Pathfinder: New Spellcasting Feats

I've always thought that Augment Summoning was lonely, and I wanted to see other Feats linked to Spell focus in the other arcane schools.  So here we go - this is a rough sketch, feel free to take and adapt for yourselves:

Augment Dispel
Prerequisite: Spell focus (abjuration)
When making a d20 roll related to dispelling a magical effect, the caster can take 20.

Augment Scrying
Prerequisite: Spell focus (divination)
The duration of all divination spells is extended to concentration +2 rounds where that duration exceeds the listed duration.  For example, scrying lasts for 1 minute/level or concentration +2 rounds, whichever is longer.

Augment Charm
Prerequisite: Spell focus (enchantment)
Charm spells cast by a person with this Feat are more powerful than normal.  Opposed Charisma checks are not required except for the most extreme commands, and the subject of the charm spell will undertake dangerous actions which fall short of suicide.  Lastly, when the charm spell ends, the victim will not have a clear memory of having been magically coerced unless she succeeds at a will save at the spell's normal DC.

Augment Elementalism
Prerequisite: Spell focus (evocation)
Then caster chooses an element in which she specializes.  When she casts evocation spells with this element, the deals +1 damage per damage die rolled.  For example, a fire-specialized elementalist would deal 5d6+5 damage at 9th level when casting fireball.

Augment Figment
Prerequisite: Spell focus (illusion)
Illusionists who take this feat are able to create more persistent figments using spells like Silent Image or Major Image.  These illusions persist even after the caster ceases concentrating on them.  As long as a figment persists, however, the caster loses that spell slot until she dispels the illusion or it is dispelled with a successful will roll due to disbelief.

Augment Undead
Prerequisite: Spell focus (necromancy)
All undead created by a necromancer with this feat are affected as if they are on desecrated ground, including +1 to attack and damage rolls as well as saving throws.  These undead also receive +1 hit point per HD.

Augment Augmentation
Prerequisite: Spell focus (transmutation)
When the transmuter casts a spell which augments the ability of it's target, this bonus is raised by +2.  So, for example, Fox's Cunning increases Intelligence by +6.

GURPS Midnight: Running A Big Fight in GURPS (Aftermath)

Image from Heroes of Battle, WotC

The Post-mortem

This is the follow-up to my post about setting up for a big tactical battle using modified GURPS rules...

In short, the player-characters kicked ass during the mass tactical combat.  They seemed to have fun and to be engaged in placing their various troops, which is cool because I know two of them aren't usually all that engaged in tactical combats.  They got a kick out of really giving the Orcs a beating.  When the Orcs realized things were going bad, one of the PCs nailed a roll to taunt them into fully attacking, and they were basically pinned down, surrounded, and then rushed by angry villagers who cut them to pieces.

The battle was still significant.  One PC took a javelin in the chest and went down in one hit, as did one of the named NPCs who had been with the PCs since the first session - she almost didn't recover, in fact.

One of the things I really like about GURPS is that having a javelin thrown at you is like "Oh shit!  A javelin!  I might die!"  Instead of D&D, where you might think "Oh, a javelin, 1d6 plus strength modifier damage.  I can eat ten of these, easy."

Anyway, overall, it was a complete success.  As always, in high-lethality tactical combat, planning is everything.

It was also pretty efficient.  A full-scale tactical fight, with combat modifiers for footing and cover and everything, was resolved in under 2 hours, with over 100 combatants and 11 different unit types.  That's quicker than a D&D 4th edition fight can be with a tenth that many participants.

I give the whole experience a B+.  Everyone was engaged, everyone had a thing to do, and the fight was quick and big and bloody.  Good times.

GURPS Midnight: Running A Big Fight in GURPS (Prep)

In my periodic GURPS Midnight game, we are coming to the end of the introductory sessions I've planned to help the players get used to the new system, tweak their characters, and so on.

Last session the PCs ended up rounding up a peasant resistance south of Baden's Bluff, with the able-bodied people of three villages fortifying and preparing to fight against a group of a couple dozen Orcs and some Goblin slavers.  The PCs came up with a plan, and this session, we find out how the plan works.

First I'll talk about what is involved, the situation, and then I'll go through how I represented it using GURPS.  Lastly, I'll post a report on how the game works out.

The setup

Here's what the prepped table looks like:

On the far side of the table, where I'll be sitting, are the Orcs.  I'm using colored cubes that I found at a craft store to represent the units, as well as the D&D minis that I have that fit.  The red cubes are extra Orcs.

On the near side are the five PCs looking lonely and heroic facing the Orcs - I set it up that way just to set the scene.  The PCs are the heavy-hitters in this fight - the peasants they're leading aren't soldiers, they're villagers the PCs have convinced to join them.

The colored cubes at the near side of the table are for the PCs to place - those are their "troops".  They're stacked in descending order of 'power' where this fight is concerned.

Blue cubes are the toughest villagers: the smith and his two burly sons, two people who have hatchets, and two people who have bows.  Remember, all weapons are illegal, on pain of death, in the Midnight setting.

Orange cubes are the rest of the villagers who have spears - the village they are defending, Dorn Hill, is a village that happened to have a comparatively large amount of contraband weapons.

Green cubes are the villagers who have slings - not a lot of damage, but they have the advantage of being able to hit the Orcs without being hit themselves.

Purple cubes are the villagers who have large knives and are willing to fight with them (given that most families have a knife between them, even though they're technically illegal, because it's a ubiquitous tool)

Yellow cubes are the villagers who are willing to fight, but don't have anything more dangerous than farm tools - grain flails, wooden pitchforks and quarterstaves.


The system hack


I'd like every villager death to be dramatic, and every Orc injury to be hard-won, so I want to treat each interaction with it's own die-roll, possibly hand-waiving if things begin to drag.  But I want every death to hurt.  This battle may very well not go in the PCs' favor, and the characters have never led troops before.

For the purposes of simplifying the battle, I am assuming everyone is using an All-Out Attack maneuver, as per the GURPS rules - the weaker ones, using knives and farm tools, taking a +2 to damage, and the others taking the +4 to attack rolls.  This lets me ignore defenses - it's hard to parry with a knife or a hammer anyway.

I'm assuming the Orcs are really excited at the chance for a real, pitched battle where mostly their job is terrorizing unarmed villagers.

I also simplified damage: each hit from an Orc will take out the villager they hit.  Villagers don't have more armor than layering the clothing they have, and the Orcs are wielding military weaponry with deadly skill.  Each hit from a villager wounds the Orc in question, and a second hit will take that Orc out.  Taken out means downed, unable to move well, and possibly going into shock, not dead unless the person is left without help.

On the fly, I'll try to take penalties and bonuses into account - mostly penalties for things like slingers on rooftops (bad footing -2) or Orcs and villagers trying to fight across the debris barriers the villagers put up to block the road at two points.

I am also taking morale into account.  I need to double check the GURPS morale rules, if I can find them, but I'm assuming the Orcs will make a morale check after losing 20% of their force and the villagers will have to after losing 10% of their force - they're not used to seeing their friends and family die around them.

Morale will be a collective Will roll and a Leadership roll from the leader of each force (an Orc veteran on one side and a PC on the other side).  If both succeed, they force is fine.  If only one succeeds, the force is stalled.  If both fail, the force withdraws.  A second failure means they panic and break.


The PC plan and the wild-card

One of the PCs is a spellcaster, using a lot of Mind Control magic.  The PCs' plan hinges on him using a Panic spell to make groups of the Orcs run away, making them unable to defend themselves and letting villagers injure them as they flee.  He probably won't have the energy to do this more than a couple times.  At the very least, it allows the PCs to use his magic-induced panic as cover.

It remains to be seen whether the PCs will set things up to be really able to take advantage of this tactic.

