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Designer Notes: Five Years After

Posted on by dconstructions
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Winston Churchill was a racist asshole but he was also neurodivergent as hell. He spent his nights during the blitz rehearsing strategies over and over of how he would leave the building if it was bombed or taken by nazi troops. He had contingency plans for his contingency plans. He was a ruminator, and he was wracked by what could happen and how he might be responsible. When he was seven years old his father let him borrow his gold pocket watch, and a school bully threw it in the river. Winston paid his own money to have six men from the village divert the river so he could search for the watch in the mud. He did not find it and his strict, emotionally distant father made him pay for the lost watch. Sometimes ruminators are built from trying to stop their parents withholding their love. They live in the “if only”, forever.

When my grandfather was 19 years old the nazis invaded his home country of the Netherlands. Resistance immediately began. One day, after the assassination of a leading figure, the nazis marched into the middle of the town square and randomly grabbed fifty men. They put the men in the middle of the square and then they gunned them down. They knew that people were helping the resistance, so they made sure everyone knew the price of that help. My grandfather was standing near a younger boy who screamed and yelled when they took his father and then when his father fell, the boy stopped screaming, and went into a kind of catatonia. My grandfather was looking at the boy, and he never, ever forgot that look. 

My grandfather survived the occupation, just barely. Once he was rounded up by soldiers who intended to have him shipped to the work camps in Germany. One soldier left to get back up, and he and his two friends rushed at the nazi. My father grabbed the guard’s gun and hit him in the stomach hard, and he never forgot the look of pain on the man’s face as all the wind was knocked out of him. My grandfather survived, and left his homeland and had four children and eleven grandchildren and dozens of great grandchildren. He raised a dairy farm out of nothing but dirt and built a life. Sixty five years later, I visited him in hospital when he was quite sick. It was the first time I had been alone with him in my whole life. I held his hand and I saw fear in his eyes, the fear of dying. I held his hand and I comforted him as best I could.

Last week someone died while I was performing CPR on them. 

For a long time as a young boy and young man I was terrified that when the time came to save people, I would falter and not be strong. I lived in a permanent rumination of what I would do when the time came. In my autistic fashion I would listen to The Impression That I Get over and over and over, because I was so worried that when I was tested I would fail. Turns out I shouldn’t have worried. I have carried people out of danger. I have given my last bit of food to feed another. When my grandfather was afraid I held his hand despite my fear. When my friend was dying I didn’t panic. I pulled her onto the floor and I did everything I could to save her life. But the worry goes on. I live in the perpetual fear of failure. Trying to make myself into something that cannot fail. That will not fail. And that will stop the bad things from happening. If only I had concentrated, listened, paid attention, they told me as a boy, then the silly thing would not have happened. I had to pay attention. I had to stop it before it happened. I have to stop it.

This is a blog about games. Bear with me.

I don’t watch horror movies much. I have enough horror of my own. But I keep making them. My latest game I have just announced, and it is dark. As dark as it gets. It’s called Five Years After and it’s about the apocalypse, and the nature of how we self-destruct. It’s based in part on the post-apocalyptic fears of my youth: movies like The Day After and Threads and When The Wind Blows. The nature of the game is that we begin five years after a terrible apocalypse, and then we wind the clock back and back and back, to find out how the terrible events took everything from you. Bit by bit, the things that kept you safe and happy in the world before the zombies, those things are stripped away. The fun of the game, the power of the game, is discovery: the random nature of which things you lose when tells a unique story that cannot happen any other way, and reveals things to you that you did not know about your character and could not know without playing. I think it is fun and beautiful, but it is also very bleak, because there is no happy ending. You are left with one attribute that you keep, but that is often bitter sweet or darkly ironic. The world ended and so did you.

Threads by Barry Hines is something everyone should watch once.

My great colleague and co-developer Peter asked me what the game was for, then, if it was so bleak. I think it’s a fair question. I have always believed that everything we do echoes unto eternity, that small things matter and that my games and my art can and will change others. That’s why we make art, really: to take our thoughts and struggles out of ourselves with the hope that it connects with other people. I also believe that art isn’t always just a good thing, and that we should justify what we put into the world, as opposed to flippantly believing that art has no power and can’t affect anyone. I keep making grim, dark games and I think I should justify that, even if I find myself unable to make anything else. Peter thought the game’s message was that you cannot change your fate, and therefore the game was defeatist and nihilistic. The game might even be adding to the wickedness of the world, then.

I think sometimes there are people who give up, who see a wicked world and decide that it’s not their job to clean it up and they might take fatalism as an easy excuse to justify that. But I think there are also people like me who think the opposite, who think that everything is their responsibility and their fault, and if they try hard enough, if they work hard enough, then nothing bad will happen, and that everything bad that does happen must be because they didn’t work hard enough or love well enough or think things through. This has only gotten worse in a world of advertising that desperately makes you feel insufficient, and the panopticon of social media, where everyone is judging you, all of the time.

Terrible things have happened to me. Things that I cannot tell you and might never speak of. Things that defy belief in the suffering they have inflicted, and the cruelty of their shape, and the callousness of those who inflicted them or let them continue. These things took things from me and they took things from the people I love and those things will never heal. Or rather, healing will not make them back to where they were, back to good as new. And yet I persist. I grieve for what I have lost but I remain and that is worth something. What I lost in the fire, I find in the ashes. Like the phoenix I was burned but did not die; I was reborn.

