with style. It looks like fun. It looks like a lot of fun. I don’t have too much to comment on as far as the rules go. I like that there are two win conditions for each player character. It drives home the Shakespearean theme, but I do think that even the tragic endings lean more towards the comedic. That’s okay, this game is obviously meant to be played manically and with booze.

While I like the game and truly think I would have a blast with it, I think that it might do better as a board game than as an RPG. I can picture a beautiful game board, little character pieces, and fully illustrated character cards complete with role play guidelines. I think with some tweaking to the role play elements that this could become quite the little boxed product. On the other hand, I can also picture you going in more of a How to Host a Murder direction. Keep the character cards with role play elements and add masks or other props. Declare sections of the house as the different rooms and have a couple of people take on the role of GM and you have a game that I would go to the driest cocktail party to try.

Keep at it. I’d like to see this one after it has had a few layers of polish on it.

I ended up recommending this one as a finalist for this year’s competition. Out of all the games I looked at this was the one I wanted to play most. I wasn’t the only one that liked it. AWTEAYLI ended up winning Game Chef 2011.

Categories: All’s Well That Ends As You Like It, Game Chef, Review

The Gentlefae of Cremona (Game Chef 2011 Review)

This is the last one of these and then I’m done posting my thoughts. It was one of the harder ones to review because of the density of the rules.

I enjoy seeing the few games that borrow the fairy elements from Shakespeare’s work. It’s a nice change from all of the tragedies and romantic comedies.

I didn’t get stuck anywhere reading through the rules, but I did have to read through twice before I really wrapped my head around everything that is going on. This is a game that would really benefit with a page dedicated to showing the player how it should play out.

The overall mechanics seem like they should work and I like how responsibility is spread out among several different players for everything that happens. I also can’t help but feel that the game would be more fun if only the Major Arcana cards were used. Of course, that would require reworking the entire game so please don’t consider that a criticism; it’s more an observation that drawing named cards is more fun for me.

The glossary was a nice touch. It’s not something you see often in any RPGs. I do think it’s a bit odd you would include a glossary and not a table of contents, though.

My only criticism is that I think the game might be a little bit too finicky. This game seems to be intended for one-off play, but it requires a tarot deck, beads, created characters (although not difficult to create) and index cards/scrap paper. That’s a lot of things. To top all that off the rules take a few passes to sink in. I don’t think that is very conductive for a one-shot style game where players may not have even planned to play the game and have fallen back on it because someone couldn’t make it or as a break from whatever their regular game is. My earlier suggestion of including an example of play could help alleviate that, as could including some of the necessary components in the document to be cut out. My group usually plays indies as a break or as fall back, which is where this is coming from, and I fear that we would likely pass over this game in favour of something lazier.

This is a solid entry with an interesting system and an engaging theme. I think it is a little rough around the edges, but that’s the nature of Game Chef titles.

Categories: Game Chef, Review, The Gentlefae of Cremona

My Daughter, The Queen (Game Chef Review)

Here is the second game that I reviewed during the reviewing stage of Game Chef 2011.

This one has a very nice and simple format. It’s unfair of me to take that into consideration, but I do. It is just more enjoyable for me to read when some thought has been put into the presentation.

Let’s get to the meat of it. Right from the start I’m interested. I like the idea of a father going over the minutia of where he went wrong with his daughter. There is room to explore. I also like that it really comes off more like it’s his friends analyzing what happened and telling him the truth of it rather than the fiction he has built for himself over the years.

System wise, I don’t really have any complaints. It looks like it should work with a minimum of fuss and do what it sets out to do. I think there could be a little more room for throwing curve balls at the players, but it otherwise looks solid to me. I think I would need to sit down and play it with some friends to know if there are any spots that need more attention.

The biggest, possibly only, problem I see with this game is that I’m not feeling the Shakespeare. Sure, Shakespeare is in it, but as is noted in the game he could easily be replaced with anyone. This game could just as easily be a post-mortem of a messy breakup. I aam by no means a Shakespeare expert, but this kind of examination of one’s life just doesn’t feel like Shakespeare. Maybe one or two of Hamlet’s soliloquies are as introspective, but that’s it.

I think the designer has hit on something good here. Replaying events and looking at them from different angles could work with so many different stories. I’d love to see this idea taken and applied to a variety of tales. I’m also strangely reminded of the film Big Fish and the novel Ireland. Both are stories about fathers trying to relate to their estranged children (sons in this case). The difference is that they try to do it through their own fictions. I think that’s an angle that really could have brought Shakespeare into this story. If, after all the introspection, he writes a final play which is played out in a similar way as the other scenes with the players building off his ideas. It could be his final attempt at reconciliation or maybe just something for the daughter to find one day after he has died.

Categories: Game Chef, My Daughter The Queen, Review

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