***

We'll see how things work out - I'll be trying this during our game tomorrow.

The Lumpley Games PDF Library

Ever wanted to main-line awesome directly into your veins?

It's never been this accessible before.

$25 for PDFs of Apocalypse World, Dogs in the Vineyard, kill puppies for satan, In a Wicked Age, Mechaton, and Poison'd.  That's...$4.17 per game.

Stop what you are doing and buy Vincent Baker's games.

Neil Gaiman Makes My New Year Bright

One of the things that I got from my wife for Christmas was The Graveyard Book by Neil Gaiman in audiobook form, read by the author himself. It is kind of like Gaiman's take on a Harry Potter-type coming-of-age story, but it is, as one would expect, better than Harry Potter in every way.

I'm sure that some of its impact is due to hearing the author read it himself. I didn't know this, but Gaiman is a superb dramatic reader - downright mesmerizing. I wonder if he also excels in kendo, or racecar driving, or perhaps landscape painting? My looming green jealousy aside, I think that the impact of the story is increased by Gaiman's rendering. It is coming alive, and I must admit, sometimes makes it difficult to concentrate on my commute. I'm not done with the book yet, but I already recommend it to everyone without any reservations.

I am also deep into reading Monsters and Other Childish Things as well as the long-awaited Magic Burner for Burning Wheel. I also picked up a copy of Artesia: Adventures in the Known World and a copy of Mutants and Masterminds, which I'll talk about more later.

Reading Monsters has been a real pleasure. It is laugh-out-loud funny, and well written, and an elegant system. It is an interesting contrast with the Magic Burner - Burning Wheel in general is a very complex system, and while others describe it as elegant, I don't agree. It is an excellent system, and it is fun to play, but it is not elegant in the way that Monsters is elegant. It does not solve problems with the simplicity and grace that I look for in anything I would call elegant.

I'll have more to say on what elegance in game design means to me once I finish Parsec at long last. Which should be soon. Or I will explode.

Discovering Fantasy

It's been far too long since I've been able to play any role-playing games. Mostly I've been so busy, and there's been so many new things in my life that I haven't had time to miss it, but the last couple days I've been getting the urge in a strong way. I've begun daydreaming the next game I want to run, and that has led me to some thoughts about the fantasy genre as represented in gaming...

Fantasy in gaming is essentially a genre term that has completely moved away from it's root. Really there is nothing "fantastic" about RPG fantasy settings. That is because all of the supposed fantastic elements are really just natural, presumed parts of the setting. Dragons in D&D aren't any more fantastic than a hippopotamus is in Africa. Depending on the setting they may be rare, exciting, or significant, but they aren't fantastic. No one is surprised to encounter a dragon. Dragons are in the title.

To be sure there are "high-fantasy" settings for games, and "low-fantasy" settings and you might think I was just expressing a preference for the latter, but that is not really what I mean. Low-fantasy implies that the magical or fantastic elements are rarer, but they are nonetheless native elements, expected, even required elements of the setting. For a game or setting to even qualify as fantasy such things must be a given.

Fantasy as a genre, of course, owes a huge debt to Tolkein, but almost all fantasy since Tolkein has followed after the LoTR trilogy rather than the Hobbit. In LoTR, elves, wizards, dragons, orcs, magic and demons are all simply assumed. They are part of the background of the story, not the substance of it. The story isn't about Frodo venturing out in the world and discovering to his shock that it is inhabited by magical beings. In the Hobbit by contrast, Bilbo is on a constant adventure of discovery from step one. Gandalf's encounter with the trolls who turn to stone by daylight is far more "fantastic" than Gandalf's face-off with the Balrog - at least in the sense that I am after.

What I am looking for is the sense of wonder or mystery attached to the fantastic that a character like Alice feels when she falls through the looking glass. It is what all the ancient heroic journeys are about - a Celtic hero is tricked into entering Faerie, a young warrior sets off on a sea-voyage and is beset by sea-monsters, the old-crone turns out to be a powerful sorceress... What happens in these stories is that the "fantastic" is discovered rather than presumed. It is fantastic precisely because it is unbelievable, it breaks the known rules, it doesn't conform to our expectations of reality, it conforms to something deeper and more inscrutable.

There ARE games out there which can involve the fantastic in the sense I mean here.

Mage the Ascension comes to mind right away. There is no better game for subjecting the players to a collective experience of discovery, and breaking or pealing away the nature of reality. Where I feel Mage isn't meeting my current craving is that it is too open-ended, so open-ended it verges on the surreal. It would be difficult with Mage to tell a story about a Celtic hero that didn't end up involving space aliens and werewolves.

Changeling the Lost is almost the reverse of what I've described. The characters in this game are coming home from their journey of discovery into the fantastic. It definitely captures the wonder and mystery, but it is ultimately more cynical than I want.

Everyday Heroes is another. I have yet to play this game, but it seems to set out to accomplish precisely what I've described. If I have a problem it's that being "everyday" has very limited appeal. Even Bilbo ends up becoming a clever, and adept thief with a magical ring that makes him invisible.

Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying, if it ever gets published, is another option. This game would be perfect for a medieval setting, my only question is how it will handle fantasy elements like magic and monsters. Until that question is answered it is tough to say whether this game will work.

GURPS, of course, is always a viable choice. It is good because the bias of the system is toward realism, making fantasy elements in GURPS already seem out of place. It would be easy as well to start with something very realistic and slowly weave in magic and monsters into the game with the rules as established. GURPS might really be my best choice here, but GURPS has the perpetual downside of being super-crunchy. My GM style tends to work best in a rules-light atmosphere, but GURPS is meant to be hacked...

Whatever system I end up choosing (or if I come up with something homebrew), the game I'm slowly brewing up in my mind starts out as a medieval adventure story with historical-realism as its basic assumption. Indeed, I might even keep the players in the dark about my plans to incorporate monsters and magic into the game. The idea being that the players are genuinely surprised to encounter goblins in the woods (and therefore perhaps genuinely frightened). Let the fantasy slowly unravel before them and lead them on a journey of discovery that D&D could never replicate.

Hunter: the Vigil and the New World of Darkness

The New World of Darkness games seem to be intentionally designed to give players insane results. In the old world of darkness system, you could get crazy results, but it was because you gamed the system well - you set up a roll with lots of dice and low difficulty.

In the NWoD, everything is target 8, so successes can be relatively rare, but you also have "exploding dice", re-rolling 10's and sometimes even 9's and more rarely, 8's as well. This means that the most common results of rolls are one or two successes or a large number, and it comes out of nowhere. It is also less under your control. Even when you can make some of your successes explode, they are relatively rare, so its more of a game of luck and randomness.

One effect of this that I found in my own play is that it turns the game towards comedy. There is a lot of botching and absurd successes, and it is hard to handle.

The exception here is in combat, when some kind of defense number is subtracted from almost all of the dice-pools for attacks and special abilities. This means that you're rolling fewer dice than you're used to, which in turn means that combat involves a lot of singular successes or marginal failures.

This can get to be...a little unexciting. Your vampire grows her agg-dealing supernatural claws, leaps from the rooftop onto her opponent, slashes the claws down his back, and deals...one aggravated damage. Nowhere near a would penalty or anything. A scratch, really. Then in rage he turns around, pulls out his Desert Eagle, shoots you, and deals...two bashing. And so it goes until one of you has some exploding dice and randomly ends the battle in a paroxism of bloodshed.

I like a lot of the changes that were made to Vampire, Werewolf and Hunter. I think that Mage took a step backward both in its fluff and in the system itself in almost every way. But the dice system is just sort of hard to manage sometimes. It doesn't work for me. It doesn't deliver the play experience I want - it isn't reliable when it should be, and it isn't exciting when you want it to be.

