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Dave's still putting up the AP from the Pilot Episode, but I wanted to get a link up to PrimetimeAdventures / Strange Allies. We finally got to play this game! Woo!
It was a little wonky, getting started, but we hit our groove near the end of the session and I do believe I'm still buzzing from this thing, a day later. Good good stuff. Some could-shouldas to consider, but good, good stuff.
Lots of talk in the last couple days about what constitutes a "finished" game. (My threads on teaching your game flowed out of that conversation actually.)
Matt Wilson, who wrote Primetime Adventures and Galactic, gives up the best rule of thumb on this I've seen so far:
"You need players to consistently be able to sit down and play your game out of the box, without help, without you available as an unpublished supplement."
There you go. It's nice that so many of these indie games have the author easily available to answer questions, but the best ones -- Dogs and PTA spring to mind, as they have for a few days now, but Conspiracy of Shadows and TSoY are there too (they may not be in-game-referencing-friendly, but the rules make sense without lots of online help -- are the ones where that's not necessary; where you are reading Actual Play threads not to understand what the hell to do, but just to get cool ideas.
In an email, Jason Morningstar wrote:
Hey Doyce!Your comment:
"I'm a professional editor for technical publications and training delivery (which I've found game texts may benefit from stealing from, in terms of information delivery and teaching the game)."
was very exciting to me. I want to learn; let's figure out how to make that happen. Mostly I'm interested in how your experience relates to a game text and play instructions. Want to start a dialogue at S-G about this?
And actually I was already working on (a) some learning materials for work and (b) a post that used most of the same stuff from the work document, applied to game design, so I started a series of posts on the subject.
I left my journal/notebook at home today (along with a bunch of otther stuff I should have remembered), which included all my detailed notes on the happenings at ForgeCon Midwest, which I attended this weekend. Without the notes, I'll just hit a few highlights:
If nothing else, the con let me meet some people I should have met ages ago (Jae, Matt, Mike, Ron, Aaron, Eric, Blankshield... just off the top of my head), meet some folks I really enjoyed and have only recently become aware of through the forums (Clyde, Keith, Thor) and really get a sense of the people behind the UserIDs. Great stuff.
Also, there was a lot of talking about Space Hulk and Warhammer -- that's always good. :)
And I'm now totally okay with not liking Capes. Or Shock:. I know I'm not alone, and I know my reasons are much like the reasons that other people have -- people with whom I share many other gaming preferences. It's not this thing that i don't get -- it's this thing that just isn't for me, for a number of reasons both artistically, enjoymentally (a new word) and just plain TECHNICALLY.
Like any of these sorts of things -- it was a lot of time spent with folks who enjoy the same fun you do, talking, playing, and just enjoying being a part of a really grand hobby.
That's a good thing. :)
The Bringing Down the Pain "Group" rules from the Finnish version of TSOY, translated back into English. It's worth noting that the guy who translated the game is also a very good rules wonk and tweaked things here and there in the rules, so seeing his version of the rules are really interesting and often enlightening.
At any rate, it's not that his version of the Group BDtP rules are different than the English version, they're just looking at the whole situation, and explaining it, from an very different angle (134 degrees rotated horizontally, 32 degrees vertically :). It might be useful to get your head around it.
Before I head off to Chicago, a quick link to a post that starts out asking [TSoY] Refresh: with who?, and in the replies turns into a great dissection of what Refreshment scenes are FOR -- what they accomplish in the story, and why they really aren't about conflicts...
except when they are. Good story-stuff, all around.
It's the people.
The long and the short of it is that I like the people I meet through gaming. Maybe I don't like everyone I meet, but of the people I meet and I like: gamers.
Allow me to illustrate:
I met my closest friends in high school during a class play. The whole play takes place in a stuck elevator. I am the pushy book salesman. I need books as props, so I jam some of my AD&D books into the bag I'm using. During breaks a couple of the other guys in the play start going through the books and looking at the pictures and they want to play. We play that weekend. We play every weekend thereafter until we graduate, three years later. Although we all had a number of extra-curriculars, in essense, the group consisted of the state weightlifting champion for his weight class, three of the starting line for our football team, and one dedicated acting guy. I didn't get a lot of geek grief in high school.
In college, my roommate for the first semester (a friend from high school) wanted to party more than me and moved in with another friend who felt the same. My new roommate walked in wearing a short mohawk, an Opus t-shirt, and camoflage pants. We talked for hours and hours. He was gaming with me a few weeks later (first time I'd played since high school), though he never had before, and he was always like a brother to me.
