Vote For Adventure: Series 3 Retrospective

That's right, I'm back again with another Vote For Adventure retrospective. I've done them twice before, go take a look.

The Setting

This time around I mandated a generic fantasy setting. I needed something easily digestible after the difficulties with the last one (survival horror). That isn't to say that the voters weren't given input, they were. What I did was allow every voter to submit a word. This word could be whatever they wanted, although I warned against profanity. The idea was that I would compile all of the words and incorporate them into the game in some way. I wasn't able to use all of the words, but some of the themes and motifs of the game came straight out of these words. One of the most important, the color red, was because so many people submitted words that were related to that color.

Character Creation

In S2 we used a % skill system that, while working, turned out to be difficult to use. Players couldn't remember what their odds were and many didn't feel particularly attached to the character. For S3 I switched things up again. This time around I simply introduced the adventure and created the character based on the choices they made in the very first poll. In this case they entered the dungeon by solving a puzzle and were plagued by recurring dreams. I combined those choices with some of the words from the setting to create the character. I also asked some follow up questions as about the character as we progressed through the Series (Male/Female, for example).

The character we ended up with was Kamala, a Vivid/Vibrant human female. A Vivid/Vibrant is a type of spellcaster that uses drains color from the world in order to power their magic. Kamala drains the color red and this element of the world and story was strongly influenced by the word choices from earlier. We also learned a little bit about Kamala from the actions and votes throughout the series. She is a treasure hunter, and acquires of artifacts. She travels far and wide and frequently manipulates emotions with her magic. Kamala is curious and has a bad habit of getting into trouble by poking metaphorical bee's nests.

The character's name, incidentally, was also voted on and supplied by the voters.

I would say that Character Creation was a resounding success for S3. It worked smoothly and everyone became attached to the character. I got a great level of "buy in" and a sense of ownership from the voters. So much so that when it came time to vote on what S4 would be the voters chose to build on to Kamala's story.

Mechanics/Rules

This time around I tried GM fiat as the method of resolution. I responded based on the actions chosen by the voters and what I thought made sense. This turned out to be surprisingly popular and was voted in again for S4.

I did feel that I wasn't as cruel as I should have been with my responses as I was worried about truly hurting the character without a dice roll or something to buffer the blame. This is something I intend to improve on for S4. I need to be more impartial about what happens.

Overall

I think S3 did really well. Traffic-wise it was probably a little less than S2, but it had a much more regular voter base without the massive swings. I think Kamala attracted a bit of a core following. I also had a lot of fun with this one, even if it started as a rather formulaic dungeon crawl. It grew into so much more than that.

You can read from the beginning of Series 3 right here.

Categories: Kamala, retrospective, Storytelling, Vote For Adventure

Won't someone please think of the newbs?

One thing that I've noticed about the role playing hobby is that it isn't friendly to new players. I'm not talking about the community itself, most message boards I've seen are filled with people that are happy to lend their experience. No, I'm talking about the actual state of the hobby.

Despite role playing games being easier than ever to actually obtain thanks to the wonders of digital distribution, it seems like the hobby really caters to existing players. Where are the new player guides? Where are the introductory adventures? Wizards of the Coast and Paizo may have gotten their acts together and finally published some competent introductory products, but, judging from all of the forum threads featuring people looking for a product to start with, they haven't done a great job of advertising them outside of the people that already know how to play.

Not good enough.

WotC and Paizo aren't the only publishers to blame, though. Take a look at the introductory chapter of your favourite RPG. You know, that "What is an RPG" that you usually skip over. These chapters are almost uniformly terrible. They raise more questions than they answer, they assume the reader already knows what they are doing or they explain the wrong things. If you move on from there and into he actual "How to Play" chapters you will find that these are no better. They all assume the reader already understands the concept and structure of role playing games and from the viewpoint of a completely new player are mystifying and unhelpful.

Part of the problem is no doubt how difficult it is to actually explain in writing how role playing games work. Since the birth of the hobby this has always been something that was easier shown than told. Decades ago when TV and Film and Video Games were limited a prospective player would probably spend the time to puzzle things out for themselves, but these days? In the age of the Internet there is very little chance that someone is going to spend more than a little time trying to puzzle out your game. They're going to move on to some other form of entertainment or, if they are set on tabletop role playing, they will turn to the Internet to answer their questions. Why don't you go do an Internet search on how to play? I'll wait.

Back with me? Nothing particularly useful, was there? A few lazily written guides that cover the physical steps but don't really communicate the actual how of it. If you're lucky you will find that an out of date primer from WotC that tries to sell you products that are out of print. This is a problem. Our hobby can not grow if it has too large a barrier of entry. Programs like D&D Encounters and products like the Red Box and the Beginner Box are a good start, but they aren't enough. A new player needs to be able to type a few words into Google and get the answers they need.

What I said about the community earlier wasn't strictly true. Gamers might be willing to offer help in a friendly and welcoming manner, but that help is awful. Many of the threads devolve into experienced players arguing about which game or edition the new player should be playing. The advice is contradictory or just plain unhelpful. I'd be surprised if many prospective players leave such a thread any more enlightened than they were going in, some of them are probably more confused.

