Conventioning! Play & Pub Toronto

Recently Dancing Giant Games hosted a Play & Pub convention in Toronto this past weekend. I had a great time for a few reasons.

The first was the it got Curt Cover from Smirk and Dagger up to check out the prototypes as well as try out a few things that were coming down the pipeline for S&D as well.

I'm not going to talk about every game, because we played a lot in a wide variety of levels of completion, but I'm going to hit on some highlights.

1. Finally got to play Biotix. I totally get why Curt is publishing this game. It's quick, so much fun, and very much backstabby. It's backstabby in the way that feels like you're also making strategic moves. Also, the germ meeples are adorable and everyone will want to play with them.

2. Got to play a Fast Food game by Joel Colombo. I didn't get the name, it was something about Drive Thrus and it was so good. Like heavy crunchy kind of "what am I doing" kind of game. Funny thing about me, I love playing those games and in part is that at no way shape or form does my designer brain go that far down the pipe.

Got to talk about how to many shorten it for players who are new to the game, or aren't quite fully versed in that kind of heavy game.

Also, there's a tag line that I hope he uses so hard. I have a long standing joke when someone asks me to define a "euro" game and I yell out "Is it about farming or colonizing shit? If yes, then see Euro." I know it's not quite the same, but anyway I think it's a good joke. That said, we're playing this game and I have an epiphany, "This is truly the American Euro. It's not about farming, it's about Fast Food."

3. Saw a couple of designs from Chris Chung. A lot of them were in alpha state, but there were some really good games but my favourite was Spell Smashers which hopefully we'll see in certain formats when he gets some more work done on it.

It was a great job by Kevin to get this up and running, and a great first time con!

Veronica Monsterhearts - Playtesting Notes

Well, got some Veronica Monsterhearts playtesting done. Little playtesting done, but the character creation stuff gave me some thoughts.

1. Need to make everything immediate to the players. You just don't make it up and go, you have to make the city and I have to come up with that. Everything that's coming up is heavily influenced by 5 Fires, but I really don't want to just cut and paste that. It needs to fit this game, and not that one. However, that's the city creation that I'm enamoured with so it's going to be there.

2. Need to look at the scenes and how to frame them. There was a bit of panic about setting scenes with little or no direction on how to start them. I kind of did that in Geasa but I think this might be something that needs a little bit more direction since it's using AW.

I was directed to look at Murderous Ghosts but I didn't enjoy it too much when I read it the first time, but I'm sure that there is something there but I really don't want to do that.

3. I think I'll have to revisit the casefiles again, mainly because they need to be cleaned up a little bit and try to think about how to incorporate scene setting moves into them. No clue how I'm going to do that but that's there.

I think those are the three things I need to look over again, and then give it another playtest.

Previously Generated - AIR v.5 - Playtest Documents

Hey folks!

I've been puttering around at this, but here's the playtest document for AIR v.5. That's right, there's been some fixing and the character sheet still needs to get uploaded and I'm sure I'm missing things but here's the document with a form to fill out at the end if you play it!

Yay technology, now without further ado ...

AIR

Metatopia - AIR

I have written a fair bit about AIR because it was the game that really wanted to come out earlier. You see I played a game that promised me something, and then didn't deliver on it at all. I wanted a game that was able to tell a ghost story in space, because that sounds like something amazing.

What is it, or the Elevator Pitch.

Exactly what I said, you're playing a ghost story in space. You wake up, something has happened to the space station. You need to get off to survive, but something on the station wants you dead.

The Slightly Longer Pitch
This game is a rather antagonistic relationship between the players (Victims) and the GM (Captain). The goal of the Captain is to kill the Victims, as nastily as possible. The Victims want to get to the escape hatch and survive whatever it is that is trying to kill you.

Much like Geasa though, there is an element of co-operation at the beginning. During the setup the Victims and the Captain will build parts of the ship, and then build in a very indirect way what the Ghost is. You'll do that with keywords on the Downwards Spiral, which the Victims must go through in order to make it to the Escape Hatch.

What does the game do, how does it work?
It's the most boardgamey RPG I've ever done. The players are moving on a map, as well as on the spiral. There's a constant recognition of where you are at all times, but no knowledge of where the ghosts are and what they're going to do.

I want to bring that to the mechanic, so you're uncertain at all times what's going on. What happens is that the Captain rolls a certain amount of dice and assigns them to methods of how you can deal with a problem. The player will then roll and assign dice in an order on how they're going to try to get past a problem.  When that's done everything is revealed and the player gets to see if they succeeded or not.