There weren't enough gamers running into each other in college, so I founded a roleplaying student activities group and got us listed in the guidebook so we could have a booth at the fall activities fair. I met pretty much all my college friends through that group, or as friends-of-friends in that group. That summer, we started a gaming convention. That was in about '92. Both the Student Org and the gaming convention are still active at the campus today. The first girl to come up to our booth that first year had never played an RPG before. I put her into a 'newbie' campaign of Warhammer FRPG that I was starting up (this was De). She played all year. The next summer, she and I ran into each other and got to talking about a new game: Amber DRPG. She joined the game when I started it. So did this other friend of mine that I knew through the Gaming Club (Lee). They started dating. They are now married with a little girl, and live about an hour from me in Colorado Springs (we both moved to Colorado at different times). We usually see each other every few weeks or so.
I *think* I first read Jae Walker's name on a Star Wars mailing list back in '92 as well -- she may even have been moderating it. I'll meet her this weekend at Forge Con -- fifteen years later.
I met Jackie through softball... which I got into at the prodding of a friend of mine in college, who wanted me to get out of the house more. HIM, I met through gaming (Star Wars), so that connection's a bit tenuous, but there.
In Denver, I went about two years without gaming or really knowing anyone local. Finally I got fed up and posted a 'gamers wanted' ad in the FLGS. I also solicited for players in the Denver area on the Amber Diceless mailing list, then hounded respondents until they finally showed up to play. Randy responded to the ad. Rey and Julie and MTFierce and I became aware of each other's Denverness via the mailing list. That would have been in about 1996, I think. Randy is still gaming with me. Rey and Julie were regulars until they moved to Austin. MT and I exchange emails and participate in group writing stuff together and will, I swear, will eventually be in a regular game.
Through Randy, I met Dave and Margie -- then, they were new additions to the Amber game I was running; now, they are touchstones of sanity in my life.
Lori I met at a gaming convention here in Denver. A few weeks later she met Dave G (whom she married) -- a worker friend of mine who got into games with Rey and me after killing hours on the helpdesk we worked, talking about them.
I met Kate via the City of Heroes MMO, kinda. Played in the same groups in the game, really, and met because of writerly things, but those stemmed from the game initially as well.
Her roomate is a member of NYC Nerds -- he's one of my groomsmen now (Dave is the other). Iskander is one of her friends also, and an NYC Nerd person, and also who I'm rooming with at Forge Midwest. Two of her other gaming friends, plus her roomate, run a tiny little RP-based WoW Horde guild with me. We laugh a lot on ventrilo.
And last week, I ran a Conspiracy of Shadows chargen session that will become a "one movie long" series for a couple guys in Denver who found me via Nearby Gamers. We have alot in common, those four guys sitting at the table. A lot. That group has a mutually-supportive guy-energy unlike any I've ever participated in.
In my life, the people I've become friends with via routes other than gaming are the rarities: unique, if not non-existent.
I meet my friends through games. How could I not love em?
So here's a thought, grown from an offhand comment in a podcast last week.
If you're going to run a game in a setting, and plan on tweaking a game system to run it -- specifically, a game system that's designed for something else -- you should first, foremost, and without exception run at least a short game with that system, in that system's default... let's say "genre." By that I mean:
- If you're going to use Sorcerer to run kid's fairytales, use it for a normal game first.
- If you're going to use Dogs in the Vineyards for a Vampire game, use it normally first.
- If you're going to run Conspiracy of Shadows for a Delta Green/Resident Evil game, do the dark fantasy game first.
- If you're going to use Spirit of the Century to run a 18th century swashbucking game, play a standard Pulp thing first.
- If you're going to use Heroquest to run Firefly or Star Wars or Amber, use it to run some kind of fantasy game first.
- If you're going to use Shadow of Yesterday to run Jack McGraw and the Mind-Kings of Jupiter or Shadowrun, use it to run a fantasy game in the world of Near first.
What I'm saying: access the system as intended before you decide what comes and goes during a customization; drive the car before you try to rebuild it into a 4x4. They don't have to be long games, but they should dig deeply into the system's conflict mechanics and the reward system and how progression works, before you pull an Italian Job on the system and start tearing off 'unnecessary engine parts'.
This isn't relevant to any particular game or situation -- I'm as guilty of jumping right to the Modified Version as anyone (Petrana, and that's fairly mild; Firefly, which wasn't), but I think it's a good rule to keep in mind.
Funniest Machinima video I've seen in awhile, even if you've never seen WoW. Great spin on a classic Muppet bit.