I find that I'm left wanting to hack White Wolf's games all the time. When we used to run V3 (Vampire third edition), we probably had a minimum of house rules, but by the end of a chronicle we had a few to make the system more playable.

I wonder - did they playtest the new system before they brought it out? It just comes off as...unfinished in a lot of ways. So you have huge, beautiful books with unfinished systems in them that don't deliver what you want them to deliver.

I sort of want White Wolf's graphic designers and artists and setting designers to team up with Paizo, maybe, or a team of designers who can create a game that is tight, efficient, and delivers when you want it to deliver.

We just had a session of Hunter: the Vigil with some members of our new home group we're trying to put together, and it went really well and was a lot of fun. It isn't like I'm not having fun with White Wolf's games - I almost always do. It just isn't...reliable. Their new system, its core dice mechanic, just isn't as good as their old one, and it takes something away from the game that used to be there. I'd have kept a similar dice system, with variable pools and variable difficulties on d10s, because that just lead to a more interesting game, a system that the players can use to set their characters up for huge success or for big risks at critical moments. The dice helped the game along - not so much with the new WoD stuff. Its really too bad.

Mage: the Ascension and the Tangle of Entropy

A friend of mine is currently putting together a Mage: The Ascension game for us to play over the intertubes in the near future. This has been a good way for close college friends to keep in touch and keep in the hobby when we are separated by thousands of miles.

One thing that precedes any of these games, and has for years now, is a significant discussion of house rules. We house rule everything under the sun. It's part of the reason I stick with trying to be a game designer - I'd find almost the game I want to play, with almost the system I want to use, that is almost as consistent as I'd like. I got tired of almost. Anne Lamott says "Write the story you would want to come upon." In the same way, "Design the game you want to play."

If you've played Mage, you know that it is a game about everything, in which your characters can do almost anything. That's the point, and that's the incredible design challenge behind the game - to deal with characters who have improvisational reality-altering power with anything but a narrativist hand-wave. Because of this, we're tweaked our own ideas of what the Spheres do and some of the assumptions behind the game - we've hacked it significantly, such that I can't even run it as written in the book anymore at this point - and I don't mind. Our system is better in a number of ways.

But we got caught up in arguing over what Entropy, the Sphere that oddly covers both decay and chance, should function. The discussion ranged over dozens of emails, with all six of us chiming in at various points. There were votes, counter-votes, suggestions, and near-treatises written on the topic.

Ultimately, our ST had to say "Ok, this is over. I'll figure it out. Moving on to character backgrounds and group template..." (well, he doesn't say "group template" but that's the stage we're in) It was sort of a necessary anticlimax.

I can't help but think that we, the players of a game like Mage, have these long discussions because the designers of Mage didn't. That is, I'm sure they had lots of design discussions - but were they the right ones? Mage is probably still my favorite WW game, but it is also the one for which I have the longest house rules document. In part, it's a labor of love, like custom random-encounter tables for my pubescent AD&D escapades.

It is also one of the things that, as I said, motivates me to design games, and to pay special attention to magic systems, which are almost 100% garbage in the RPGs out there for the past 30 years.

After all of those emails back and forth, I'm left with the deep feeling - this could've been done better.

I will do it better.

We'll see if I live up to that.

Desolation RPG and the Ubiquity System

I just paged through a copy of Desolation, a post-apocalyptic fantasy roleplaying by Greymalkin Designs, which liscences the Ubiquity system. The reason I mention this is that I'm not sure why they liscenced it (from Exile Games) at all.

The Ubiquity system is a lot like a dozen other systems where you have the same attributes as D&D (Body, Strength, Dexterity, Intelligence, Wisdom and Charisma in this case - so, ok, they changed the name of Constitution to Body, but you get the idea). It also has "Talents", which are Feats with the name filed off, and skills that are rooted in the attributes which are eerily familiar.

The dice system itself isn't meaningfully a dice system at all - all of the dice are basically the same as coins you flip. Evens are successes and odds are failures. That's it. You add up the successes. What I mean is, it doesn't matter that you're using dice - so why use them?

Oddly, it is even possible to get your hands on special Ubiquity dice, which...just seems extra odd to me. Why?

I think that the Ubiquity system comes with one really cool setting - Hollow Earth Expedition. People have run HEX at the store before, and players have had a really good time shooting dinosaurs and Nazis from biplanes. That's good times however you slice it.

It just seems really odd to me to license a dice system that is basically a coin-flip system - even Burning Wheel, which is also basically a coin-flip system, has shades, so that some dice-rolls aren't just straight 50/50.

I really don't see a reason to create the Ubiquity system at all. I think it would be easy to adapt another system, even one that would be free to license, for the settings that they're putting out. It doesn't have elements that aren't already in a dozen other games. I understand the desire to have a new system for your new company putting out new books and all that, I just think it could've been done more easily. There's nothing about Desolation or HEX that requires a new system, and if I was going to design a system for either, I'd try to have a dice mechanic that somehow added to the experience, rather than just having various ways to flip coins...

Other than the dice and system, Desolation's post-apocalyptic setting has most of the fantasy tropes you'd expect - the races you see everywhere else (some under different names) with the common generalizations which hold true for them as well.

What will be really interesting is to compare Desolation to the 4th Edition D&D incarnation of Earthdawn, which I believe is coming out next year. Earthdawn is sort of the original post-apocalyptic fantasy setting, the most recent incarnation of which is over 10 years old. Its doubtless going to get updated, and really fits the "points of light" theme of 4th Edition. I'll be curious to see how WotC adapts the setting and how it compares to Desolation, given that in the generalities they are going to be very similar (and overall I must admit a preference for Earthdawn, which years ago was already dropping some of the entrenched D&D tropes...)

Work in Progress: Horror! Alpha Playtest Document

Putting this up here in case anyone sees it and wants to comment on it so far.  Its a work in progress and not done yet, but it is getting closer to what we can use to playtest the system.  Note: placing this document on this blog does not constitute publication.  All rights reserved.

Horror! Alpha Playtest Document

Style Bible

Always Capitalize: Adrenaline, Appeal, Attributes, Fear, Hopes, Might, Occult, Pain, Precision, Scars, Traits, Virtue

Use numerals rather than written numbers - so, 3 rather than three.

Capitalize with first mention: types of Traits, character types - victim, jaded, etc.  Afterwards, it isn't a big deal to capitalize and can just be a descriptor with a rules effect

Italicize important sentences - one or two from each section at the very most - that people need to see and understand, or that hold a key bit of rules or system in them

Italicize whenever you want to draw specific attention to something - a word, phrase, sentence, etc., that isn't already specifically handled in some way

Embolden the first instance of a new key word or term that doesn't occur in a heading but in the body of the text

What you have
Attributes: Might, Precision, Appeal, Occult
-->Note on other Attribute systems, since this is one of the weakest parts of the game at the moment (to me at least)
Traits/Items: 
Virtue
Adrenaline
Dreams

What will take it from you
Scars
Fear
Pain

How it will happen
Conflict System
Tabletop
Live Action
Rewards

For example...


WHAT YOU HAVE

First, you figure out what kind of character you're going to play.  There are a few ways to do this.  The first way is to choose 3 Hopes or Scars or some mixture of the two adding up to 3.  So you can have 3 Scars, 2 Scars and 1 Hope, 1 Scar and 2 Hopes, or 3 Hopes.  These will correspond to your starting Adrenaline (Scars) and Virtue (Hopes).

You can determine your Scars and Hopes one by one, thinking them through and sketching out what they represent in  your character's past or the future she wants - or you can determine them semi-randomly with a deck of cards.  Each player who wants semi-random Scars and Hopes is dealt 3 cards from a shuffled deck.  The red cards are Scars and the black cards are Hopes.  A spade is a Scar having to do with violence or suffering.  A club is a Scar having to do with disempowerment - perhaps poverty or oppression or emotional abuse.  A heart is a Hope having to do with relationships.  A diamond is a Hope having to do with achievement.