And there is nothing I could have done to stop this things from happening to me, and these parts of myself being taken from me. They were not my fault.

The fascists are rising over my friends in the USA. Their gestapo is snatching people off the streets and killing them in death camps. Israel is conducting genocide. The world is full of monsters and people are dying and in a way, maybe, all my games are about all of this. Relics is about how we can believe in our own potential to be good. Partners is about trusting one another. The Score is about how security is all theatre and the most powerful forces are much, much weaker than they look.

And Five Years After is a reminder that terrible things are happening and you must be brave and you must fight hard and it will cost you. But none of this is your fault. In their panic, people will blame you and tell you you should have done more to stop it. But there is always more we could have done, and more we could do. Blaming ourselves is not going to help. They did this to us. It is their fault. And now we have to be brave, and we will survive – but it is not our fault.

I don’t know if Five Years After can help us deal with the apocalypse on our doorsteps, but maybe it can, and even if it can’t, it’s what I feel and think. It’s what I want to say. It’s what my heart aches to speak of. And I hope that someone out there finds something in it for themselves.

Monkey See

Posted on by dconstructions
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I’m someone who learns well from examples. Sometimes I find it hard to learn without examples. For this reason I tend to like ttrpgs that have really explicit mechanics and instructions about what we’re doing and how we’re supposed to do it. A strong brief and a strong sense of the core idea is vital to getting me on board.

This is why I’ve always been a fan of games based on pre existing media, and emulation in general. It’s also why I want my games to be filled with examples – example characters, examples of play, the lovely Japanese trend of replays, and of course prewritten scenarios and adventures. Hooks and prompts are a good start but you need to show me how to write one and show me the finished product. This might be an autism thing – we’re very emulative. And with me if I spend five minutes with a person I will be copying their accent and mannerisms. So it could be just a very me thing.

How true that is – as in, to what degree this is mostly/only a Steve problem – determines whether any of the following thoughts are useful, so I’m posting this partly as a question: how much do examples guide you in how you approach an RPG?

There are lots of ways this manifests. I don’t, for example, typically like games that ask you to come up with a concept for your character before you start chargen. Thats what chargen is for! This is why I like to do it randomly. It’s also I suppose why I don’t like games or GMs that ask me to describe what I’m doing before I roll the dice – that’s what the dice is for.

More dramatically, it prevented me from getting into D&D as a kid. A lot of silly people will demand that rpgs aren’t emulating media but that’s exactly how they were designed. The magic system in D&D was taken from the Dying Earth, the setting from lord of the rings, and the combat explicitly from the Errol Flynn Robin Hood. The alignment system was furpm the Elric books. The classes were roughly from Conan and the Fahrfhd books. The idea of going off and fighting shit in caves mostly comes from Ray Harryhausen movies about Sinbad the Sailor. Very swiftly a bunch of other insane shit was added like priests from Hammer horror films, lovecraftian demons, poorly understood ideas of medieval history and a bunch of rubber dinosaurs. And then Beastmaster came along so they jammed that film in too.

Nowadays it is probably hard to understand because D&D dominates culture so hard but that produced a combination that wasn’t exactly representative of fantasy fiction at the time. If D&D hadn’t become so insanely popular until it made these things normal it would stand out more how bizarre and chaotic a lot of it was. But more importantly it depended on being inside a subculture. If you hadn’t grown up with those books and movies, it didn’t make much sense.

Enter me at age 11, who has read two and only two fantasy books: The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe and The Hobbit. I have seen a total of one fantasy film: The Neverending Story. It will be twenty years before I see Conan, thirty before I see Beastmaster (which cleared up so much). I try to understand D&D but it’s really hard. I don’t know what any of it means. I know dragons guard gold in mountains, sure, but what the fuck is an orc?

Two years later I find TMNT which is set in a universe I understand, because I have seen Die Hard and a dozen other action films. And kids cartoons which are basically the same thing. That makes sense. I’m home.

Years later I bounce off other games which are either really open or a little harder to pin down. I cannot get my head around how to play Nobilis or why anyone would want to. I didnt really get the world of darkness (I didn’t see the crow till later). I’m currently reading Unknown Armies and until it mentioned Twin Peaks I thought it was about Elmore Leonard. And it is a bit, yes. But you wouldn’t pitch it as an Elmore Leonard game. I remember trying to play cyberpunk and nobody telling me what kind of characters to make or what they were supposed to do. My first and second characters in that game were killed by “obvious traps” because “I should have known they were traps”.

I tended to find my home in history: ars magica, call of Cthulhu, blue planet become my favourites. And genre as I said: ghostbusters and Buffy are the two games I’d save from a house fire or a meteor strike, and TMNT has my boyish heart. Now I design games where you can’t do anything but follow strict genre cues. The system simply won’t let you.

And I find a lot of games really do end up back at finding the media you know to get you started. Even if they’re in a totally unique setting – especially if they are – they come back to “have you ever seen a coen brothers film? It’s like that”. When I was working on the first 40K rpg we had an in-house brief that went: “it’s the A Team fighting Cthulhu in Star Wars”. Obviously we can’t always put these things in our texts; certainly not on our branding. But if we keep doing this, we should recognise how vital it is. How it’s the core of what we’re doing and so it should be core to the rules we write. The only reason D&D appears not to need this is it invented its own genre and rewrote pop culture around that.

