Some Thoughts on my 24 Hour RPG

I finished my 24 Hour RPG because I really wanted to get that off the ground for a couple of reasons. It was a break from writing CyberGen 3.0 and Critical!: Go Westerly. It was a chance to get the creative juices flowing again in a different direction, which always makes them come back better when working on projects.

It was also a quick mental challenge that, while draining, is something I think served me a little better than the Game Chef competition did. It gave me a much tighter deadline. I ended up writing 10k words for Game Chef and in retrospect that's far too much. I wanted to be more concise.

I also ended up showing that I can use Geasa and modify it to fit something different. I hope by showing that I can do it, other people can do it too. If I get it polished enough what I might do is put it up on Drivethru as a free download because I think it's a good way to get people to understand that the system is there to be used.

Anyway, if you want to check out the game you can download it here.

Which comes first, the Setting or the Rules

So I did a little bit of an unscientific poll on Facebook and Twitter yesterday. The question was, what should come first the Setting or the System.

Now, I should clarify this question as what should come first in the book. Would you rather read the Setting first or the System first. I got 17 People who said "Setting," 2 People who said "System" and 5 people who said, "Get it together asshole, find a way to merge the two."

My personal preference goes to Setting first rather than rules. It's one of the reasons why I like the Shadowrun books a lot. I like reading them because the Setting inspires me to figure out nasty, horrible things to do to the players while rules just tell me how it's possible to do nasty horrible things to the players. I tend to feel that I have a pretty good grasp of how, it's the what that needs to be inspired.

How does this apply to what I'm doing? Well I've got two projects currently on the go. The first is the next edition of CyberGeneration (which we're lovingly calling Evolution 3.0) and the other is a fantasy game I'm working on with Geoff Bottone of Slug Fest Games called Critical!: Go Westerly, which I might have talked about once or twice on this blog. Figuring out how we're going to lay out the book is a big deal, because as Adam Jury has complained about frequently you need to know these things before you really get too far in the writing part of the book.

Planning, planning, planning, or something like that. Measure twice and cut a million times because I suck with tools.

One of those expressions.

So with Critical!: Go Westerly we're stuck with introducing a new world to people. What I want to do with this world is actually start writing books and stories using it, because I think it's that entertaining a place. That means I think we need to showcase the world and put it front and centre. I want people to be amused by it, and want to dive into the various places and build their own stories. I want to make it a CC license so that people can write stories, and it's okay for them to write stories. I think it would be a lot of fun. That the pipe dream there.

Pipe dream? Possibly, but I think it's doable. So there.

With CyberGen what I did like about the 2.0 book was that character creation was built right into the book as an adventure. You didn't need any of the stats to start the game and it threw you into conflict right away, running from CorpSec and throwing all the juves together in the same spot. It was a lot of fun. The thing is, I want to try something different with 3.0. I want the characters the have a life before it gets ripped away from them. Make them feel more connected to the world rather than just starting on the run. I mean, it was great and it makes for an awesome con game but it always seemed to drag for me when it came time to transition to a campaign.

However, much like other games where you have a heavy metaplot setting (Looking at Cyberpunk, Shadowrun, Mechwarrior) you need to make sure that people feel engaged in your setting. That they want to invest their time there.

I think that's why the Setting comes before the rules if you can't find a way to integrate the two of them. It is a way to get people engrossed in what your doing in a way that numbers generally don't.

Casual Fridays over at the Border House

Hey. This is a little late, but I've managed to get another set of flash game reviews up over at the Border House.

This week, it's filled with AIs and stuff.

Go check it out.

TL;DR version of a response to Steven Long's IPR post

I was going to write a long post about Steven Long's post over at IPR. It was going to be filled with quote things and stuff like that, but in the end I think I could boil it down to the tl;dr version.

Who cares? Makes games you want to play and have fun with it. Now I go write my own IP and pine for a Veronica Mars RPG.

Look at that. 120 characters.

CyberGeneration 3.0 - Let's Talk About ...

One of the things that I loved and loathed about CyberGeneration was the Slang that came in the book. Each yogang had their own slang and their own way of speaking, which I thought was great. Then I read further and saw that they really tried to define it in the book, which I thought wasn't so great. Yes, I know that it didn't say that this was all the slang that they used, but there's something about a list in a roleplaying game that stymies the imagination ... or at least my imagination.

Language evolves, and it's one of the things that can create a level of distance between the reader and the work they are reading. It's what causes that stereotype to happen, "Kids these days and their butchering of the language" and all that. I mean, A Clockwork Orange isn't nearly as interesting a book if it isn't written in Nadsat.

That being said, we kind of made fun of the slang in the 2.0 book. What kind of outrageous line could we come up with using the slang from a single yogang. I can't really remember much, the term "Chrome Plunger Beast Man" came into play, but they were all pretty out there and they all felt really ridiculous. I don't know anyone who didn't giggle a little bit when reading them.

The other problem I had is that the way the book was structured, it made it sound like all yogangs of the same type used the same slang. That's patently absurd. I use words that were common place up in Northern Ontario, and the people in Toronto and Nova Scotia all look at me as if I've grown another head. And for those people who I subtly reference, yes "huck" is a word that means throwing stuff out ... where I come from. So there!

Back to the game, when people feel that it's superfluous or ridiculous it's something that needs fixing. Originally I wasn't going to include any slang stuff in the yogang sections, because I felt that anything I had in the months / years I've been planning a new edition didn't address any of the problems that I saw. Then, just recently I got to thinking. What if we let the players define what slang? Give them some direction, I mean tell them that Glitterkids like to use movie / gossip / tabloid lingo in their slang. Quotes from those places will start to pop up, but it will be relevant to them rather than something imposed on from the outside.

I think this helps a lot because you can get people who create their own slang, and then they might be more inclined to use it. One group of Glitterkids might end up calling an upstart a Hepburn, but another group might use it as a complement but they might actually use it rather than have me tell them what it means and then laugh at how silly my mind is.

Not that I have a problem with my silly mind, it's just I'd rather put stuff that's going to be used in a book.

Societies and Customs at 1km1kt

There's a great thread over at 1km1kt that's interesting to me. It's all about customs in societies and how you can use them in your game communities.

Well, SheikhJahbooty posted something that I thought was pretty freakin' amazing over in this post. I think you should check it out, because I think it's an interesting topic but I'll give you the conclusion:

"I mention these to suggest an exercise you may want to try for your fictitious cultures. Give them customs that made a lot of sense at some point in that culture's history, even if the situation has changed so that the custom is dumb or annoying in the society's current time or place."

Geasa - Reviewed at Robot Viking

Yay! The first review of Geasa from Ed over at Robot Viking!