Each Scar is a time in your life when you were crushed by suffering and wanted to give up.  Each Hope is something that you desperately want for your life to give it meaning and make it worthwhile.

Someone with 3 Scars is a Victim.  A Victim has been beaten down by life again and again, and is often mostly concerned with survival.  The Victim might accept horror for what it is and respond directly to it.  The Victim has learned not to mess around if she wants to get through this.

Someone with 2 Scars and 1 Hope is Jaded.  Jaded characters will tend to be competent, professional types.  They believe the horror can be kept at bay, but you've got to break some eggs in the process.  The Jaded character still holds onto some hope for the future, but her feet are also firmly on the ground.

Someone with 1 Scar and 2 Hopes is Foolhardy.  The Foolhardy character believes that the horror can be overcome in the end.  They tend to be idealistic visionary types who might be entrepeneurs or artists.  The Foohardy character has been burned before, but believes that in the end, things work out for the best if they can keep believing.

Someone with 3 Hopes is an Innocent.  The Innocent never really comes to believe that true horror is real, and an Innocent character might hold onto her ideals even when giving them up might serve the "greater good".  The Innocent is fragile and powerful at the same time because there is something about them that the horror has a hard time reaching.

Attributes
Attributes are measured from 0 to 5.  0 is handicapped, 2-3 is average, and 5 is the maximum for normal human beings.  Attributes are also the base for all tests - the Attribute provides the base number, which is then modified by Traits, Fear and Pain.  For Attributes, you distribute a 2, two 3's and a 4 between your four scores.

Might is a measure of your physical power, athletic ability, and toughness.  It could also be Muscle or Force or Power, maybe, but the name is just the place-holder for physical badassery.

Precision is your mental acumen, fine motor skills and ability to think clearly.

Appeal is your social grace, charm, good looks and general likeability.  It is how you get what you want from NPCs.

Occult is your knowledge of dread secrets humankind was not meant to know, psychic abilitites, supernatural sensitivity and so on.  High Occult will also make you more susceptible to the supernatural abilities of other creatures. [CAN PERHAPS REMOVE ENTIRELY]

/Spirit/Mysteries

Alternate Attribute Systems
The Idea is that the Attribute system is brief, tightly designed, and covers the categories of conflicts that you might be able to resolve or 'win'.  Right now, Might corresponds to a lot of physical combat; Precision corresponds to shooting people and skill or thinking-based conflicts; Appeal pertains to social conflicts and interactions, and Occult is sort of a catch-all for the weird, creepy, supernatural stuff.

Traits/Items
Traits and items modify your attributes when you're involved in a conflict.  Basically, having a trait that applies to a certain situation grants a bonus in that situation.  Traits should be specific and descriptive - there will never be a catch-all Trait that is useful for everything, or anything close to it.

There are six kinds of Traits: Feats, Influences, Items, Knowledge, Mysteries and Skills.

Feats are specific ways to call on physical prowess, particularly when beating ass or doing things you'd do when playing a sport - throwing, running, swimming, jumping and so on.  Influences are ways to influence other characters socially and psychologically, as well as a way to measure who you know who can help you - contacts, allies and the like.  Items are just that - a catch-all of useful objects.  For a lot of things, like shooting someone or driving, you'll need an item at bare minimum to even do it. Knowledge just says in what area or areas you are an expert.   You can expect to have your questions answered in that area of knowledge during the course of the game - maybe in forensics or biology or even conspiracy theories or art history.  Mysteries are weird shit, and they overlap with some of the other categories of Traits.   You can have special items or objects, a special occult ability, a magical ritual or a way that you are resistant to the attacks of alien mind-rays.  Finally, Skill are pretty self-explanatory - they are a main way that you get concrete things done in the shared imaginary space of the game.

You can stack one Item with one Skill for one test when applicable.  Otherwise, Traits can only be called on one at a time.  Traits can stack with themselves, however.  For example, at a basic level, you could have a handgun.  You could also have a Desert Eagle with a laser sight (+1).  Lastly, you might have a hand-machined .50 caliber handgun with extra chambers, armor-piercing rounds, a laser sight, recoil suppression and a scope attachment.  That's a +2, and would take the place of 3 Items.

Examples of Traits
Traits include skills and talents as well as particular pieces of equipment that make tasks easier.  They should be a lot more specific than an attribute, but still grant an advantage in a conflict.

Feats: 

(You can spend an Adrenaline to double the effect of a feat)

Influences: 

(You can spend a Virtue to double the effect of an influence)

Items: 

(One item can "stack" effect with one skill)

Knowledge: 

(You don't test knowledge - you just know things in a given area)

Mysteries: 

(When you fail a test in which you use a mystery Trait, you gain one level of Fear or Pain)

Skills: 

(One skill can "stack" effect with one item)

Adrenaline
Adrenaline is a pool of points that you can use to modify conflicts.  Understandably, Adrenaline helps you kick the shit out of things - doors, objects, and opponents.

You earn Adrenaline back by being aggressive, by leading with your chin, fists, knife, fire-axe, shotgun and so on.  Adrenaline creates a cycle where you paint the walls, then earn some more, then paint the walls again.

The amount of Adrenaline that you can spend at one time is equal to your Fear level +1.

Virtue
Virtue is a pool of points, a reasource that you can use to further modify rolls, among other things.  Virtue is the only thing that might enable you to deal with Fear and Pain, and one character can use their Virtue to help others.

Virtue is earned - you begin a game with a little bit, but if things are going right, you should be spending it pretty often.

The way you earn Virtue is by taking risks on behalf of others, by doing self-sacrificing things to preserve others in the face of horror.

Virtue represents one of the two ways you can survive horror - by being someone who should survive in the first place.

If you RP talking someone down or soothing them or encouraging them and spend a Virtue point in a scene, you reduce their Fear level by one step.  If you RP caring for someone, binding their wounds and so on in a scene and spend a Virtue, you reduce their Pain level by one.  You can only do one or the other in a given scene - for 2 Virtue you can do both at once in a scene.

Hopes
Your Hopes are what give you life.  They inspire you, they make you who you are.  

They give you something to lose.

Your hopes are what give you your starting Virtue in a Horror! game.  You can  have up to three hopes which will function this way.

Also, whenever a Hope comes into play in a conflict specifically (GM's discretion) you get a +1 to directly-related tests.   Your Hopes inspire you to greater effort and at times, true brilliance.

Of course, in situations like this, when things go terribly wrong, it is possible for a Hope to transform into a Scar.  This should be a story event that takes place - and a character can never have fewer or more than a total of 3 Hopes and Scars unless they have received a Scar for being taken out of a game or incapacitated and then returning later.


WHAT WILL TAKE IT FROM YOU

Scars
Scars are the counter-balance of Dreams.  A scar is a memory of something terrible that happened to you.  It often resulted in a particular fear or weakness.

It also pisses you the fuck off.  Your scars give you Adrenaline.  You draw on what has hurt you - and use it to hurt other stuff.

Every time you're in a situation where a Scar specifically comes into play (GM's discretion), you are at -1 to all tests, but you also get a point of Adrenaline as soon as the penalty comes into effect.

Fear
Fear exists on a scale that is right there on your character sheet.  The more Fear you have, the weaker you'll become, the more ineffectual.  The accumulation of Fear is automatic over the course of a game.  Whenever how bad things are escalates from where they were before, everyone's Fear increases.  The only way to mitigate this effect is for someone to spend Virtue and talk someone else down.  This has to be roleplayed out, and then the Virtue is actually spent, and the person who was talked down can reduce their Fear by one step.  Your level of Fear is subtracted from your score in all social or mental conflicts.