Maybe im wrong though. Maybe nobody else needs this but me. Maybe everyone got world of darkness fine. Or maybe they’d seen a bunch of vampire movies to give them context. And maybe it’s about time we admitted this and put it front and centre in our designs.

Let me know your thoughts. You know, like in the movies where everyone responds to a viral post.

Review: Aristocracy

Posted on by dconstructions
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They say there are two types of RPGs: large ones full of options but aren’t really about anything and need you to give them meaning and narrow ones that are really focused on being about one thing the author wants you to play so you only tend to use them once or twice. Generic, setting-agnostic RPGs are the former but even more so. It’s hard – maybe impossible – for them to be about anything without risking their chief goals of being widely applicable and infinitely flexible. It’s hard for them to even be interesting since they’re designed to be so neutral and even formulaic at times. A handy tool to do anything you want has trouble standing out – and outside of the granddaddy GURPS, has trouble selling too. Aristocracy, by Kylan Day, promises “broadsheets” that will provide setting hooks, although none have been announced yet. Also not yet visible is why the game is called Aristocracy. Maybe the plan is to be at the top of a list of RPGs, but then you’d want to be Aardvarks At Home: A Cutecore PAstoral Game of Insecure Insectivores. But I digress.

Actually, no, while I’m here, setting agnostic would mean we don’t know if we have a setting or not. It should be setting absent. But anyway.

Aristocracy works hard to stand out at least visually. For a first game, the layout is slick and attention grabbing with a good use of colour, which helps somewhat with all the page flipping needed. The art is dynamic, colourful and occasionally dazzling but again suffers from being a wide range of styles and genres like the game. To truly catch any attention, however, a universal RPG needs a strong core mechanic that’s simple but powerful. Aristocracy delivers here. Almost everything in the game is a skill roll, and skills are either untrained (d6), trained (d8) or  focussed (d12). A 6 or a 7 is a success, an 8+ is a crit. You always roll five dice, so if you have no points in something it’s just 5d6 (which gives you a 60% chance of success, if you want the maths). You’ve got three main ways of messing with your dice – rerolling as many as you want, nudging a die up by one (but not off a 1, which is a botch), or upgrading a dice up a level from a botch to failure to success to a crit. You can also downgrade the other way. This allows for powers to provide three levels of dice control, but I do wonder if it’s hard to tell the difference. A reroll could at times be way more beneficial than an upshift, mathematically, and they all kind of feel the same? It would have been simpler to just give out one or bumps, say. Especially when we learn that some powers give bumps, some rerolls and some shifts, and there is no rhyme or reason which happens when. Worse, there’s no symmetry: good attribute give re-rolls, weak attributes give downshifts. Also, as clever as the dice pool system is, it’s not intuitive.Is 1/0/4 better than 0/3/2? By how much? What about 2/1/2 vs 1/4/0?

Speaking of attributes they are (sitting beside fifteen fairly standard skills) Brawn, Intelligence, Reflexes, Style, Perception are joined by Influence. This gives us a new kind of duality – we got dummy thic and twink as usual in Brawn/Reflexes, Book Smart and Street Smart in Intelligence/Perception and now we also add a Vader/Tarkin split in who got the swagger versus who pays the bills. It’s perhaps only moments of individuality like this that can set a universal RPG apart somewhat, and its a sign of the dedication behind Aristocracy that it has these touches of flair.

 Another touch of flair is the mechanic where one character each session is the Lynchpin, which means the story is all about them. This is typically combined with the powers that let you alter the story or scene in your favour; by keeping this big showy things to just one person you ensure that the hacker bricking the nemesis’ laptop doesn’t happen at the same time the seductress declares they are secretly in love with them. It doesn’t play a huge part in the game as a whole but it helps communicate an important piece of information to the players (this bit is about Doug’s character) in a sly, unintrusive fashion. I wish it did do a bit more, however – it would be nice to see this have more mechanical weight to bring home what the game is about. 

Skills and Attributes are also modified by Abilities, which are the Kewl Powers of the game and like the other two things, are doled out by choosing an Origin, a Species and two Careers, but before we get to those we have to learn about tracks.

Everything is tracks nowadays – what used to be clocks, and before that what we called hit points.In this case, there are bad tracks aka Danger Tracks, counting losses in health, wealth or willpower and good ones aka Progress Tracks which are like “did I find the lost tomb I’m looking for” or “are me and Mateo bros yet”. If you do an action that adds to a track, then at the end of the action you roll a d12 –  roll equal or under the number of ticks on the track and you take pain equal to how many ticks you have, and then drop it back down a ways. Otherwise you keep ticking things off. This creates a very interesting dynamic where if you keep doing dangerous things it might cause you a small injury but it will absolutely assuredly cripple you if it doesn’t do that. Likewise you are generally like to pour damage onto someone until they explode…but there’s some good odds that before then, they’ll take a major injury and get reset back. That’s interesting. I guess it could get weird if you take a whole bunch of tiny near-misses and then when you get one more punch you all of a sudden collapse like a deflating wind dancer, but any loss in “realism” is balanced by being dramatically and numerically interesting. 