The Solution

The tabletop RPG community needs a definitive "Newbie Guide". A guide that the entire online community can get behind and point newcomers at. It should come up in web searches so that people curious in role playing can find it on their own. Ideally, the guide would have a nice CC license that would allow anyone to customize and update it. It could birth a hundred more new player's guides.

This guide needs to be something free of system bias and argument. It should explain all of the most basic elements of role playing and contain system-agnostic advice. The ideal guide will point potential players in the direction of clearly written, beginner-friendly and free RPGs. It should contain overviews of various beginner products, such as the Red Box, and links to quick-start rules for the more popular/well-known games. The very basic play structure should be explained along with advice on creating players and organizing games. All of the most frequently asked questions should be answered. Things like "How can I play online?" or "How do I find someone to play with?" need to be answered by the guide.

I'm probably not the guy to write this guide, but I'm going to do may best anyway. New players deserve something like this and the role playing hobby needs new players to thrive.

Categories: Beginner's Guide, New Players, RPG, RPG Community, WotC

Vote For Adventure: Series 2 Retrospective

I have just finished the second series of Vote For Adventure, the RPG that I run via Tumblr and form polls I create with Google Docs. When I finished the first series I talked about what worked, what didn't and what happened. I'm doing it again with series 2.

On Setting

This time around I did things differently. I presented the voters with a big list of different genres and setting elements and told them to choose 3. I then took the top 3 responses and mashed them up into the setting for series 2. The top three results were Weird, Survival and Post-Apocalyptic. To me, this meant a weird apocalypse and for that I had to turn to Lovecraft. I came up with a setting based roughly on The King in Yellow, but modernized. This turned out to be pretty successful. People liked the setting.

Despite the setting being popular, it was an absolute chore to write for. The big issue here was the survival aspect. In a world where there isn't really anywhere to go, no hope or way to save it, there just isn't much of an ongoing plot. I really struggled to keep the plot forward moving. I won't be doing a survival game in with Vote For Adventure again.

On Character Creation

I also did Character Creation differently this time. I presented the voters with a big list of skills and told them to select 4. At the end I was left with a % for each skill based on the number of people that selected them. I used this as the baseline success rate for those skills whenever the protagonist tried to use one. This worked out pretty well, but the reality of how the character was played (aggressively) did not match with the character that was created (an engineer with little physical prowess). This is what ultimately lead to the character's demise.

On Update Schedule

I slowed the update pace down to 3 days a week (Mon/Tues/Fri) and this seems to be the sweet spot. It doesn't absorb my life nearly as much and I get less complaints about people missing updates.

Overall

I enjoyed VFA 2, but I moving the narrative really was a chore this time around. I started rooting for the character's death after a while because I just wanted to move on to something new. It didn't take long for him to pick a fight with a shotgun-wielding maniac, however, and I got my wish.

If you would like to read through Series 2 then you can start at the first entry here.

Categories: retrospective, Survival Horror, Vote For Adventure

There is now a Polish version of In Between.

Just like the headline says, the folks over at RPG Kepos that reviewed In Between so long ago have actually gone and translated the game into Polish. This was the last thing I ever expected to come of a game I made in 10 days for Game Chef almost two years ago.

As if translating a game from English to Polish wasn’t enough work, the Polish version of the game is quite a bit nicer than mine. They secured the rights to some artwork, got a nice layout put together, and generally prettied things up in ways I couldn’t even begin to do on my own. I got in touch with their layout designer, Tweet, and he agreed to send me that files he used to gussy-up the game so hopefully I can make the English version look almost as nice some time in the near future.

I’ve actually been emailing back and forth with RPG Kepos while they worked on this project and between clarifications on rules and additional playtesting done by their team the rules were reworked and added to. There have been enough changes to the rules that it wouldn’t be remiss to call the Polish edition version 2.5 of In Between. One of the highlights of the new additions are rules for taking a more demonic path rather than the path to redemption. While I have a copy of these updated rules in borrowing old .doc format, there isn’t a nice PDF in English available. Those updated rules will make it into the version using Tweet’s layout which will probably show up whenever I have a free weekend to work on this stuff.

You can see the Polish version by visiting RPG Kepos, which I have handily provided as a translated google link. If you’d like to just go straight to the PDF then click here.

Categories: In Between, Poland, RPG Kepos, Translation

Vote For Adventure

In my last post I talked about how I had run an RPG via a series of polls. In late December I started up another one of these games, only this time with a Monday/Wednesday/Friday update schedule. I’ve been feeding all of these posts into a Tumblr website called Vote For Adventure.

This time around the unwashed masses voted for a game that mixed together elements of weird fiction, survival horror, and an apocalypse scenario. I went with a survivor struggling through life after a large portion of the world’s population went mad.

So far this one has been significantly more difficult to write. The big problem, for me, is that there is little direction in a game set in a world that is really beyond hope. It’s about survival and it’s been a struggle for me to find a meaningful plot that makes sense. Ultimately, I think the game will end in the protagonist’s death, but I’m not going to force it. I do have a general direction I’m moving the story in, but it isn’t easy to get there while giving players the freedom to control what the protagonist does. In any subsequent games I will be forcing a setting and game setup that fits into a more standard adventure format.