There's a fair bit of book keeping on the part of the Captain, but I don't know if it's a hindrance.

What are you hoping to get out of Metatopia for this?

The mechanic still needs some work, I think it's fun but there are ways it could be more fun and scarier. It needs to really survive contact with other people, to see if it's going in the right direction. Surprise, because there's probably going to be something brilliant that comes out of people playing it. You can follow the AIR label in order to find the playtest sheets and document if you're interested in seeing what it is before the convention.

Metatopia Upcoming Projects

With Metatopia only a month away I figure it's a good time to start talking about what I'm going to bring to that convention, what the game is, what the goal is, and what I hope to get out of the convention.

AIR - Playtest Sheets

If you've read the playtest document* then you'll notice that there are a set of sheets that you can use to play the game.  Well, I have playtest sheets for those people who are interested in playing the game.

Download AIR playtest sheets.

Clearly these are also up for criticism.  If you have anything that you think might improve them, shout out about it!  I want to make this game better!

*ha, someone reading the playtest document ... sometimes I kill myself.

AIR - v0.4 - Playtest Document

It's that seasons again folks, that's right it's playtest season.  A time where game designers, and even large companies, get in on the fact that someone, somewhere might be interested in seeing a game before it's out.

Let me introduce you to AIR, my ghost stories in space game.  You all play Victims who wake up to find that that something has happened to the station you're in, there is only the oxygen that's left in the air and the little you have on you.  You want to escape but there's a malevolent force trying to stop you, can you survive to the escape pod?

If you want to check out the Playtest Document, you can find it here.

Feedback is appreciated, either at the email address in the document, or here on the blog post.  Let me know what works, what doesn't work and what you think would make the game better!

Signal Boost!: Curse the Darkness - Playtest Stuff!

Okay, I don't know if you've been following Matthew MacFarland's Curse the Darkness? It looks like a lot of fun, and it touches on post-apoc stuff which is very firmly in the category of games I enjoy playing.

What I'm doing is letting everyone know that he's got a playtest booklet out that you can download from his website. It looks great and I'll let people know what it's like after I've read it more and played it.

Dex Con 2011 - Everybody Loves the Funny

My second con in three weeks just happened, and it's Dex Con in Morristown New Jersey. It's one of the largest local cons in the North East for gaming (where I include Toronto and anything 8 hours away for me, your geography may vary). I love this convention for a variety of reasons. I've gone there now for I believe it's six years and I've gotten to know a lot of the people there very well. A lot of my best friends when it comes to gaming are there, and so my glasses are coloured by that.

It's also a place where a lot of the NE Indie designers show up to test their new games. The joke is that if a game survives Dex Con then it's good to go. Most of the games that I've made have been improved from the feedback that people are more than willing to give. It's a great place to make your game that much better. That being said, let's talk about the games I did run, or that were run.

Critical!: Go Westerly
Wow. This con was the con that really showed me that this is going to be a good book when it comes out. We had three games go off, there might have been four but the midnight to 4 am slot isn't one that I can do easily anymore, which I'm going to call a 100% success rate, which always surprises me.

We ran two instances of You All Meet in a Tavern, though Geoff ran them off on a different adventure than the one that was written, and there was a lot of good times had. I think the best part of the game I ran was Brennan, who was playing Marten, was quite gentlemanly and made sure that all the gold was split evenly between the party. I think much to the surprise of the other players, who then expressed their guilt over the fact that they did try to screw over Marten at various points in the game for gold. I was amused greatly.

Geoff told me about his game, and for me the best part was when the player realized that crawling through an earthen tunnel to get to an actual dungeon meant that they were on a dungeon crawl. The other best part was when they awoke the giant stone idol because the thief wanted to make it look like the victim they were rescuing had escaped.

Hoggart's Follow was one of those game where you had an idea of where you wanted it go to and the player end up going completely the opposite direction. I had wanted them to try to gather the pieces of the only map that was created of Hoggart's Castle, but instead it ended up as some sort of political intrigue game where the Guards and the Guides were busy fighting each other, so that the Maids (I had to try to come up with something funny, so I came up with Ninja Maids) had to find a way to defend the King and Queen from being attacked. That was the hope anyway, but it did end up turning a little more serious than I had intended which just proves that it's hard to be spontaneously funny all the time.