Since everything is about successes along a track – and I mean EVERYTHING – success level always matters as a measure of volume. It’s not “oh four successes so you did quite well quite well”, because everything is a twelve-space track, so four is always a concrete number 30% better than three. And that makes all those Rerolls and Bumps and Upshifts potentially quite important. Every roll can be a negotiation with stats and math, and this makes “combat” full of choice and exciting. 

I say “combat” with the inverted commas because combat is any activity that’s trying to make a Danger Track go up. or a Progress Track go down. Likewise, a Weapon is something that does the former and a Tool is something that does the latter, and here is where we get into one of the major problems with Aristocracy: jargon. Weapons are Weapons in italics for unclear reasons and an attack that uses a weapon means an actin is WEAPONISED (which I think is in all-caps because it’s a trait?). That’s fairly straight forward but everything has a tag like this and things start snowballing out of control.

For example, let’s say your group wants to hire a pilot to fly you into a volcano, but the pilot is being a jerk so your character decides they want to leave the group, go off screen and come back with a suitcase full of money and just buy the whole fricking airline. That’s either a Dangerous Combat Action which adds I guess to a Get To The Volcano Travel track, with any Danger being added to the Wealth track, unless it isn’t Dangerous at all, or maybe there isn’t a track. Alternatively, since it’s off screen, perhaps its a Downtime Action which only occurs during Downtime. In either case it might require an Extended check, because you may be doing several things. But it may not require Extended Downtime, it depends how many Downtime Actions it requires. A Downtime Action is usually just one skill roll, but what you can actually do depends on if it is a Short, Standard or Extended Downtime, and that’s a GM call. An Extended check can still happen in Standard Downtime. Now this is me trying to acquire Progress so I’m attacking my Resources Track, and I’m using a Tool to do so (I’ve got a Tool called Mommy’s Credit Card). And if you use a Tool to attack a a Progress track you do double damage, but because I’m trying to get a Big Pay Day, the Extended test acts like it has UNNATURAL ARMOUR. Okay, so let me just check what the ARMOUR ability is…(flip flip flip) and if it is UNNATURAL …okay it means all damage is reduced by 3. Is this before or after I double the damage? (flip flip flip) Not sure. Doesn’t say. And if I succeed, I get a Hoard. (flip flip flip, check index, flip flip flip, oh here it is) A Hoard is a kind of Loot that is ONE USE and can wipe out Wealth Damage or allow you to Acquire Equipment that is Rare at reduced costs. (Flip flip flip) Okay so Rare items can only normally be achieved with a Side Quest, which it turns out is just a regular Acquire Equipment roll, except it is now Extended, and can have multiple characters roll on it, so now we set up a new Progress Track towards Buying The Entire Goddamn Airline, but the Hoard “reduces the cost”, but like, how? Does the reduced cost mean it just wipes out Wealth Damage which is what it already said it did anyway? Or does it just let us roll on the track to begin with? Or does it count as a Tool? Or does it let us do it at as a non-extended task? Is the Side Quest now still Armoured, given my Hoard? Is a small fleet of planes even Rare to being with? Ask the GM. No, look at his eyes. He’s frightened. Luckily he can turn to the equipment chapter (flip flip flip) where the modern day section might indicate what makes something Rare. No dice. It doesn’t list air vehicles at all. Hang on, what if instead of getting the money first I just do a Side Quest to get the airline? Airlines aren’t listed as Rare. Let’s say one helicopter. Still no air vehicles, but we could use a Van and grant it Alternate Movement? Does that change its rarity (flip flip flip)? 

It’s nice that all of this is genericised so I can reskin any item at all into a Tool that grants Progress, or even has Precision that cuts through Armour. That’s actually kind of fun, to imagine like okay, Precision removes Armour and big Pay Days are Armoured, so this person has some power that means his Side Quest heists are easy even when the Pay Days are big – so that Precise Tool might be “A Guy on the Inside”.. If I add three levels of Range to a Brutal Willpower attack, I can make anyone I can see anywhere surrender, even if they cannot see me, a power I call “Hey You Down There, Shut Up”. But if I’m reading through all the cool powers I get as a Fixer and I find out I can choose Resistance (Health) or Inspiration (Hazards) I wish it would just tell me what those things actually are. Resistance in this case means you can change any kind of damage into the brackets type, so my Fixer can turn financial damage into getting beat up. Or willpower damage into getting beat up. That’s actually a fun noir power – nobody can intimidate you, damage your finances or even run down your good name, it always just ends up being a boot to the face. Okay, so what’s Inspiration? Inspiration means I can grant allies a bump, but only during Hazards. What’s a hazard again? (Flip flip flip)

Don’t get me wrong, I think if you have intimate knowledge of this system, you can remember a lot of this. I think the designer could solve the airline problem in a second. But he doesn’t come with the book. 

The other benefit of everything being generic is that you can keep some lists short. You don’t need two abilities, one for financial issues and one for physical issues: if it’s hard to wear down it’s armour, if you can get through defences,it’s Piercing.But  If my raconteur gains Brutal in social situations, then all of a sudden this helpful jargon becomes vague again. Can I add it to attacks? Can I attack Travel tracks with that, even if it’s just me an my mechanic having a chat? Is it a tool or a weapon? Can it be both? And I have to remember that Brutal means more damage, instead of just reading in the stat definition – it doesn’t just say in the power “In X situations, add Y to Z”. And it’s not unified – some power ups give bumps, others rerolls, others flat bonuses. And some things on this list very specific, like Invisible, instead of some kind of Hard to Target power that slowly gets better. There’s also the ability to Portal into other dimensions which isn’t called something more abstract like Long Distance Travel (which should allow Travel tracks to…I guess cover more distance? Add Brutal?). Why is the first level of Invulnerable just being resistant to damage instead of actual invulnerability? Somethings use the jargon, some don’t, and some mix and match. 

