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

A New Version of Seedfall + More In Between News

As promised, I’ve put together another version of Seedfall that contains a number of changes and (I hope) improvements. I’ve added quite a bit more background information to the setting, mostly because people wanted to know a bit more about what kind of technology they have at their disposal. There has also been some major changes to The Seed, specifically puppeteers. I’ve made them significantly scarier at the cost of the overall viciousness of being impaled by a vine. Still, the change is for the best and I think making them inhalable so that they might fill your lungs and then squirm their way out of your mouth more than makes up for it. I also added an entire section on role playing as a colonist or puppet along with specific rules related to becoming a puppet, cures, and other puppet features. There are quite a bit more changes since the game grew by quite a few pages, but the changes are escaping me at this time.

You can get the latest version here.

I’ve discovered another quick review of In Between, this one is quite a bit more favourable than the official Game Chef one, but also not as in depth. It's short, so I'm going to quote it entirely:

The Good: Stuck between worlds trying to atone for sins? I love the concept and I like how the bidding system works with the dice and your power pools. It gets harder the more you accomplish because you lose power.

The Bad: Dice, lots and lots of dice. You need at least 15d6 per person. If one theme this year is maps, the other one would be dice.

The Other: I love how striking the title page is. It’s simple black and white, but it really made me interested in the game.

Would I play it? Yes, several times because apparently like a cat I have nine lives.

Thanks to Jonathan for his quick thoughts. He has also gone through and done the rest of the 58 Game Chef entries. What a job! Check out his blog.

Categories: In Between, RPG, Seedfall

A review from Poland.

I also got a very cool email last night from a group of people that had played my Game Chef entry. The neat thing is that they're all the way in Poland! They liked the game but had many of the same problems that came up in the Game Chef judging. Looks like I'm going to be hard at work getting a better ruleset put together.

If you can read Polish then go ahead and check out their review. I found Google Translate did a good enough job to get the general idea across.

Categories: In Between, Poland, RPG, RPG Kepos

In Between didn’t make the Game Chef cut.

Not everyone can win and I'm glad I wasn't the person that did. There are many games better than mine that were submitted to Game Chef. I liked In Between, but I knew that it was a mess mechanically when I submitted it. That's what slapping a game together in just a few days will do if you aren't careful.

Here are the judge's comments:

Concept: Players take the roles of dead souls traveling back into the mortal world through reflective pools in the Wasteland, a purgatory-like afterlife, and attempting to make amends for their crimes and regrets. The first player who removes all their fetters to the living world can enter the Golden City, a different and hopefully better afterlife.

Execution: This author was nice enough to include a very simple, sketchy layout, but it does wonders for the ease of reading and understanding the text. Nested subheadings, woohoo! I feel spoiled, almost. Overall, this game takes a couple steps forward compared to some of the other abstract and setting-free games in terms of providing a attractive premise that is substantially more provocative. The Wasteland, its silver pools, and the Golden City all sound pretty awesome. Plus, seeking to make amends and fulfill regrets is both emotionally and narratively powerful. However, this game continues an apparent trend of taking a GMless game of personal exploration and structuring it by having the players (if not necessarily the characters) compete directly with each other using limited mechanical resources. This trend is especially striking to me because it does not seem very natural to match the mechanics of inter-player competition to the theme of individual exploration, yeah? When you watch The Fountain or American Beauty, is Universalis the first game that comes to mind? Probably not. And yet several designers have made just that connection, which suggests that inter-player competition may be the sort of dynamic they feel most comfortable designing around. But there are other ways – Polaris, Great Ork Gods, Geiger Counter, Fiasco, Montsegur 1244, etc. – to design GMless games and encourage other players to take on NPC or antagonist roles without putting the players themselves in direct competition to win. I feel like this game and several others may have been more successful if they’d taken a different route and created a more cooperative GMless dynamic between the players, which might have also led to more innovative mechanics. I don’t mean to pick on this game overly much in this regard, but just wanted to point this out explicitly since it’s at least the third or fourth game to do it.

Completeness: There is some missing text between pages 5-6, describing demons. Otherwise, there are some places where the “power” token economy seems to have issues. For example, there doesn’t appear to be any incentive to spend tokens on narrative control if players are ultimately trying to spend them on winning control of possessed mortals and resolving their issues. I also wish there were more guidelines for what was supposed to happen either in the Wasteland or the mortal world, because right now that’s entirely open-ended, even though it comprises the vast majority of play. Additionally, as with some of these other GMless games of personal exploration, I wonder if the game could be strengthened if the various characters could actually meet each other in the Wasteland or mortal world and interact directly. That seems possible according to the premise and maybe even the rules, but isn’t discussed at all. Finally, what’s the point of having these different classes of dead souls – wanderers, unmarked, and demons – if they players don’t get to choose or explore which one their character ultimately is? Seems like a wasted opportunity.

Cookery: The theme is definitely here, and the ingredients are well included. The author did a clever and evocative job with the requirements here. Very impressive.

Conclusion: The solid premise of this game makes it at least as strong as the World Riddle, perhaps more so, and ultimately more narratively compelling than Symbolon and If Wishes Were Horses, I think. However, like the other games mentioned, which all operate in similar thematic space, this game needs a bit more work if the rules are truly going to support the potential of the premise. I really want to see a game in this vein make the playoffs, but I haven’t quite found one yet.

As you can see, they aren't all bad. It looks like they quite liked the premise. That's good because I’d thought the setting was the strong point and my actual game mechanics were the stumbling block. All of the judge's criticisms are valid and I’m already working on putting together a version of the game that does away with competitive structure. No idea when that will be done.

Speaking of games that will eventually get some work done on them; a new version of Seedfall is forthcoming. It should see the light of day sometime in the next week.

Categories: Game Chef, In Between, RPG