Ultimately there was a lot of interest in the game, which makes me anxious to get it out. I need to talk to the artistic folk and see if we can't get this done by the end of the year. It's really something I think will do well.

Geasa

I only ran one game of Geasa, because I made a mistake and they ended up duplicating the Critical! stuff rather than the Geasa stuff, but it was a lot of fun. We ended up telling a story of post-war London with a Streetkid who was looking for his parents, a pub owner who was a pillar of his community, a noble woman looking to get a better sense of the common folk and a constable that was still on the take for the remnants of the Axis.

The game ended with the Constable being run off after capturing the orphan Streetkid by the Pub Owner and his local mob. There were some great moments, Eric playing the Fae to the Noblewoman ended up making her obsessed with Stags even though he didn't spend a die. It's just another moment that shows you can do a lot as a Fae even if you don't have any dice.

Ultimately, I would call this a super successful con. It's given me that extra push to get Critical! done, which I may or may not be working on ... right now. I just hope I can get most of it updated and organized before Game Chef kicks in. Damned Shakespeare theme.

Critical!: Go Westerly - Introduction Redux the Second

Well, the first attempt at doing an introduction wasn't so hot. This means I'm going to get back on that horse and see what I can do here. This is a draft copy, I'm looking for any feedback I can get on this thing.

What is Critical!: Go Westerly!?
Eat, Drink, Fight, and be Merry, each one of those is important because it’s been capitalized, but also because that is the basis of Critical!: Go Westerly. Play that character you always wanted to have in a world slightly twisted sideways. You will go forth into a world where monsters are organized by height, dysfunctional duchies try their best to deal with their personal demons, and a land war is fought over who doesn’t have to control and monster filled, bug infested swamp. You will gather gold for personal gain by killing monsters and pilfering off of friends who stay conscious on the other end of a fight. You will learn how to fight, and help others, and cheat your way to victory in wonderfully descriptive training montages.

Critical!: Go Westerly is more than just a collection of punctuation nestled between a valley of words. It’s a world that is in dire need of questionable heroes who know how to fight and how to cook, possibly at the same time. A world in dire need of Bards who are willing to stop at nothing to produce the best music that they can. Fallen sports heroes who are looking for a less dangerous line of work, or even Wizards looking to advance their careers by walking about righting wrongs and wronging even worse evils. A world in dire need of peat farmers, because it’s a dirty job and somebody has to do it.

Adventure and hijinx awaits! All you need to do is keep reading, and convince someone else that they really want to be the Bartender.

Critical!: Go Westerly - Introduction

I read up on what a couple people were saying to Brennan about the introduction to Bulldogs. How it should snag the reader, and give a good sense of what was going to happen inside the book. With that in mind, I'm going to be asking the people who read this blog (and there are more of you now, much to my surprise) what you think of the new and upgrade version of the Introduction.

Note, this is still a draft so any suggestions on how it's written in Jonathan Speak is appreciated.

What is Critical: Go Westerly!?
Tired of boring battles and pointless treasure gathering? Annoyed by the boring, monotonous fantasy worlds that seem to spring up everywhere? If you aren’t, then maybe you should just put down. No, I mean it. Put it down and go back to your magical fantasy worlds where everything is drab and colourless. Surely you can’t handle what goes on inside this book, it just might be too much for you.

If you haven’t put the book down, then you’re either really bad at comprehension or you’ve decided to boldly go forward towards the center of this book. There you will find ribald adventures and slightly off kilter places where you will have meaningful reasons to go after monsters, and kill them for their treasure. Inside is a place where cooking and combat are nestled side by side in education facilities. Take great, unimaginable risks in order to defeat strongly smelling evil monsters. Drink yourself silly in taverns and still manage to adventure successfully. Kill, steal, bribe, and find as much gold as you possibly can to attain power and glory!

Critical: Go Westerly! is ultimately a story about a kingdom that needs a slightly questionable hero. It’s a kingdom filled with highs and lows, good times and bad, ups and downs, friends and foes and many other dualisms with which other Kingdoms are filled. There is the threat of war, Pirates attacking the shore, Monsters to the north and various political factions each looking to win the Stout Throne for itself. It’s up to you, to decide who might pay you the most money to do their dirty work.