And worse: sometimes things have the wrong names, aren’t called what you think they are or aren’t explained where you think they should be. A skill will be called an occupation, characteristics will get Expert instead of Enhanced or vice versa, new skills pop up without definition, and so on. 

I’m not looking for these problems. Making my first character, I decided to create a sci-fi concept which was “what if the alien from Alien was built to attack financial tracks instead of health tracks – the perfect thieving oranism.” My genetic perfection meant I always had an Accurate Tool appropriate to a task (any task? What’s a task?) but it can also be a Weapon, whereupon it counts as Brutal and Deadly. This means that if I’m using a Tool to move a thieving progress along, I have Accurate to those attacks (except it’s not an attack?) meaning I can reroll my dice, and the Tool allows me to do double “damage” to my progress. But if I attack someone’s Wealth, I do quadruple damage (because Brutal is x2, plus x2 for the Weapon) and my crits do extra damage (because of Deadly). But here is the question: when am I attacking someone’s wealth vs progressing thievery towards a goal? Or can I use it on any task related to this general area? Also, does my Poor Eyesight affect the roll, if we never said it was work that needed my eyes? I have no idea. I feel like I might be arguing with my GM a lot about both questions. I feel like my GM would be really sick of this. 

So we have a system that is hard to learn, hard to remember and hard to translate into meaning, scattered across the book in pieces, and all of which are drowning in jargon you need to look up elsewhere, which is sometimes inconsistent, unspecified or unclear, and that wants to be absolutely purely abstract but also constantly relies on “the description” added by the player or the GM to know when and where and how it works..On the other hand, the intent to keep things unified is achieved. When I rolled that one of my Careers was a Summoner, I groaned because hoo boy I did not want to learn more of these rules, but the assistants rules were no longer than anybody else’s – they’re just a kind of tool. Theoretically, in this system, a spyglass and a scouting robot would work exactly the same way, and that’s fine. It was actually more complicated figuring out what a Winning Smile does – I gain Rapid Piercing Weapon to make WIllpower attacks, which means my smile ignores WIllpower Armour and that defensive actions are downshiffed against them. I can imagine what Willpower Armour might look like – the person might not like me to begin with or be on the lookout for a scam. On the other hand, they could have Willpower Absorb, or WIllpower Invulnerable, or Willpower Resistance, in which case, my Piercing is useless. Will the GM choose to give my enemies Willpower Resistance? I think he will. 

And what, exactly, are defensive actions? I do not know. It is never defined. Combat is “always a contested roll” which seems to suggest that you are both attacking at once. Or both defending. And how do you defend against a smile? What Skill do I roll for that? 

That was fifteen hundred words of negativity, which is a lot. But I want to be clear why I’m struggling with the game, because it has a lot of power and passion behind it, and a lot of good writing. But every time I find something I like, I find the good Lord taketh away the next moment. The three kinds of Templates you snap together to make a character – Origin, Species and Careers – are full of really evocative entries that you just don’t see elsewhere. Careers include things like Merchant Princes, World Breakers, Sorcerers and Shadows…but then things get confused when we also have Chirugeon sitting next to Hacker on the same list. Yes, it says not to use Hackers in medieval games, but that information isn’t on the table I chose it from. Species includes “Protagonist” alongside obvious cyberpunk things like Drone, Rebuild, Geneforged and Uplift – if we’re all playing modern day cops, do we all just pick Protagonist? Origin includes Socialite but no clear reason why it’s different to Fixer, or how Criminal is different to Scoundrel. Yes you can grow up On the Streets or Rich and still end up a Scoundrel, but who is born a Pilot? Why is that an Origin? 

Combat also has some great stuff. Whenever you add to someone’s Damage track you roll to confirm that advance. If someone has taken three points of damage out of twelve, you need to roll a 1 2 3 to turn that into a minor effect. If someone has taken 10 points of damage you’ll convert that to a critical effect 84% of the time. So as mentioned you will rarely deal minor attacks and almost always convert to bone crunching owies. And it’s great that chapter four is full of whole bunches of options for these kinds of effects for players to choose from. Except it probably is going to slow down play to pass the book around every time a hit is confirmed. And some of them have tags that aren’t explained, and some require GM calls (I can do a coup de gras only if the target is prone but no effect causes prone as written. How do I make someone prone? Can I just say they are prone? Is it harder to hit them if I want to do that? How would I or the GM make this rule up on the fly?). 