Specifically, organizing each book, internally. I've done this a lot in the past, simply because the games I was running (DnD 3.5 , Star Wars d20, Nobilis, BESM -- all for different reasons) sort of required some quick-reference tabs to keep in-game rules-checking moving as quickly as possible. Need to look for Combat? Flip to the RED, FOR THE BLOOD OF MY ENEMIES tab.
Now that we're getting rolling into some new games, I'm looking at doing something similar, for different reasons:
- The Shadow of Yesterday: Great game, but laid out... you know, it's actually not organized that poorly, but there aren't PAGE BREAKS where there should be (at the start of key sections). This is probably to reduce the overall page count, and I appreciate that need in an indie publisher, but it makes finding the sections on Attributes, Skills, Keys, Secrets, and Conflicts (almost all of which start somewhere mid-page) a pain in the tuchas. I'll drop some tabs in there to make such look-ups go more quickly (as well as tabbing some parts of the section on Near that I find useful), but I actually don't expect to need them forever -- while I'm looking a lot of stuff up now, I don't expect that I'll need to do that forever -- I think the rules will internalize quickly, at which point I won't need the tabs anymore.
- Conspiracy of Shadows: Similar reasons to TSoY, only moreso -- the layout for the book is simply wonky as all get out.
- Primetime Adventures: Tabs should not be necessary -- the rules can be summarized orally in about two minutes.
- Agon: I expect as many tabs in this as my DnD books, and that's a good thing. Nothing wrong with a little crunch.
- Savage Worlds: See Agon.
- Dogs in the Vineyard: despite the organic layout, I simply don't think that any additional tabbed references should be necessary, except MAYBE for the rules on Demons and Possession and the like, which I don't use enough to just remember. Again, it's such a pretty book that I don't want to add some permanent technical tag to it.
For my older game books (the ones I mentioned previously) I used those colored plastic tabs that you insert little cardboard slips into. They were both annoyingly permanent additions to the book, and simultaneously temporary, because the little cardboard tags would slide out and get lost, leaving only the ugly empty plastic tab.
My new weapon of choice: these things. Non-permanent, yet less likely to just fall off and get lost. My boss at my last job used this all the time in his notebook/journal to flag stuff he was currently working on, then tossed the tags as that particular note became irrelevant.
Tabbed reference points that stick around as long as I need them, but not permanent additions to the book's pages -- I find this combination appeals to me immensely.
WoW PvP Frustration -- not coming from where you'd expect.
There's some pretty cool stuff you can get for your character by gaining honor in the various PvP Battlegrounds in WoW. The battlegrounds work a bit like an Arena match in CoH, except you pretty much just sign up to play in 'the next one available' and get teleported there (with a confirm window in case you're no longer interested) when it comes up. Everyone getting sorted into similar-level matches broken up as 10-19, 20-29, 30-39, 40-49, et cetera.
So... these rewards you can sort of bank on your honor to get from the battle masters? There's a really cool mount I'd like to get at level 60. To get it, I need 30 'honor tokens' -- denoting participation -- from each of the three battlegrounds that someone who's level 60 can participate in. The three BGs are Warsong Gulch (the first BG: a bog-standard capture the flag game on a smallish map), Arathi Basin (a really neat one where you try to capture and hold as many of the five resource-generating spots on the map as you can, for as long as you can, until one side or the other racks up 2000 resource-points), and Alterac Valley (which I know nothing about, since I can't get there until level 51).
And honestly? I'm enjoying myself -- otherwise not even the cool mount could keep me in their -- playing against live players makes me a better player in PvE as well (and vice versa, I've found), and it's actually really fun to fight people for awhile before going back to the content-driven quests. Also, I just I like seeing my 'lifetime kills' number go up. :)
So... where am I on the quest for the cool mount? I have all the 30 chits I need from Arathi Basin -- it was the first Battleground I tried, and I liked it a lot, so I kept doing it. Each "win" got me 3 chits, so 10 runs in there got me all the chits I needed.
I have about a third of the chits I need from Warsong's capture-the-flag. I started doing this BG later, plus it's not as much fun, but I'm doing it. This part is also taking longer because Horde doesn't WIN as much in this battleground (we tend to win most of the time in AB), and each match, which should be fast, instead takes AGES, and Losing only gets me one chit instead of three. :P
Lee assures me that Alterac Valley is even cooler, combining the best parts of both previous Battlegrounds, so I don't worry that I can get all the chits I need from there, before sixty.
The problem?
I just hit level Fifty, which means I get sorted into the next highest tier of combatants (levels 50-59). This has caused me two problems:
1. It takes ages for a Warsong match to start up in my new tier. I assume this is because people in the fifties are instead running in the AB or AV battlegrounds, having already gotten all the Warsong battle honors they need, and also probably fed up with running those matches.