Your party of adventurers will go forth, with their Bartender behind them, to create epic tales of monster death, gold collection, and general dungeon delving with the hope that you won’t find yourself waking up in the Hay Loft of the local White Gryphon Tavern establishment wondering where all your stuff is, and how will you ever get it back from the clutches of your backstabbing teammates.

[Need Catchy Contest Name] - Brrr! It's Cold Sports!

There seems to be a large amount of contests that are going about the place. You've got Game Chef which should be starting up in a couple of months. You've got the Ronnies, which I still think is one of the most masturbatory titles in all of game publishing, which happen ... well whenever it seems. The key thing is that they get the creativity flowing and some really cool things happen from them. Heck, someone hijacked my almost empty lets tell a story thread to tell me that Fall of Granada was going to be turned into a real live book.

All this is cool.

However, what I see that is lacking is a sense of diversity. They all try to kind of do the same thing, here are some keywords and some stuff and here's your time frame and then we'll see what comes up. This is good, again there are plenty of cool games that come out of this. What I'm going to do is start my own contest, in honor of The New Toy selling The Licensed NHL Hockey Guys from Kaskey Kids. Let's see if someone can come up with a game, and I'm not going to limit it to RPGs, but a game that can take a sport and turn it into an RPG, Boardgame or Card game? That's right, I'm going that route. AMAZING.

Now, for the limitations. Because limits are what make things challenging.

1. It has to be a winter sport. By that I mean something that would get played at the Winter Olympics. Here is a handy, dandy list:

1. Alpine skiing
2. Biathlon
3. Bobsleigh
4. Cross-country skiing
5. Curling
6. Figure skating
7. Freestyle skiing
8. Ice hockey
9. Luge
10. Nordic combined
11. Short track speed skating
12. Skeleton
13. Ski jumping
14. Snowboarding
15. Speed skating

2. Mutant League XX - This is also inspired because I got the urge to do a version of Blood Bowl. That means there has to be some sort of mayhem attached to the game. Now I know someone is going to make a, "well I just have to do hockey normally then, don't I?" joke. That's fine, you can make the joke but I think it could do with some over the top violence there.

How do I enter?

1. Well, post here expressing your interest.
2. When your game is done, post it in the completion thread over at the "What's been done" post with a link to the game.
a. If it's an RPG, a link to the PDF is fine.
b. If it's a card game, a link to the rules and a PDF of the cars works.
c. Board game see above, though if you have specialty pieces you're gonna wanna tell us how to make them.

Deadline
I think this should give people plenty of time to think about it. Let's say September 31st because that's con season plus 1 month. I'm flexible on this, if you think it should be shorter, that's fine. If you want to submit early, that's fine.

Judging Criteria
Me and a panel of me will be the judges on this one. Not because I think I'm overly qualified for this, but because I think it'd be kind of cool to judge this. We're going to do it, a la dancing with the stars kind of judging. I'm going to give each game a rating, based off of the criteria below, and then we'll use that as the base point value. Then we'll have a vote off to determine the winner.

The Criteria are:
1. Completeness: Can we play the game, or does it feel like it needs a lot more work.
2. Fun: Is the game fun to play? Does it do the things that make you want to play it again, or continue the campaign.
3. Mayhem: How much mayhem is there? Blood all over the ice, or does it feel like too goons tweeted to stage a fight?
4. Look: How good does the game look? Is it pretty, is it awesome looking? Does it inspire the crowd to riot when their team wins?

Each is based out of 10 and that will provide the base score.

I'll make one too, it just can't enter the contest. There may be something cool at the end, I don't know. I may not have the power of an OGB behind me, but maybe a gift card for IPR, or Drivethru of undetermined value would be up for grabs.

That's right, I'm not cool enough to get people on my own. I'm going to have to bribe them with piddly sums of non transferable cash.

Dreamation 2011 - Critical! and Geasa

There's a convention that I like to go to, and it's Dreamation. I find a pile of wonderful people there who I love talking to as well as get to play with a pile of games. Some of them are even my own.

There were two games that we ran. The first one was Geasa, and I ran a lot of it since it's the new game that we're pushing, and the second one was Critical!: Go Westerly! We got a couple of interesting insights playing these games.

Geasa

I only had one game of Geasa go off, there were four scheduled.

Lesson One:
Try to produce more hype for the game. I was hoping to get at least two of them off because I want people to play the game. They need to play it, or at least hear about it to want to play it. Must bust out the marketing chops, which we all know that most writers suck at this part of the biz.

