Back to Some Game Design

My obsession with Tolkien is well documented. There has been a recent lull in editing activity on my other projects, and one of the things that happens at such a time is I dust off an older project and put some more work into it. In this case, that project is Servants of the Secret Fire, my Middle-Earth RPG. It is a cool game, and I hit a point where I had enough new tweaks and ideas that I wanted to put down another draft. So far, so good - about 5,000 words have rolled out in the past few days, partly by way of iPhone while watching a friend play Red Dead Redemption, so clearly my mind is in this space.

I was recently invited to write for my friend Pete Figtree's blog, and he gave me a blank slate, so of course I wrote about Tolkien. I have also been reading about Tolkien and listening to the Aldasaga podcast, which is about Tolkien and Norse myth. I think these things build up to a critical mass, and one of the main ways I discharge this extra intellectual payload is through gaming. Since I haven't yet found a group to play The One Ring with, this is what happens.

It's also a hell of a lot easier than dealing with a new city, new job, toddler, moving and bills.

The One Ring is hands-down the best Middle-Earth RPG out there right now. I love running it and would likely love playing in a game as well. I can still do better. Now I just have to prove it by actually doing better. If I finish SotSF, I will be of course be giving it away. If anyone reading this has any interest in reading or paytesting it, please contact me and let me know. It probably won't be ready for beta playtesting for a while (I haven't even had an alpha playtest yet, honestly), but obviously that'll need to happen.

Maybe other people have fewer of these, but this is one of those projects that I work on simply because I enjoy thinking about it and working on it. I don't make it a priority over actual work - Never Pray Again and writing for my new job come first, no question, as do the couple of editing gigs that I have. But there is still time when I can squeeze in even more writing and thinking, and this is it. My fantasy heartbreaker.

I don't know whether it is better or worse that I realize that and still work on it.

Whose Story Is It?

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As I write my way into this fiction attempt, I've had some time to reflect on my approach - present tense, multiple viewpoints. I think that I was bouncing around, wondering whose story this actually is. One of the characters emerged, and I think this is his story. He's one of the more interesting characters, to me anyway, with lots of internal and external conflicts currently and coming his way. He has interesting relationships with the other main characters, with some nuance and potential conflict there too. He's also one of the few characters I'm sure will survive the story (not all the main characters will).

Looking ahead, I don't think he will be present for every event I have sketched out, and some of the events he won't be present for are a big deal to the story, so I may need a second POV. I'm not sure who that should be.

Writing in first person continues to open up challenges and opportunities. It's odd to be writing fantasy, which always has the artifice of being "once upon a time" to some degree in first person. It is happening both in a legendary then and yet the reader's now. There's no room for things like an imaginary manuscript history for the story, or the idea that a storyteller is setting things down on paper that happened long ago in their own life. It is cinematic, and I'm actually not even sure that this technique plays to what strengths I have as a writer (which in fiction are very few and underdeveloped).

Still, it's worth continuing. This is practice. I am still enjoying writing my way into this story, and I'm approaching 40,000 words without feeling fatigued with it. As long as I continue to learn, it's worth it.

Weak II

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The weak point? I figured it out. The POV character knew too much. I switched the scene to a character who actually knows the least, and there it is.

Oh, and happy New Year!

The Work Behind the Work

I note the current word-count for the main Dragonblade document on these posts, but there are more words that went into the project before I started on the actual narrative. Here is a look at word-counts from my notes and source-documents:

"Alchemy" 191
"Extended Character Notes" 4,298
"World Building" 6,158
"Dragonblade: Book One: Earth - Notes" 3,246
"Dragonblade Story Document" 7,220

Total Prep: 21,113 words

There they are in the order in which I last updated them in Google Docs. I'm going to need to expand some of them, Alchemy especially, in order to move forward. I tend to expand my notes when I hit a wall in writing, to the point where I know how to move forward, and I need to do that soon. I'm only going to count words from the actual manuscript, though. I can't let myself treat preparation as the same as actual writing, particularly since the preparation is by far the easiest part for me.

Weak

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I just hit a really weak patch - or at least, one that I realized was weak while writing it. I can see that I've sort of set things up to fizzle and not really grab your attention, and what should be a tense out-of-the-frying-pan and into-the-fire scene is already falling flat (and we're barely out of the frying pan).

So the question is: how to handle this? How do you handle it? Do you grind through, produce a crappy chunk, and move on, to later 'fix it in post'? Or kind of skip over it, sketch out what should happen in the scene, and move on to something you can do better?