You can spend Adrenaline on any one test equal to 1+your level of Fear, so being afraid can actually empower you...sort of.  Really, what it does is let you blow even more Adrenaline to negate the penalty to your tests, thus encoraging you to go out there and get more Adrenaline faster - and that just makes everyone's night more fun.

Pain
Like Fear, Pain is right there on your character sheet.  Whenever you lose a physical conflict where someone or something is trying to injure you, you gain one level of Pain.  Each level of Pain progressively incapacitates you more and more until  you are took broken to continue.  Your level of Pain is subtracted from your score in all physical conflicts.


HOW IT WILL HAPPEN

Conflict System
Conflicts in Horror! are simple, designed to be resolved in the midst of panic and shouting and running for your life.  The higher total number wins.  Two equal totals cancel out, and both sides take consequnces from the conflict.  Most physical conflicts will have Pain as a consequence.  Some social or mental conflicts will have Fear as a consequence, but genrally Fear just escalates as the story escalates.  The conseuqnces of a conflict might also be something simply related to the story - will the car start?  Will the locked door open?  Can you weld razor-wire to the sides of the schoolbus for the run through the mob of zombies?  In these cases, the GM just sets a target number.  If you get the target number exactly, you get what you wanted - barely, and not as thoroughly as you'd want.  If you get lower than the target number, something bad happens.  If you get something hither than the target number, you get what you want in the conflict.

Target Numbers
1-2 Easy
3-4 Normal; relatively challenging
5-6 Very challenging
7+ Probably impossible

Otherwise, the conflicts are character vs. character.  You compare each character's Attribute + Trait + Adrenaline or Virtue spent - again, the higher total wins.

In all cases, the player-character makes the first move - the PC is the first to take the risk, even if they are being attacked.  This adds to the feel or Horror! - you don't know what you're facing.  You might over-estimate and burn Adrenaline when you didn't need to, and you might under-estimate and get hurt for your trouble.  What this means is, the GM might say "Ok, the zombie is trying to grab you and bite you.  What are you doing?"  Then the player says what her character is trying to do to resist this - say, struggle and get out of the zombie's grasp using Power + a Feat + 1 Adrenaline to help make sure.  Her character's total is 5.  The GM knows that this is a very strong zombie, with a 6 in Power, but what happens is that the GM narrates what happens, ending with the zombie getting a grip on the PC and sinking its bloodstained teeth into her shoulder.  She takes 1 Pain.  Now, what does she do next?

This should always keep the PCs off-balance, making them guess how bad a thing they are facing is.  There is a way to try to figure out this ahead of time - we'll get to that in the Traits section.

A tie goes to the status-quo - often the "defender".  In combat, a tie means that both sides take a level of Pain and continue as they were, wounded and panting.  Note that ties will be pretty common, so things can get bloody for both sides quick.

Table-Top
The table-top game of Horror! doesn't involve any dice.  There is no chance that will come to save you, no high roll that will get you out of a tight spot.  In fact, we're doing what we can to keep you in the dark, make you waste resources, make you over-react to small threats and underestimate large ones.  Every player should say "oh shit", or something like it, during the course of every Horror! game at minimum.

Live-Action
Live Action is exactly like table-top, except that Adrenaline and Virtue should probably be playing cards or something so that they are harder to lose when  you're walking around.

It might be interesting that when you spend one or the other, you just throw your card to the ground, leaving indications that some kind of serious conflict took place here for others to find and/or intuit when they come by later.  That is, a pile of Adrenaline cards on the floor would mark the site of some combat, and you'd expect to find spent shell casings and blood splattered all over the place.

Otherwise, your character sheet easily fits on a single 4x6 card, and items can be cards you carry on you or can just be recorded on your sheet.

Appeal of 3 could be one gold star on your nametag; Appeal 4 is 2 stars and Appeal 5 is 3 - to indicate how hot, influential, menacing, or inspiring you are.

For a test, both sides get out their character card and any item card or Trait card they hope to use, as well as any cards they're willing to risk in the test.  Both sides reveal at once and compare.  All spent Adrenaline or Virtue cards are scattered on the floor.

Rewards
At the beginning of a game, there is a pool of Adrenaline and a pool of Virtue, set by the GM for that session.  Players award each other Adrenaline and Virtue during the course of the game when they see fit - the another player is baddass or virtuous, basically.  Once the pools are spent, there can be no more awards.  Unawarded points go away at the end of the session.  The PCs should probably work out some kind of shorthand for saying "I think we should award a point for what you just did"

Adrenaline:  "Holy shit", "Baddass", "Hardcore", "Oh my God", "You're a sick bastard" - or you could pound the table in appreciation

Virtue: "Nice one", "Awww", ::Cheering::, "Wow, that was amazing", "Saved!" - or you could raise your hand in blessing or make the sign of the cross or a peace sign toward the player in question

Parsec: Functionless Attributes

Now that I'm down to just three jobs, I remember that one of those jobs is writing Parsec, so I'm trying to buckle down and work on it in a more disciplined way.

As I go through the text once again, I have re-habilitated my rules on Status, which is basically a measurement of your social and economic standing in the setting. The thing about Status is that there are almost no actual rules attached to it. It is sort of a measurement, a note about your character like the place of their birth (but more important, I hope, for a game).

The reason I decided to bring Status back after I cut it out is that I want Parsec games to have a strong sense of economic realities of the setting injected into them. I don't want Star-Trekkish homogeneity because I think that's less plausible than faster-than-light travel. I think we're going to have phasers and warp drives before we have an economy without scarcity, without wealth on the one hand and the poverty on which wealth depends on the other.

But it does feel odd to put something forward as important when it won't be involved in spending points or rolling dice or doing the other things that attributes usually do in an RPG. Maybe its just that I don't want to tell players how Status must function, only that they have to take it into account in some way.

What do you think about something on your character sheet that doesn't really have rules attached? Should I give it leverage in the system or drop it, or is it not a problem?

A One-Shot of Ice and Fire

I have mixed feelings about licensed material forming the basis of an RPG. In some cases, where the universe of the base material is sufficiently expansive (such as Star Wars) it can work. But if the source material is too closely wedded to certain characters (as with Serenity/Firefly) then I am less inclined to enjoy it. The appeal of the original world is simply too closely tied to the personality of the original characters and every game using the setting is going to feel derivative.

That makes Green Ronin's latest venture into the world of Westeros from George R.R. Martin's series of novels a tricky proposition. Part of Martin's genius is his gift for creating rich memorable characters. On the other hand, Westeros is incredibly detailed and there is such a dedicated fan following that it is hard to fault anyone for making the attempt. There have already been several forays into game design for Martin. There was a previous RPG using the D20 rules. There is a strategy board game, and a card game as well. So Green Ronin has their work cut out for them to distinguish themselves and make a game which will have an impact on this crowded market.

This past Saturday was Free RPG Day and Green Ronin released a preview set of their rules for the game and a test module to be run on the day. I was sufficiently intrigued to run it at Gamescape North in San Rafael and I am extremely pleased to say that this game delivers on everything it promises. I have not been so excited about a new RPG release in quite a while. Song of Ice and Fire Roleplaying (SIFRP) is a gritty, elegant, profound game that hits the nail on the head in terms of mood, mechanics, and material. 

If you are familiar with the books you'll know what a mismatch the D20 ruleset was for this material. D20 is all about combat simulation and heroic adventuring whereas Westeros is a place of intrigue, politics and gritty realism. No one should ever take a sword blow and shrug it off as a mere 1d8 hit points damage. Players should fear the very real danger that live steel presents and prefer to solve problems with their wits and careful planning. This game needed a a ruleset that would deliver on a crunchy in-depth intrigue system and Green Ronin has done just that.