Some of the tracks are great, especially when you realize there are lots of powers that you can activate by throwing damage on those. Got the Enemeis track? Then you can get Bumps or rerolls by leaving a trail of breadcrumbs or just pissing people off. But it’s sort of misnamed because Health and Wealth and Willpower are positive things, and I guess this is a Lack of Enemies that is being whittled away? Maybe it should be called People’s Tolerance for Your Bullshit. Secrets is another great one. I desperately need to make a character who gets buckets of powerups by running their mouth off when they shouldn’t, but has some amazing healing power to stop it coming back to hurt them (Restoration (Secrets)).. And I love that this can happen just by rolling 1s on your die rolls, when doing a Dangerous action – as in you don’t know when you’ll slip up and make a mistake. Now, which actions are Dangerous? I can’t remember. (Flip flip flip)

I think it’s exciting to have all these wonderful narrative realms to attack, damage and confirm wounds upon. It does mean you have to speak of everything in the abstract instead of the specific but it allows you to model anything you want with the same rules. And it’s exciting to have a system that has all that flexibility about what might be an attack, damage and health but comes complete with crunchy modifiers like Brutal, Accurate and Deadly. I do think games like GYRO and Cortex and Fate do some of the same kind of things with more elegance and approachability and are much easier to read – but I don’t think I’ve seen anything do it with this much interesting mechanical structure. It reminds me, more than anything, of DnD 4e, where everything could be reskinned as an attack somehow. But it doesn’t actually have the satisfaction of interesting tactical combat. 

But as I say, making this interesting abstract shopping list of powers apply to everything is conceptually fun and open to great builds. Having defined powers like Burst, Rapid, and Piercing means I can make every piece of equipment and every super power feel different in different ways – and I can apply that to every thing, every where. It’s like being a gunbunny in Shadowrun except the mods work for your charisma too, or your rugged individualism or your ability to walk a long way in the rainI can give my evil banker Burst financial attacks because he can attack lots of people at once. I can give an incisive reporter Piercing attacks against Secrets. I can protect myself against the wiles of saucy enemy agents by strapping on a device that gives me Armour and Defensive against romance attacks, while my nemesis, Captain Dick Longfellow, has supernaturally enhanced Style, and a Natural Weapon that is Deadly against Morality trackers. And now, finally, I can remember what all of that means – but I will forget, and have to look the damn things up again. Or get into an argument with the GM about how if I fire enough arrows it counts as a Burst not a Rapid attack, and all the king’s guards were absolutely close enough for it to count because Burst doesn’t define HOW near to each other enemies have to be.

Some of this is because of the nature of this book: a universal roleplaying game is not really a game at all, but a toolkit from which to construct an RPG, from which one then constructs a game. This is a resource of lots of rules to use to construct those RPGs. I think what would help the game would be a narrower focus. The design could pick exactly the right list of Origins, Species, Careers, plus tracks and Abilities that work for that setting, and simultarneously strip away much of the generalities, ambiguities and diversions. It would figure out exactly which tracks matter and how much crunch those tracks need and save space by cutting out every possible modulation and variation, and then maybe allowing them not to constantly be referred to with jargon. If it finally picked a cyberpunk setting, we could rob people for money instead of wealth units. And maybe see some more pregenerated characters so the skill system makes sense, or making our own can be smoother. These are in the works, so we will see where the game is in six months.

Until such products come along, I cannot recommend Aristocracy. It is certainly not more than the sum of its parts. However, it is a collection of some clever parts. The dice system is interesting, allowing lots of fiddling without ever rolling more than five dice. The idea of tempering every possible confrontation through the same mechanics and building modifying tags that work for any kind of battlefield is clever, and shows a confident design hand. The use of language in delineating the templates is deft and vivacious. At times, the reach has been audacious, even if some of the execution roughhewn. So while I don’t like the game as it is, I find myself hungry for the next thing to come. That’s worth something. 

How much you like this game depends on how much work you are prepared to do getting across all that style, terminology and complexity, and then tailoring it to the setting and game you want to play, and the game is not super helpful at guiding you through either of those steps. But maybe you like things a little rough. That’s between you and Captain Longfellow.

Queen For A Day: A DramaSystem Session

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“The difference between you and me is I want to be the guy, and you want to be the guy the guy counts on” – The West Wing

Despite contributing to the immense Hillfolk kickstarter (by setting appears in Blood on the Snow, the companion volume), I have never had a chance to play the Drama System contained within – until last weekend. Even better, it was with five amazing players and a brilliant, unexpected set up: instead of a setting, we were given the lyrics of all the songs off Queen II, an amazing concept album of fairies, ogres, white and black queens and the seven seas of Rhye. With that as our palette, we painted.

I took the role of The Master Marathon, and decided that I wanted to be a character who had what everyone wanted – or wished he did. I decided he was the keeper of the power of Endurance, that all who wished to Suffer And Go On owed homage to him. Another player crafted Mother Mercury, also an elemental power, but in charge of hot and cold, now lost in an endless winter from which she seemed unable – or unwilling – to awaken, despite her need to be rekindled. We soon learned she was the ex-lover of the Fairy King, ruler of all the lands of fairy, but weary of his throne and eager for his son to replace thim. That sond was Sir Tristram, a young prince called the Killer of Queens. He was cursed to love the White Queen while the prophecy spoke that if he married her, she would die. Last was General Grimtooth, the King’s trusted long-serving general, also keen to retire so he can spend time with his grandchildren. King and General and Mother and Son, all waiting, all wanting things to finish forever, or start at last, but stuck in time until then, and Master Marathon keen to sell them suffering so they needed him more…

Convention Rules for DramaSystem involves setting up each character via introductory scenes where they ask another character for what they want from them. We began with General Grimtooth asking the King if Grimtooth could train his successor. Grimtooth’s player asked if the King had a name, and someone – doing that fantastic ingame improv worldbuilding that works so well – said “If you knew his name, you wouldn’t have to ask for freedom”. Boom, world creation. The King, by the way, said, in his usual wishy-washyness that it was okay but there had to be contest first to make sure Longfang was the best choice.