In any case, if you’d like to be a part of the Vote For Adventure game then be sure to click the link and catch up with the story. Don’t forget to vote!

Categories: Storytelling, Survival Horror, Vote For Adventure

A Game of Artifact Control (idea)

I had an idea for a card game today. I don't know what it is about me and card games, they're like an addiction. I don't know why I ever bother designing these because I don't have the resources to buy the necessary art to ever publish one. Here are my ideas anyway.

A Game of Artifact Control

There are objects of power in the universe. They do things that are unexplainable. Various people and factions want them for all manner of reasons. You are one of them.

The core of the game revolves around control of these artifacts. Factions clash as they try and recover, collect, destroy, and control these items. The game consists of two or more players facing off against each other, each bringing their own artifacts to the field. When one player no longer has any artifacts under their control they have lost.

Players come to the table with a deck of at least 60 cards as well as an artifact collection of 6 total artifacts. The artifact cards are each placed face down in a row in front of each player.

Mystical, Technological, and Financial resources are used to play cards. At the beginning of each players turn they choose one of these resources and places them on one of their Artifacts. These resources are usually represented by coloured beads (Financial = Yellow, Technological = Blue, Mystical = Red). Resources can be taken in any amount from the Artifacts to play cards, but to activate Artifact abilities/powers the resources need to have been placed on the Artifact in question. Resources are consumed when used and placed back in the shared pools they came from. On the first turn only the players distribute 3 resources among their artifacts, although they many not put more than one on each.

Resource control can be an alternate win condition for the game. If any one player is able to control all of a specific resource (Financial, Technological, or Mystical) then they win the game. To be clear, this means that none of the other players nor the common pool have any of the chosen resource.

Each turn a player may attack their opponents Artifacts with any Units that they have in play. These Units may be intercepted by Units that the defender control. The Unit with the least power in such a clash is destroyed. Equal powered Units are both destroyed. Multiple Units may intercept an attacker. If a Unit successfully attack an Artifact then resources equal to the Unit's Power are removed from the Artifact. Some Units specify a specific type of Resource that must be removed, if none is specified then the Defender chooses.

Artifacts

Each player has six Artifacts and all of them have their own powers and abilities. At the beginning of play they are placed face down in front of each player. Resources are assigned to artifacts each turn. Over the course of play the artifacts may be re-arranged, stolen or destroyed. If a player ever has control of all remaining Artifacts then they win the game.

To use an Artifact’s ability it must be revealed at the time of use. Flip it from face down to face up. It stays that way unless another ability or card is used to turn it face down or to shuffle the artifacts. Two Artifacts of the same name can not be in the face up position at the same time (unless otherwise noted).

An artifact can be destroyed using special operations or equipment cards or unit and artifact abilities. More commonly, they are destroyed by attacking them with units. A unit deals damage equal to its power as normal. For each point of power 1 resource is removed from the artifact. If there are no resources remaining it is destroyed and placed into the discard.

Deck Cards

Deck cards come in a number of different varieties. The three most common are Unit, Operations, and Equipment Cards.

Unit Cards are your troops on the ground. While they may have other uses, they are primarily used to defend your artifacts and attack/steal your opponents artifacts. Unit cards can be played by spending resources. The type of resource used to bring them into play depends on the unit and the faction it belongs. Units may have special abilities that can activated by spending resources.

Operations Cards are one time use tactics or effects that you can play by spending resources. They are things like calling in reinforcements, rearranging artifacts, and getting intel (revealing artifacts or an opponents hand).

Equipment Cards are just that, equipment. These are attached to Units to improve them in some way. The most common benefit of an equipment card is that it will add a special ability to a Unit.

Example Artifacts

Humming Scrap
Type: Alien Artifact
This mysterious piece of unidentifiable metal gives off a faint vibration despite having no power source.
Power Surge - Destroy all units attached to Humming Scrap and receive 2 Tech for each one destroyed this way.

Statue of Moloch
Type: Religious Artifact
This large statue contains 7 cabinets. Within each cabinet is a different sacrifice.
Sacrifice - During your turn you may sacrifice any Unit you control. The resource cost of the unit is placed on Statue of Moloch in the form of Mystical Resources. You may not sacrifice a Unit engaged in combat.

Example Units

Thieving Smoke
Type: Mystical Unit
Faction: Brotherhood of Smoke
It is well known that the Brotherhood can steal the unstealable. It is less known how they do it.
Power: 1 (Financial)
Special: When Thieving Smoke damages an Artifact place the lost resources on an Artifact that you control.
Special: Pay 1 Mystical to prevent Thieving Smoke from being intercepted.

Templar Knight
Type: Mystical Unit
Faction: Templars
The sword of a Templar Knight is feared by monsters everywhere.
Power: 2
Special: If Templar Knight enters combat with any Unit with "Monster" or "Beast" in its name then its power is 6.

Categories: Artifacts, Card Games, Game Design, Idea, Secret Societies

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