Intrigue deserves a post of its own, but I will summarize here. Every character has ratings for Intrigue Defense, Status, Persuasion, Deception, and Composure. Aspects like Disposition and Frustration come into play, also, and you will be choosing to use techniques like Bargaining, Charm, Seduction, Taunting and so on... As an Intrigue progresses in exchanges parties will gradually lose their composure until one person gets the better of the other and gets what they want, which could include information, could be a new friend or ally, or it could be to cause their opponent to lose their cool and do something rash. The possibilities are endless. The system is slick. It is fast to learn and run and it provokes players to be better roleplayers - which is the highest compliment I could possibly pay to it.

Green Ronin also succeed on the fluff. They've obviously paid close attention to Martin's world and done their best to evoke it in mood and flavor without just using canon material. The module they sent had great characters with depth and complexity to them, portraying all the roles the books suggest - a Maester, a Septa, a Bastard, a Knight, a Lord, a Squire... Their descriptions of places and suggestions for NPC's were on target as well. I do have one criticism of their module design which is that it was way too vanilla to be an adequate introduction. I understand the philosophy that you want to have an introduction be simple since players will all be learning the rules, but I think it is shooting yourself in the foot. You want your first impression to be as good as possible and so they should have put together a module that was far more detailed and highlighted the things about the system that are unique - particularly intrigue. Instead they threw us a story about bandits which could have been in any D20 game.

So, of course, I modified the module heavily. Instead of being mere bandits, they were men hired by a family still loyal to the Targaryens to waylay and kill a Knight on the way to the tournament. There were family feuds and hints of a plot to bring a poisoned blade to the upcoming tournament at King's Landing - perhaps to kill King Robert in the Melee! I made 9/10 of the game about these intrigues and threw in a little combat with the bandits just to spice it up. Green Ronin could certainly have done more with the module to impress folks, but I'm just happy with how  easy it was to concoct all of this intrigue on the basis of the system they've made.

This game gets 5 out of 5 stars from me for sheer originality and grace. It is totally different in feel from any medieval fantasy game out there right now and I hope it sells like gangbusters.

4th Edition D&D - Milestones - House Rule

I think I found a way to adapt my ideas about alignment - be devouring and co-opting the 4th Edition milestone rule. I want to steal the Milestone idea, and make it a lot more meaningful.

In the current rules as written, your character reaches a Milestone when she has completed two encounters without taking an extended rest. When you reach a milestone, you receive an Action Point, which can be spent to take an extra action in an encounter or to activate some Feats or Paragon powers. Essentially, the system is rewarding you for not resting after every encounter, the classic tactic from 3.5. I think this is frankly sort of unnecessary.

Now, when I think "Milestone", I think of some kind of important stage in someone's development. A Milestone is something like graduation or marriage or the birth of your first child - not room #2 in a dungeon delve.

I think that, once a player has defined her character's Alignment, she should then define four Milestones that are related to that Alignment. Her Action Point pool is equal to the number of Milestones she has achieved. These Milestones should be ranked in order of difficulty or importance, so that each successive one is a greater challenge than the past.

A Milestone should probably be some kind of really important decision or challenge that the Alignment will force on the character.

I need to give this more thought, but I like the germ of the idea.

D&D 4th Edition, 3.5, 3 etc. - Alignment House Rule

I've been thinking about alignment and how to 'fix' it so that it is something that I want to bother putting in my game. I've already talked about D&D alignment in the past a few times, and have laid out the problems with its various iterations.

I came up with a fix, while hanging out with Aric at work today (another author on this blog), and I kind of like it. I want to see how it works in an actual D&D game, because I'll be damned if I'm using the alignment 'system' that 4th Edition has in place. In order to use this alignment system, I end up changing alignment to feed into an action-point mechanic. (As I imagine how this works, the closest thing I can come up with is Burning Wheel's Artha mechanic. I'm also thinking about H. Richard Niebuhr, as it turns out.)

What goes in the alignment slot on your character is what I'll call your "center of value". That is, it is what your character values most. This should be relatively abstract, so that it can be interpreted a few different ways during the game. Some examples we came up with could be "Personal Gain" or "My Code of Honor" or "Peace Between my People and X Neighbor".

You will regenerate action points when this center of value, this alignment, is threatened in some way in the game. What this does is it rewards the players for putting their characters into situations where their center of value is threatened. This also provides the DM with a source of ideas of ways to push the characters and challenge them in dramatic ways.

Now, once your alignment is set, you have three more things to write down.

1. The first thing to write down is a specific goal that is related to your alignment. This has to be something achieveable in-game, and the DM and other players have to agree to it, because you're obviously not going after these goals alone.
2. The second thing to write down is one important thing you are willing to sacrifice for the sake of your alignment.
3. The third thing two write down is one thing you are not willing to sacrifice or compromise for the sake of your alignment.

When you achieve the first goal, you add one to your action point pool, meaning you can have more than one action point saved at any given time.

When you face an opportunity to make the sacrifice you wrote down, you increase your total pool of action points.

When you betray something important for the sake of your alignment

So, here's an example.

Alignment: "Personal Gain"
Whenever this character sacrifices their personal gain for the sake of something else, they get an action point. So, if they donate their money to a village so it can buy medicine to halt a plague, that is worth an action point.

1. "I will become the most renowned rogue in the city."
When you become the most renowned rogue in the city, you increase your action point pool.

2. "I am willing to sacrifice my family's good name for the sake of personal gain."
When you have destroyed your family's good name for the sake of personal gain, you increase your action point total by one.

3. "I am not willing to betray loyal allies for the sake of personal gain."
This one will work whether you betray a loyal ally or not. If you betray the ally, then you increase your action point total. If you decide at the last moment to remain true to your ally and suffer the consequences, you also increase your action point total by one.

Without talking about these ideas in game-jargon - what the intent behind this is to reward players for doing cool things in game, for causing their characters trouble, for making the DM's job easier, and for keeping foremost in their minds what it is that their characters value most, what it is that drives them to be adventurers rather than shepherds or cobblers.

Right now this not a final idea. I might come up with better things to put beneath alignment. Maybe one thing at a time would be better. One important aspect of this house rule is that the players and DM come up with these as a group when you are designing character concepts. This way, your alignments will fit together well and will hopefully feed off of each other in dramatic ways.

I also want to have the option of "Unaligned", meaning you don't have strong values and are sort of easygoing and blow with the wind. This will mean that you won't regenerate action points at all, but I should add some kind of mechanic which will enable the Unaligned character to have action points as well.

As I said, this alignment hack needs some more thought.

4th Edition D&D - Reviews - Alignment

Alignment is one of those things that I've thought of as broken for a long time. I've talked about it before, though the thinking didn't really go anywhere at the time. The best use of it alignment, to me at least, was in the original Dragonlance setting (and it still left something to be desired). That is one setting that left a mark on me in my formative gaming years during early adolescence, and it made alignment overt through two basic means - the Towers of High Sorcery and the Holy Orders of the Stars.

In the original AD&D campaign guide for Dragonlance, the one with Tanis on the cover having just killed the Dragon Highlord and taken his crown, there was actually a sort of chart that the DM was to use to track alignment changes. At the left-hand side was Good and on the right-hand side was Evil, with Neutral in the middle. Between each range was a grey "Transition" area. Each major act a PC committed would either keep them where they are or move them in one direction or another. When in the Transition area, the DM was supposed to give hints that they were slipping - toward a fall, or perhaps redemption.

The reason this mattered was that for Wizards and Clerics, alignment was key. Wizards had three orders, one committed to Good, one to Neutral, and one to Evil. The gods of Krynn were the same way - Good, Neutral and Evil sub-pantheons. The Krynn setting was all about balance, and Neutral usually functioned to throw its lot in with either of the moral poles when the other one became too powerful to be balanced.