The game went off fairly well. We did a lot of exploring in France just before the revolution. This was funny to me because this was the second time that someone decided to do that and one time was in Hamilton so there is no way that they were able to collaborate on this. I should probably find a way to write up a setting book for this time period because apparently it's pretty popular. I think I'll blame Montseigneur 1499 for this.

Lesson Two:
Make sure that you schedule a break. Geasa is a pretty demanding game and the fact that people just kept going means that it broke down pretty quickly near the end. I think if I give people that 15 minute break between every two times the game goes around the table then it will refresh the mind and give people the chance to do what they need to do. Must remind myself about that for the next time I run the game.

I also need to sit down and give people a slightly better overview of what they can and can't do. They can tell what their characters are doing, they can define anything for an NPP but they can't tell things about the other players. That's stepping on toes and should probably be reigned in better. Anyway, I think it went well and hope people enjoyed the game.

Critical!:* Go Westerly

Wow. This game went off so much better than I thought it would. Not that I thought it would be bad, but I didn't think it would be this much fun. The players really did have a good time with the characters and it was silly, but at no point in time did it because goofy, and that's my biggest worry. I don't want this game to be thought of as some sort of equivalent of Munchkin: The RPG or something like that. It needs to be able to stand on it's own funny.

Here were some lines during the game carefully written down by Geoff Bottone, who is one half of the creative team on this. They are listed by character, not by player.

Mary the Wench

As a duly-authorized employee of the tavern, offering to sell the tavern's provisions to the hungry Kobolds for gold. Thereby ending the battle with the kobolds with her unusually high common sense. Also, frequently using her common sense to help others.

Urist Axebeard, Tall Dwarf

When confronted with flying fairies: I can't reach them with my axe? Can I throw it at them? I really don't like fairies.

Urist: Wait, there's a plaque on this wall. And it says, "Perend Adventure Tours Dungeon Complex, Room A5? That...doesn't make any sense."

Urist: What's my name? You don't really care, do you? You'll just call me, "dwarf," anyway, so whatever name you give me is fine.
Mabel: Oh, excellent! You shall be known as El Tallface!

Barnabas Ramsey, Wizard

Discovering, through discourse with a kobold that he had captured, that the kobold was both a) very intelligent and b) a licensed therapist. Then the two of them proceeded to have a very nice conversation as they headed to the kobold lair (pronounced "lay-er" by the kobolds), where they found the others mired in traps and negotiations.

Taking out the entire group of anarcho-punk fairies by shouting, "this is ridiculous! We live in a feudal society! You can't tell me that you've just come up with this extremely advanced, modern, political system on your own in what is, essentially a vacuum! I don't believe it! I just don't believe in these fairies!"

This lead to the fairies keeling over and dying, because someone didn't believe in them. Everyone else was very careful not to clap.

This entire exchange with Aelae the Necromancer. It's paraphrased. The actual exchange was even more awesome.

Barnabas: You may be evil, but you don't have to be a jerk!
Aelae: Sure I do, it's in the contract.
Barnabas: You have a contract to be evil?
Aelae: Yes! I graduated from the Wizardry with a major in Necromancy and a contract that says that I get to be a jerk whenever I want!
Barnabas: Really? You're a graduate of the Wizardry? Me too. But I was valedictorian!
Aelae: So was I.
Barnabas: Oh.
Aelae: Incidentally, if you're a graduate of the Wizardry, what are you doing slumming it in this dungeon with these idiots? Shouldn't you be teaching classes?
Barnabas: I don't...have...a graduate degree...Um...Can you write me a letter of recommendation, maybe?

Barnabas: "I know, I'll summon a fire elemental. That should solve the problem. This is a dungeon, nothing in here should catch on fire."
Mary: "What about the wooden kiosks outside?"
Barnabas: "Fire elementals don't buy things."

Daffodianna, the Very Nice Bard

Played by, possibly, the nicest person at the table. She was quiet and sweet, and played songs that gave everyone bonuses virtually all the time. She also conjured an impressive goblin-repelling force bubble out of song. And, was responsible for this little exchange.

Player: Okay, now that combat's over, I'm trying to do (something not combat-related, I forget what it was). Do I still get the Bard's song bonus?
Daffodianna: No. I don't play music when combat's over. There's no point. It's just not exciting.