2. At fifty, I'm the lowest level guy in any given match, while my average opponent is 8 or 9 levels higher than me and doing commensurately more damage (and taking less from me) -- this means that even when I do get into a match, I'm getting wiped out in seconds when I actually go up against someone, and spend a lot of time running back to the fight from the resurrection point.
What I need to do is just wait until I get about five more levels, and then go back in. What I WANT to do is run Warsong until I get the 30 chits, so I never have to do it again, but at this stage, that could take as many as 20 more matches. :P
Annoying.
Grezzk (my first/main character in World of Warcraft) dinged level fifty a few nights ago. Almost simultaneously, he achieved Exalted relationship status with his first faction (and I'm closing in with a couple others). He has his Skinning skill maxed out, my First Aid skill (invaluable for solo pet- and self-repair) is nearly maxed as well (284 of 300), and I'm finally making decent headway on Leatherworking -- cranking out some pretty neat magical bits.
That's all nice, but more important are my play-time stats. WoW lists them in Weeks, Days, Hours, et cetera, but it boils down to 256 hours of playtime to get to level fifty. That's less than a third of the time I spent on CoH getting Hang Time to 50. I'd have to log in to check, but it's less than half the online time (at least) that it took me to get Hyperthermian to 50. This has been rewarding time spent, as well: I can't think of a night of 'serious play time' (where I'd play from say seven to bedtime) where I haven't either dinged or made some really significant headway on some skill or talent or side project or something. In general, every good night of play = a level up or some equivalent. That's fun. Best of all, there's a PILE of stuff to do after you hit 70 (which is why they didn't make leveling progressively harder), and also good: I know I only hit about half of the content available to Horde players during my time playing Grezzk, which means I could level another Hordie up and see very little redundant content... and that doesn't even address Alliance characters.
All that's nice, but here's the important part: those 256 hours of online time with Grezzk were spread out from mid-December (starting the weekend of the First Big Blizzard) to mid-April, which works out to about sixteen hours a week. Sixteen. I can't even begin to convey what a change in time-involvement that is for me compared to my time on CoH (where something closer to 40 hours was a low week for me), especially since on any given week I've got one day that accounts for a big chunk of time. I'm very very pleased with myself about that.
Even if you factor in my other characters (one at level 34 whom I haven't touched in at least a month), and five characters between levels 10 to 16 that amount to a net effort of maybe 20 hours, total for all five of them... I'm controlling my MMO time pretty damn well.
And having fun with the time I spend.
"Crazy Moon Language Forgite Babble Theories"
Capcom Entertainment, a leading worldwide developer and publisher of video games, have been given a license to produce a digitally downloadable version of Talisman. The game takes place in a fantasy realm and is based very closely on the Talisman board game through a 3D representation of the map with animated productions. Players scour dungeons, attack other creatures, cast effects-laden spells and use magical items and weapons to enhance their actions. Talisman will be rolling this winter, to complement the highly anticipated launch of the board game in October 2007.
I used to love playing Talisman in college -- we'd save for months to get the expansions.
I'm very pleased with how it turned out
In this post, I wrote:
I don't think I have too many 'headspace' or 'immersive' characters to begin with. Of those, it's unusual for me to have one that's notably opposite from myself -- in the cases where that's happened (and I can think of three) they reflected some strong negative emotion I was feeling toward the game itself.
That actually provides me with a very strong indicator that I can use to analyze myself when I'm making up a character for a game -- if I'm making up someone who's really a negative of myself, it would seem to indicate that I'm reflecting some negative thing in myself out on the paper, which in turn indicates that I'm feeling some kind of negative emotion toward the game in question, apparently subconsciously.
Recognizing that, I can stop and figure out what that is, and maybe do something about it.
(Granted, this is a hypothetical practice/benefit at this point.)
But I don't care: it's a really interesting question.
1) Name a roleplaying game character you can think like, outside of the game, like right now sitting at your computer. (If you can't name such a character, say in the comments that you can't, that's more than okay -- that's really really interesting and valuable information.) Also, name the game.
2) Say a few words about how that character thinks, or how different it feels to think like that character, or something.
3) How much backstory did you create before you started playing that character?
I don't have a hypothesis or agenda, I just want to know how you play. I honestly don't know how many people I play with really socket into their character's headspace that way -- more to the point, I don't know how many players I play with would like to. I have a sneaking suspicion that my 'look at the wizard behind the curtain' method of GMing might make that difficult at times, and frustratining.