Anyway, to make a long story short, that's as good as I've seen for alignment. Aside from that, players don't take it very seriously, except for the occasional jerk who wants to sandbag your game by playing Chaotic Neutral all the time, or the other kind of jerk who frustrates everyone by playing a Lawful Schmuck Paladin. (It doesn't have to be bad, but it usually is)

In 4th Edition D&D, the alignment system has been pared down to five options - Lawful Good, Good, Unaligned, Evil and Chaotic Evil. Not having their rationale in front of me, my first reaction to this is that it is, how do you say, "stupid". They have turned a weak-but-traditional alignment system into a weaker one that is a break from D&D's past. In fact, it seems to frankly be double-stupid.

No freedom-loving Chaotic Good heroes? No tyrannical Lawful Evil villains? No disciplined Lawful Neutral monks? No Chaotic Neutral lunatics played by obnoxious players? It seems like they have taken a weak system and hamstrung it.

They could have gone with what they have instituted with the Minis game, where there are Good, Unaligned and Evil alignments for each card, and you can't mix Good and Evil in the same army. That's simple, basic, and it makes some kind of sense, and it serves as a counter-point to the faction system they're using, of Civilization, Borderlands, Wild and Underdark.

From their description of the reasons for the change, I get the impression that Good has swallowed up Chaotic Good and Evil has swallowed up Lawful Evil. This just doesn't make sense, however. I like alignment better, if there must be a spectrum, as a double-spectrum of Good-Evil and Law-Chaos. It just has more potential to be descriptive and interesting.

The only good thing about the change is Unaligned. I like that idea, though in play so far, the players of Unaligned characters are basically treating it like Chaotic Neutral used to be - the quintessential alignment for doing random things and pretending that they make sense because they're 'in character'. In theory, however, I like the option of just being someone who doesn't have strong moral commitments either way - unlike True Neutral, which is often depicted as a commitment to balance of some kind.

My proposal:

I think that with this change, I'll feel more inclined to jettison the 'official' take on alignment entirely, and replace it with something else. What I'm thinking of is to have your "alignment" be the thing which is most important to you. Then, once you've said what that most-important thing is, I want to use an indie-game trick and reward you for putting that thing in jeopardy or putting it at risk in some way. That could be the way to earn a little bonus XP maybe, or perhaps the way to earn Action Points (which I've long used as a reward rather than a boring rechargeable point-pool). It is also a good way to find out, in a single word, how you might get the player's and character's attention in the game early on. You know where to start pushing at least, and that's an improvement on the system 4th Edition presents us with.

4th Ed D&D - Healing Surges

According to the new 4th Edition rules, all heroes have what are called "healing surges". These healing surges have what seem to be two functions:

1. You can spend a healing surge as a standard action to heal yourself up to 1/4 of your hit-points through an action called a "second wind". So, essentially, any character can sacrifice one standard action in an encounter to self-heal. You can also use healing surges when resting between encounters (one can't help but think of pausing to 'mana up' in WoW between pulls)

2. Healing abilities, such as those of the Cleric or the Paladin, also cause you to expend your healing surges.

There are a few problems with these healing surges. The first problem is that to use them you have to sacrifice a standard action. When initiative comes around to you and its your turn to act, this is sort of an anticlimactic way to use your action. Damage seems to be set to a higher standard in 4th Ed, meaning you might end up taking more damage during that round of getting a second wind than you can reasonably heal, especially at lower levels.

The second problem is that there are way too many of them. In the Quick Start rules that WotC has put out to promote 4th Ed, I think the Fighter has 12 healing surges. This amount is so high that it doesn't serve as a meaningful limit anymore. Also, if the fight has, say, 32 hit-points, that means that he can heal 8 hit-points 12 times a day - meaning he can heal 96 hit points, or three times his maximum hit points. In other words, without any outside help, he can theoretically absorb 128 hit-points of damage. And this Quick Start sample Fighter is, I believe, level 1 or 2. He can't exceed his maximum at any one time, but that gives this Fighter an absurd capacity to absorb abuse - such that it would be a lot harder to come up with meaningful challenges. Certainly, nothing that would reasonably tax resources like that.

The third problem is that healing is already limited in other ways. Healing powers seem to have a limited number of uses per day, maybe one, or maybe linked to an attribute bonus. The point is that you have two limitations on healing functioning at the same time, overlapping each other, and rendering each other redundant.

There are a lot of things I like about 4th Edition, but healing surges aren't one of them. When I run this game at my table, I'm pretty sure my first house rule will be that healing surges go out the window.

Godlike Review

Wow. I have to say, this is an excellent game in a lot of ways.

Godlike is a roleplaying game set in WWII. You play one of the "Talents", people who have begun to demonstrate superheroic powers. Beginning in 1936, these Talents emerge in all the nations of the world, just as the world is about to be set ablaze by the second great war.

The game is gritty, which is interesting for a superhero game. The tagline is "You are larger than life. But the war is bigger than you." That about says it. The premise is that Dennis Detwiller, the creator, didn't like the way supers were presented as part of society, either worshiped or reviled. He thought - what if people started demonstrating super-powers? Hundreds, then thousands, then tens of thousands of them? How would society really respond?

In Godlike, you get one Talent that defines you in a lot of ways - but that one Talent doesn't make you unkillable. So what if you can fly? So can fighter planes. So what if you are super-strong? A tank shell will still obliterate you.

The engine that powers this game is Greg Stolze's one-roll engine. Like the World of Darkness series of games, you roll stat + skill, a pool of d10s, but quite unlike that system, everything is resolved in one roll. You are measuring height and width of the roll, and you are always looking for matching numbers. The height is how high the highest match is, and the width is how many matching dice you have in your pool. So a roll of 1, 2, 4, 5, 5, 5, 7, 9 has a height of 5 and a width of 3. Those two pieces of information, essentially, tell you all you need to know.

Aside from the system, this game really shines as an alternate history. The work is subtle and comes off as pretty plausible given the condition that Talents emerge in the late 30s and early 40s. There is a detailed timeline of the major events of World War II with the addition of the Talents, sometimes entirely in the background and sometimes driving the story. There seems to be enough crunchy detail to even make some WWII-buffs nod with approval - if you want massive lists of various kinds of rifles compared between the major participants in WWII, each with their own slightly distinct rules, you've got it. (If, like me, you want to ignore that aspect for various reasons, you can do that too easily) The game remains true to its premise, however, that the war is larger than the Talents.

I want to have a chance to run this game - I'll definitely make such a change. In the meantime, I'll finish absorbing it, and I highly recommend you get a copy. 5 out of 5 stars for the setting material, 3 out of 5 stars for the system itself.

A Problem With Story Games

Maybe someone in the Story Games community (not necessarily just the one 'Story Games' forum, but overall) will read this at some point and want to address it. Who knows? And bear in mind that in taking on this topic :

1) I'm talking about something I know comparatively little about

2) I have a funny feeling I'll provoke someone (but that's Ok, just look at my theology blog)

What I mean when I talk about Story Games is actually exemplified by the forum of the same name, which I have a link to on this site but you can also find here. The way I understand it is that Story Games are about Story Now, which needs a little explaining.

There are three ways one might talk about the kind of story that results when we play a game with the goal of story in mind. The first is Story Before, which is one traditional stance where the GM or DM or whomever comes up with a story, works it out ahead of time, and then invites the players to participate in it. The story is already there, it is just being fleshed out, perhaps. At one extreme is something like a video game, where the story is literally laid out for you, and at the other is perhaps a GM or DM who is good at improvising, who has an idea of where things are going and who the major players are but is open to other directions in that framework.

The second is Story After. This also happens a lot, particularly in games that I run, because I tend to like "sandbox" style games where I set up a situation, or a bunch of interlocking situations, drop the players into it and see what happens. Story After essentially means that at the end of a game or session, we look back and say "look at the story that we made!" Maybe someone writes up the session as a story, or someone keeps a game journal. In two current games, one I ran and one I'm in, there is a shared blog that the players and GM have for just this purpose.