On the verandah of the King’s hut, styled not unlike a viking longhouse – Master Marathon begged Mother Mercury to make winter go on forever, for cold men need endurance. She said maybe, if there were other ways to awaken her senses – and what she meant was a rekindled love from her once-husband, the King, but though she begged by the frozen stream’s side, he could not give it. Meanwhile the King begged his son to either marry his love or cut her loose, so he could take the throne unhampered, but Sir Tristram refused, not while the curse hung over him and the Black Queen was still at large, plotting. He went to Grimtooth’s cave to ask the ogre for an army to crush the Black Queen, but Grimtooth refused.

Generally, as is the way of DramaSystem, everyone was being a dick.

DramaChar

Master Marathon, a god who just wants you to want him and needs you to need him

The GM lit the fuse by announcing the Black Queen was coming to seek alliance and continue the ongoing peace, and in the King’s ear she whispered that this would be best sealed by her marrying Sir Tristram his son. Looking down on the two royals meeting in the throne room, Master Marathon whispered to Sir Tristram that what instead was being said was the words of lovers, and Sir Tristram should urge his father to love the Black Queen freely. On the other balcony, knowing the King would visit the Black Queen to cement the peace, Grimtooth demanded Mother Mercury – for her own safety – be his spy within the Queen’s Obsidian Castle. She agreed, fearing too that the Queen would steal her King. To guard against that, she begged the King to let her accompany him in his private pegasus-drawn carriage on the journey, but he said propriety would be violated. And since he was now committed to affairs of state, seeing in their settlement a way out of his eternal agony, he summoned Sir Tristam and told him once and for all to choose the Black Queen or the White Queen, or no longer be his son. Tristam promised to choose by sundown tomorrow.

Huffy and annoyed, Mother Mercury and Sir Tristram made plans to ally against the Black Queen. Mother Mercury then found herself summoned by the White Queen, who begged Mercury for her Winter Touch to end the love Sir Tristram has for her. She had already asked Master Marathon for a gift of strength to lend Sir Tristram which he gleefully gave (for Master Marathon wished Sir Tristram to be slain by the Black Queen, causing his father to be heirless and be forced to go on forever enduring). Sir Tristram, having pledged to choose Black or White needed to ensure he would, if he wed his White Queen, not take her life, so the next morn as the procession of pegasi flew to the Obsidian Castle, he ordered Grimtooth to promise one act of total obedience when called upon. Grimtooth promised his obedience, but bristled at the order.

Seeing his bristling, I (Marathon) suggests that to protect a king’s life, it is no treason to kill a prince. Grimtooth is not at all happy about that, either. Scurrying for protection I decide to ride by the King, who orders me that, when instructed, I pass his Immortal Heart to his son. Pretty sure that the prince will be dead soon I promise to do so. Grimtooth leaves the travelling party and seeks out Longclaw, his best soldier, and orders her, if he moves to strike his masters, to stop him any way she can.  Longclaw knows the only way to stop Grimtooth is with the Sea of Winter, one of the Seven Seas of Rhye, held deep beneath Two-Way Mirror Mountain, and he sends out the Blue Powder Monkeys to find it.

Having reached the Obsidian Castle, Sir Tristram walks the gardens in his grief for his terrible choice – marry the queen he loves and be sure to kill her with his hand, or marry the queen he does not and kill his love with a broken heart. But the White Queen appears and tells him his pain will end if he kisses her. He refuses, even though she says he does not love her if he denies her. Then Mother Mercury joins the party and tells her step-son to kiss for his stepmother, if not for his love.  Forced to it, he kisses his love and Mercury’s spell cools his ardour. Cut to him in his father’s guest chambers in the Obsidian Castle: “I will marry Black” he swears.

Night falls and the silver moon makes the Obsidian Castle shine with black light. I find Longclaw on the parapets awaiting word of her Blue Powder Monkeys but the truth is, I tell her, that I possess the Sea of Winter. Marathon launches into a big thing about how Longclaw will dance for him but Longclaw is a soldier and just beats up Marathon and takes the chalice. Marathon however is not without back up plans, and in the Throne Room that evening he demands either Fairy King or Black Queen deliver justice against uppity ogres who dare assault his regnant person. Sir Tristram gives his Black Queen a proposal gift of Longclaw’s head, after taking it from Longclaw’s shoulders. The Black Queen accepts. Grimtooth grimaces in agony for Longclaw was his daughter

Grimtooth now begs his King for release so he can turn on Sir Tristram. I point out that Grimtooth has no successor now and her soldiers are unruly savages who attack their betters, so the King cannot let his servant free. Grimtooth loses his shit at the traitor Marathon and begins beating the living hell out of him. The King begs us to stop and I see my moment and tell Sir Tristram that Grimtooth will never be his obedient servant when he is so wild and urge Sir Tristram to establish his new kingly reign with proper justice. Sir Tristram challenges Grimtooth to a duel – and uses his promised favour from earlier to force Grimtooth to comply.