I decided to do the second - I sketched out the points I wanted to hit in the scene, and am going to move on. In my case, it's too hard looking at that crappy text and just adding to it. It's like continuing to cook burned food. If nothing else, I need to go back and look at how it went wrong, and figure out whether and how I can fix it. But for me, since I am grinding through a first draft, it is important for me to keep on grinding.

Stealing from Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay and Star Wars: Edge of the Empire

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I just had an interesting idea that I thought I would put out there. Both WFRP and Edge of the Empire, by Fantasy Flight Games, use a custom dice mechanic that allows for an interesting result on top of fail/succeed. Each has a mechanic that governs fate - a special type of die that gives an overall "this goes well" or "this goes badly" result. What this means is that you can succeed on the die-roll, but then get the "this goes badly" result on top of that, so you succeed but in another way things escalate. On the other hand, you can fail, but get the "this goes well" result on the additional die-roll, meaning that you fail but you 'fail forward', or your failure opens up some new possibility.

The interpretation of both is up to the GM running the game, but I really like this idea. It also allows for something like "critical success" or "critical failure". When you succeed and get the "this goes well" result, it goes REALLY well. If you fail and get the "this goes badly"...well, you get the picture.

This mechanic struck me as a great way to tie story more deeply into die-results, or as a prompt for less-experienced GMs perhaps. It gives you a cue as to when you move the story forward - in a beneficial or challenging way, either of which is interesting. I like this mechanic a lot, but I don't want to have to have custom dice for every game I play.

What occurred to me is that there are a number of ways to solve this problem, and to add this overall 'fate' mechanic to any dice-driven game. One option is to roll a FUDGE die with every roll, where a + is beneficial, a - is a new difficulty, and the blank side is just blank. To make the benefit or difficulty less likely, you might roll two dFs, and require a ++ or -- result.

This could really be done with any die, though. You could roll a d8, and if it is a 1 you get the difficulty, and if it is the 8 you get the benefit. And so on.

(I'm currently poking around with a rough system for Dragonblade, and it uses a 2d8 mechanic. In the system, if you roll two 4s, that is 'bad luck', because in various dialects of Chinese, the number 4 sounds like the word "death", and as a result the number 4 is widely considered unlucky. If you roll two 8s, that's lucky, because 8 is a prominent number in Chinese philosophy, coming up in places like the I-Ching and the Eightfold Path. 8 is a lucky number in the way that 4 is unlucky. 6 is also a lucky number in Chinese culture, generally speaking, but I liked the parity between 4 and 8. Anyway, the two 4s vs two 8s mechanic is in part inspired by the cool mechanics I see in WFRP and Edge of the Empire.)

What I like about this is that it ports a mechanic that I think adds a lot to a game, which most games do not have, into any game in which you want to use it. Most games that come to mind could potentially benefit from this mechanic, especially 'traditional' task-resolution style games where you only roll to hit/miss, succeed/fail.

Not Another Damn Katana

Since the story that I am writing is in a fantasy-fied setting based on a mashup of various east and southeast Asian cultures and religions/mythologies, I had an important decision to make. Obviously, in pretty much every setting that has even a sliver of Japanese anything in it, you have the ubiquitous katana making an appearance. This nigh-magical blade, lifted entirely from history of physics, regularly cuts people in half, shears through armor, and is used in various impossible ways as a matter of genre convention.

I have at least one character who very well could be using a katana - he's a katana kind of guy, so to speak. So I had a decision to make. What I ultimately decided is to simply excise the word "katana", and likely even its little brother "wakazashi" from my lexicon of weaponry for this story. Certainly nothing so crass as a "ninjato" would be making an appearance. These are just things that have so much baggage that you have to dig your way out of expectations - like Elf and Dwarf and Wizard in your more traditional European mash-up settings - and I didn't want any of those expectations to be operating, if I could help it.

Fortunately, there is a wealth of terminology for swords, even just looking at Japanese history, apart from the over-utilized "daisho", and I will be drawing from these. I like using the specific terms for the various weapons, for those sword-geeks out there like me who can tell you the difference between a tachi, an odachi and a chokuto.

So far, so good. I'm also intentionally drawing heavily from non-Japanese, non-Chinese sources, so we have some Korean shapeshifters and one dude chopping up his foes with a khanda, not to mention two cultures drawn from the Mahabharata.  It's kind of fun, and after all that effort to avoid typing "katana", I hardly wanted to just fall back on presenting a warmed-over Legend of the Five Rings.