Angelique Doto, Quillsman

Bartender: Okay, you're standing at the end of the stairs. The basement floor has collapsed out from beneath you and you see the remains of the basement, about twenty feet down, in another cavern.
Angelique: I jump down! Hoorah!

Things like the following happened all the time, but this was by far the coolest example of Angelique. Who had no weapons or armor of any kind.

The players fight two skeletons. Urist kills one. Angelique says.

Angelique: I do a leaping dive roll, grab the skull of the skeleton that Urist just killed, and throw it really hard at the other skeleton. Success!
Bartender: Okay, you hit the skull with the skull in the back of the...skull...The other skeleton crumbles. It looked awesome, by the way.

Marten Iij, Priest of the Thief

Marten: "I'm not going hunting for kobolds. All we're going to do is run into traps."

Marten (upon seeing a woman trapped in a heavily trapped room with whirling death blades and the like): Ma'am, is it all right if I try to steal from you? (He knew that if he was robbing her, his chance to succeed would be higher).

Stelph the Elf

Stelph's constant running patter about how he was better than everyone else (in both incarnations) was just hilarious. And then there was this:

Bartender: The undead are pouring through this tunnel, which looks like it's been hastily dug. Roots from trees on the surface protrude through the ceiling in a lot of places.
Stelph: I use my nature-based magic to convince the trees to attack the tunnel, because I am a Defender of the Forest. I fail. Oh, nature, why have you foresaken me.

And this:

Bartender: The elf introduces herself to you as Tulip. She flicks her blue hair absentmindedly, stares at the floor, and says, "heeey." (this was me, channeling Ke$ha, though Stelph doesn't have a beard).
Stelph: Heeey. I'm two hundred.
Bartender: "I'm 198."
Stelph: Oh. Really? Well, huh.

What I got to do!

I got to play with Brennan and Amber with a couple of Brennan's games. I got to play Three Black Crows, Three Dead Men and Sparks from the Fire both games that Brennan did for various contests. They were both an amazing good time. Amber and I both agreed that had we not been so exhausted we probably would have had even more fun, which is amazing when you consider the fact that we had a great time. It seriously was one of the big highlights and I recommend that you pick up Three Crows and check out the rest of the games from Galileo Games. Seriously good times there.

Also, Brennan has a bag of awesome. It's making me want to scour through ebay to find something similar. It was just too amazing.

All in all it was a great con. I can't do anything but recommend any of the dexposure cons if you can make it. Not only are they a great and good time, you'll get to see and play a bunch of games with some amazingly awesome people.

I was just disappointed that my games conflicted with my chance of being a Cosmic Roadie!

Going Home - A Power Fantasy Playtest

For some reason I can't seem to get the Game Chef site to recognize that I am a person, and not a spam bot, which means that I'm going to post here saying that a group of us ended up playing Going Home, A Power Fantasy by Mikael Andersson.

Now, this was the first time the game had been played. Which is always nice because you know that you're gonna run into speed bumps, but that the person who designed the game is more than willing to sit down and try to tackle them.

First of all, I will say that I love this game. I love the fact that all you start out with is a name and the question, what did you just abandon. I think it's prefect and I loved how it just set you up for a lot of uncertainty.

I was playing a character who had just abandoned their phone. Amber was playing a character who had just abandoned an office job. Angela was playing someone who had just abandoned a suitcase and Mikael had abandoned ... I can't for the life of me remember but even just with that you can see the narrative possibilities that can show up.

I liked the fact that each player had different narrative roles that they got to play. The Enemy, the World and Karma (the Camera wasn't used since we were playing with only 4 players). The Enemy was straightforward, where you go to play the reactions of what was currently The Enemy of the scene. The World had the narrative responsibility to provide a detailed world in which the Enemy and the Traveler (the player in question) work in. Karma was a little more difficult, but basically it was what was supposed to keep you to your previous actions and also be the voice on your shoulder.

We managed to get once around, each player got to pick a question on the map, and the questions were great. My question was so integral to what happened that I almost screamed out the answer when I was done my moment, but it wasn't so much the same for the other players. We ended up talking about it, and I think the conclusion that we came to was that the other players needed to remember that the game is a Power Fantasy, which means that there needs to be far more Power and Fantasy in the moments that are provided. For instance, if someone searches a glove compartment, they will find something like a gun which will cause havoc (that's what happened to Mikael).

Power = weapon
Fantasy = Finding it easily

I want to play it again. I'd like to get further along the map and answer more than a single question.