Story Now means that the story happens during the game, that the game itself might take on self-conscious story structure elements to it, and the game mechanics guide and develop the narrative, which wasn't worked out before-hand and isn't just something that becomes apparent after the fact.

As I said above, Story Games are concerned with creating Story Now. And I think this is very cool, but it also has a weakness in my limited experience that especially came up in a conversation with a friend recently.

When you are going to Story Now, that means that no one comes in with a plan of what is going to happen. This could mean that things devolve into a random assortment of events and scenes that don't connect to each other. Kind of like the game where you tell a story where each person adds a sentence, and the story goes around and around. You might come up with a great story that way, but you also might come up with crap.

One way that I think a lot of Story Games try to get around this is to more carefully define what their game is about. For example, if I play D&D, I've bought into a genre, and I've bought into a lot of rules and conventions and so on, but the story might be anything. It might be about breaking out of a prison, or about defending a city, or about political intrigue. Granted, D&D is a combat game, but not everyone uses it for that. Or take While Wolf's games - you buy into a genre but not into a specific kind of story.

In contrast, with a Story Game, the game is not only tools to create a story, but it also tells you a lot more of what that story will be, and includes mechanics for that kind of story and not others. Rather than pick on a particular game, I'll given an example. One game might be called Prison Break. So when you play this game, you know that your Story Now will be about breaking out of a prison. If you want your game to be about Machiavellian politics, no dice. If you want a game about breaking out of prison, chances are this is a fantastic option. To me, Story Games are focused in this way.

The reason this is a problem, for me, is twofold.

1) I'm used to a completely different model of games. For example, the first game I ever bought and ran was Mythus by Gary Gygax. I used that rules-set to run games for about three years or so - using just the one book to run and play in all kinds of games. Granted, none were Story Now, but that's a lot of mileage, and I've since used other systems, D&D/D20, GURPS, White Wolf's games and so on, in a similar way.

2) I'm broke. So let's say that now I want to run a game that's about bronze-age competition between Greek heroes. Next I want to run a game that's about competition in academia that involves an insect somehow. After that, a friend wants to run...whatever else. I can do all of this with one Story Before/Story After system, but if I want the Story Now experience, each of these games will need its own system.

Like I said, this isn't a big problem, but its something that has come up - if nothing else, then because there are a lot of games that I want to buy, but can't afford them, motivating me to focus on systems that can be used a lot of ways and developing house rules for them.

Or designing my own games, though I don't really see any of them as Story Games.

So, in short, I get what is cool about them, and maybe what I really need is someone to run a Story Game for me and convert me so I can drink the Kool-Aid. For now, though, Story Now seems like it is interesting...and a barrier as well.

Design Journal 7: 100th Post!

Well, this is the 100th post. Not much of a blog at the moment, really. A few sporadic random hits, some hits from Google searches that send people my way, a few friends who check on a pretty regular basis. Not much more than that. I just don't have the time to post as much as I'd like, and I don't have the time to be as active on forums and other blogs as I'd like to be, which would drum up more hits. Ah well.

As I continue to work on this game, I tell myself that there are some things that are cool about it. The things that come to mind are advancement, orientation, abstract combat, ship attributes and (the) initiative. I'll probably break up a brief discussion of each one, or maybe two at a time, over the next few days.


Advancement

This is usually driven by some sort of experience point or character point system or whatever, in which you save up and then purchase new things for your character progressively. A few systems, like Chaosium's Call of Cthulhu and Burning Wheel, have you keep track of how often you use abilities and they raise as they see more use.

Of those two options, I prefer the first one for player control of development and the second one for realism. Often in the first case, in a point system, groups I've played with have developed house rules where you can only spend experience points on things you do in-game. This is almost always added onto the rules, however, and in many circumstances points are spent on things that don't come up in game anyway.

What I've done with Parsec is to take what I like from both methods. Advancement is entirely bound to what happens in-game, but what happens narratively rather than mechanically. The first way to advance is to achieve a Goal, spelled out during character creation and also while developing a group template.

The second way to advance is to face an Obstacle - whether or not you overcome it. Obstacles are also part of character creation and group template building, and I like that you advance whether you succeed or not. These are also separate from Goals. Meaningful Goals aren't just overcoming Obastacles - there is also something positive to be achieved.

The third way to advance is through either learning Secrets or having your Secrets revealed. Essentially, Secrets are a big part of a game that is intended to be at least somewhat driven by intrigue and conspiracy, and in a story secrets are meant to come out. If the Secrets were developed well in the beginning, when they are revealed it'll be a big moment for the game and for the character(s) in question.

The fourth way to advance is to receive Scars. As mentioned a couple of times before, Scars make you tougher - they modify Resilience the way that Skills modify the other Attributes (lower the target number). They also hurt, and count as anti-Traits - in certain situations, you will lose dice because of the Scar. Not every injury or setback or betrayal will leave a Scar, but when it does happen, your character has learned something. This also encourages the kind of actions that will lead to Scars - dangerous and emotionally charged ones, which are exactly the kinds of things that make a game fun in the first place.

The Road to GenCon 2008

That's how I'm thinking about my progress toward self-publication. I've decided that I will be published by next year's GenCon - either through the game proposal going through (I'm still waiting to hear about that) or by going with one of the projects I've been posting about here.

Right now, the front-runner seems to be the Horror! system. The first reason for this is that it is simple overall, but is a strong concept. The second reason is that a friend of mine seems interested in helping me with the process, so that tips things in its favor as well. Its a lot easier to work on something with someone else.

So, in light of these decisions, and assuming that the game proposal does not go through (I give myself a 20% chance I'd say), I want to have an idea of what is ahead of me and how I need to proceed.

General Production Tasks
(these are in rough chronological order)

1. Finish writing a full playtest draft of the game. This will be a rough copy that includes all of the major rules that I'll hopefully be able to playtest myself and also farm out to any other interested groups.

2. Recruit people. This includes people in the categories of art, web design, graphic design, and editing. Ideally, these will be people who are in the project for the fun or are friends who will help me out for free, but I'm also willing to pay if necessary to get quality help.

3. Playtest. And then do it again. And again. As I do this, and as I get reviews (if I'm lucky) from other groups running the game, I'll continuously modify the playtest draft and then send it back out for more testing.

4. Research technical details of self-publication. Formatting. Costs. Setting up a system to sell the book online (I'm looking at pdf/print-on-demand with online sales to start). Getting a POS of some kind to run credit cards for when I go to Origins and GenCon with the game. Etc.

5. Complete a rough draft of the game. This will be post playtesting with rules I'm happy with and everything else I think the game needs. At this point, graphic design will have to be together and art will basically have to be together.

6. Get the rough draft copy-edited and content-edited. I can't do these things myself for my own game. I'll be blind to the problems, as will most who have worked on it with me. So I'll need to find at least one copy-editor and at least one content editor who will almost certainly have to be people I don't know personally.

7. Publish the final copy. This will also involve setting up all of the details of how I am going to sell it and deciding on a price (I'll err on the side of cheap in the hope that it will get the game out there faster, but will still seem like it is significant. It's hard to respect a $2 game.) Right now I'm looking at having two options - a cheaper pdf option for download with light art, maybe pared down in general, and then a somewhat more robust option for purchase on a print-on-demand basis.

8. Go to Origins and GenCon 2008 to pimp the thing.

Thankfully, I spent a lot of time at Origins this year at seminars in the area of game design and publishing, and I've done a bunch of research on both and will continue to do so. I've got a general idea of how all of these things will work, as well as some specifics, and some people I might be able to turn to for help in the future.

As always, any comments are welcome.