CyberGeneration - Combat Speed

There are a couple places that most RPGs tend to bog down and the speed goes from entertaining to boring for quite a lot of people. One of those places is combat. Combat, for all the fact that it happens quickly in real life becomes hours of agony as everyone plays everything so cautiously that they painstakingly map out every possible scenario before they commit to any action. It's one of the reasons why 30 seconds of game play can take 2-3 hours.

Saturday Night Skuffl (SNS) has this problem too but on through different means. There aren't a million special rules that you need to be aware of. There aren't all these Feats or Skills or Traits or Abilities that you have to consider when you're going to use. Instead what SNS has is a throw back from Friday Night Firefight (FNFF), a defense roll. When dealing with melee combat what slows down the game is the fact that the game has a defensive roll. It is a roll that does absolutely nothing other than to negate someone's attack roll.

This can make a battle go on forever, especially if two characters of equal skill are involved in the fight and they keep rolling high on their opponent's turn.

Boring.

Time to follow one of the design philosophies and speed things up. We're going to change combat so that whenever you attack or defend against a roll, the winner will do damage in combat. That way combat will go twice as fast because now there is guaranteed damage to happen on every single roll. Well, not including armor, but at least it will be faster than it was before.

This isn't a unique concept, many other games have implemented this kind of combat style, I just think it's particularly fitting to CyberGen.

Game Chef - Trying out some games

Last night we had a meetup for our local game meetup group, the Toronto Area Gamers, and had a lot of fun playing 44: A Game of Automatic Fear. It was my first time running it and as such it ended a bit early. Oh, I turned them all into alien pod people, but what happened is that we ended the game way too early. Now that I have some experience running the game, I know how I can make the game last a little longer, with allowing the action to happen rather than just jumping to the conflict point. Still, it was an awesome time.

That being said we ended about a third of our way through the alotted time. That wasn't particularly cool for those who came to play, so I took out the game chef games, which happen to be in the same binder with me, and we decided on a couple that we'd like to try.

1. Danger Mountain

I still love the idea behind this game. The whole concept of building up a town, and the relationships that make the crisis immediate and pressing is great.

What I think would help the game would be a moment where you could foreshadow your disaster without trying to do it in the scene. It felt a little artificial and since we had a couple of new players they were really pushing for their disaster and so the opening scene was really:

"Did you hear about my disaster?" "No, did you hear about my disaster?"

What might help that is having a brief moment where you could mention your disaster. Just that quick cut away to the lava bubbling in the volcano, or the grasshoppers coming down the road.

We also spent all our time on the questions on the cards rather than any of the other options.

We didn't finish the game because two of the people we were playing with didn't play a lot of co-operative storytelling games and so they were feeling confused. One of the players even excused himself at that point, which made me feel a little bad. I wasn't trying to be exclusive. I do think that anyone can play any game really.

Anyway, we decided to play another game ...

2. Chronicles of Skin.

I could make emblems for hours. Seriously, I had such a good time with that I almost asked to do it again instead of playing the game.

However, we did get down to playing at least one round of the game. What I think might be cool was what ron suggested. Instead of coming up with the conflict ad you go, draw it out first and then interpret it and finish it when its done.

That is what we did last night.

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Party Games

One of the things that I haven't been too good at is coming up with party games. You know the type, the one that deals with words or phrases or some such thing. The kind of games that you bring out when there are a large number of people and a certain level of alcohol. Yeah, those types of games.

Not to say that these games aren't bad. I love those types of games. One of the homeschooling moms brings in Taboo all the time. I grew up playing Boggle, and Charades, and Pictionary. These games are a lot of fun. They just aren't the types of games that spring to my mind when I start designing games. Then, at Gencon, we were just talking at dinner and making jokes, like any table of friends would do, and all of a sudden a party game sprang out of it.

Now I find myself trying to come up with the rules for this game and its harder than I thought. The problem, unlike the more standard hobby games that I tend to make, is that the game itself is rather simple, and I'm worried that people will get bored with it too easily. Now, instead of cutting overly complicated rules and ideas, I find myself trying to make them up. It is an interesting problem to have for once.

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Anime North part 1 - Geasa and A Good Time

This past weekend was Anime North. Now, normally I do a lot of stuff at AN, but this year I decided that I needed to take a little bit in the way of a break. I also didn't feel like carting a whole bunch of CyberGen books up to the Toronto Congress Centre, which is up by the Airport in God's Country.

That means I got a chance to do a lot of panels and play in a couple of Geasa playtests. I'm going to talk about those first because that's what people are here to see, or something like that. It helps that the games ended up being rather awesome.

The first game we ran of Geasa, I purposefully took myself out of the game. The previous games of Geasa have included me in some shape or form, and I wanted to see how people dealt with it if I walked away at times.

The first game had 5 people and the setting ended up being rather interesting. We had a weird future setting where all the players found themselves on a corporate space station. We had a medical man who was almost magical, we had an alien, we had a bored IT person, a bodyguard that didn't look the part and an automaton. There were some really good moments in the story, where they spent a lot of time getting involved in each other stories as Non-Player-People, but their Fae didn't really get involved in the story much. That was a little problematic, but I guess it's something else that I need to stress.

There were some rule stuff that came out of that. Basically we found out that 4 is a really hard die to deal with. Players are going to try to angle things so that they're always using their best element in a situation, and that's fine. The problem is that if you try to start conflicts as a NPP you will never really get to use those 4s at all. So we decided to allow people to reroll two dice when it comes around. Basically after everyone has had a turn you can reroll dice, usually that means those fours but I didn't want to say just fours but now that I think about it you should have the option to just reroll all your dice. That way you can end up getting a lot more sixes and then have to do more with the Fae.

The other thing I think is that I need to find a way to punish Fae who sit down and hoard dice. One problem was that a player was stuck with having few dice and a Fae that wasn't very active. It's a problem that I don't quite know how to solve, or if there is even a rules way to solve it. I should probably just talk about how it sucks to be that player, and that with this much power you should be able to get people to do what you want.

Finally I'm going to make an addition to Supports at Iain's suggestion. Basically I'm going to be adding some text that says that the more powerful a Support is, the more specific it is. That way you can't sit down and keep using your level 3 support all the time. It's very specific and so should probably only happen once a game, twice if you're lucky.

The second game ended up being a Victorian London setting with a Member of the Yard, a German Paranormal Investigator, an Irish young woman traveling Europe and a London Street Urchin. I love how this game lends itself to a wide variety of settings. It's a lot like Mortal Coil

Anyway, the big thing with this game is that they ran into a problem of combat. The thing is that they tended to play standard RPGs that have a blow by blow system of resolution. When they were done playing, we had run out of time, they talked about how they had a problem with how to resolve a combat. I had walked away so they couldn't talk to me about it. This is a good thing because it added a combat section to Bidding. Basically it's not the blow, by blow that matters but the end result. Because there's no "physical" Element, the reason behind the combat is more important. Did you do it because you thought it was the right thing to do? That's Head. Did you get involved because you were overcome with emotion? That's Heart. Did you do it because you felt that it was the only way to get a better life? That's Life. Were you driven to do it to achieve a goal? That's Loins.

Once you've got the Element, you just bid dice as per normal and then continue. Easy-peasy lemon squeezy. However, that should probably be a section that covers that to help with clarity because in the end I want people to be able to read the game and be able to play it.

Succession - A Board Game

So David and I were going to do this game as our first DCG, but it just didn't really fly as well as we'd hoped. It was a little too complicated and a little too much, but it was an awesome idea.

I worked it and worked it until it came out as a Boardgame. I've just finished redoing the rules, and now I need to redo the cards, but that should be a couple of days. Then I'll have something playtest worthy.

I think it's going to be awesome.

Geasa - A Change for the Better

So I made a slight change to Geasa. Something very small that doesn't change the way the game works, but actually fits more in theme with what's going on.

Originally, the Fae could cancel a use of magic at 1 power. I never really liked that much. It didn't feel all that amazing and it didn't feel like it was much in keeping with the flavour. You want them that first die of power to be some sort of threat rather than just some sort of nebulous kind of, "Well, when you get a 1 I'll screw you over from using it in the future, some nebulous time unless I forget, and then you're safe."

Not much of a threat at all. So, the change is that you get to make a Geis. You can throw a curse at someone in the vein of "You must do X when Y happens or else Z occurs." It can be more elegant than that, but the key thing is that you now force the character into acting in a certain ways, and that might be more powerful than the other options two or three which deal with the stats but that's counteracted with the fact that those two do lead to death.

I'm going to have to find a way to make this all fit. I think one of these days I'm going to sit down and take a camera out to start doing pictures for the game.

Stay tuned for more details.