But Sir Tristram wonders if the bloodshed is too much and hesitates in battle. Grimtooth smashes the young prince’s sword and mortally wounds him. Seeing his son dying, the King orders me to transfer his Immortal Heart into his son, and I must obey. I lose the chance for the King to go on enduring, but perhaps the now scarred, dark, immortal Prince Tristram will need aid in his endurance. Determined never to harm a Queen with his hand, and shocked at his murderous ways, Prince Tristram adds to his stigmata by ordering Grimtooth take his victory prize by severing Prince Tristrams hands. Grimtooth obeys, but having harmed his prince, ignored his king and lost his daughter, Grimtooth then cuts off his own head.

In a lake of blood, the lack-handed but immortal Sir Tristram marries the smiling Black Queen, free of his curse but shrouded in blood and darkness, and with Master Marathon as his mentor.

But not all is sadness. Freed of his Immortal Heart, the King’s heart of flesh beats anew. And he leaves the Obsidian Castle arm in arm with his old love Mother Mercury, leaving the responsibilities of immortality and reigning behind to love her again. Mother Mercury is reborn, the snows break, and winter ends. What then, of the summer to come?

Perhaps that tale will be told elsewhere.

 

The Cells Episode Two: Drink To Remember

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“I just bring you ideas. I leave the execution to you.” – Agent Quiver

The Citadel at night. A sepia tone tells us it is the past. Young Zak and Umbrito are boosting rundown tenements. A siren rings out and the two burst out of the door of their target. As they run, Umbrito yells “If Mok ever finds out this was you, you’re dead”

Roll credits.

The same street, maybe, but the time is now. A spirit of Carnivale lingers on the streets of the Ditchers, still recovering from the Band-Aid-esque event. “What’s Up, Ditchers” t-shirts wave in the wind – and the face on them is Zak, who walks the crowd with his white suit and his bodyguards. Zak is spreading good will and food tokens, a new system to try and curb the abuses of food banks, and Zak is the perfect face to hand them out to ditchers. But then there’s Umbrito and Joanne on his arm. They embrace and Umbrito says they should go catch up. Zak throws his remaining food tokens into the air and ditches his security in the fracas – the party boy is still here.

Back at Central, it’s also a bleary early morning. Hal and Kate sit in the dining room, having Awkward Pauses for breakfast. If their marriage wasn’t perfect before the war, and before the cells, it’s gone into a kind of shock now. Kate directs the conversation onto the suffering of the city, and how, although Hal has done some good work so far, a city has to do more than just survive but thrive, as Pavani had said at the press conference (before rushing off to find her girlfriend, or something – quick cut to Pavani finding an empty room and a left note). Hal takes this as a personal slight, and decides Kate is suggesting he resign. He ponders a sense of fated failure and stares at the bottle of bourbon on the kitchenette shelf.

Close up on the bottle, now with less in it. Reverse to show sitting opposite is now Quiver, in Hal’s seat (ahem) talking to Kate. Quiver is trying to deal with the PR SNAFU that Hal retiring would cause and asks her if she can change his mind, because their secret could push him over the edge. Kate demands he stop thinking about PR for once in his life and give a damn about her, about their future, and until he does, she will be elsewhere. After she leaves, Quiver slams his palm down on the table and the glasses clink. It’s the first time we’ve seem him anything but worried or oleaginous.

The glasses clinking mixes over to the same at Zak’s impromptu party, which has turned from a reunion of old friends into a warehouse festival. Zak is the returned hero, festooned with women and flunkies. The 37s – as they are known – are flying high: their favourite son is running the city, and there’s talk of them being deputized like other gangs to help with keeping order. On the other hand, this doesn’t look like a very upstanding gangland. There’s an extra roughness to it. We pivot from a 37 tattoo to the same sign spray-painted onto a house perhaps not far away, where Knight-Father Paige is leading a new Citadel Police Force in dealing with gang activity. The dialogue indicates that there’s been a rash of murders turning up in the Ditch and the 37s are believed responsible. Paige dismisses his crew saying he’s going home, looking at a house at the end of the street.

Back at the party, the big black cars pull up and Quiver enters, uncomfortable and unable to hide his anger as he jostles through the crowd. He tries to be polite and get Zak to cut things short before the press turn up but Zak can’t go against the flow of so much belonging. Quiver snaps and tells Zak he’s being a child and he’s sick of cleaning up after a spoiled brat. Zak gives him a push to suggest he calm down and Quiver pushes back. Zak falls off his seat and Zak’s crew respond by jumping Quiver and beating him down. Zak stumbles up, looks at the situation, and decides to go with the flow and let Quiver suffer, suggesting the gang go hoist him up a flagpole. Umbrito smiles and tells Zak to follow him. Zak grabs a drink and does so, only to be jumped from behind and thrown into a car boot.

The thump of the boot matches to the thump of the door of Paige’s house closing behind him. The house is domestic and tidy. Polished. To the point of being unlived in. The pictures on the wall show a family – Roland and his husband Alex and their daughter Joanna growing up together. Then Alex’s ashes. We follow Paige through the kitchen where he grabs a bottle of bourbon into the bedroom where he sits and drinks and pulls a picture from the nightstand and starts to talk to Alex in a broken voice.

From the quiet to sudden noise: a room full of movement and noise. Computers churn, printers bubble and data is mined. The extent of cameras and maps reveals the true extent of which the city is under surveillance. And being given a guided tour of Central Data is Lazarus Moore, who has spent the last few days finding this place, a place kept secret from the five by the General. Who sits amongst it and succeeds mostly in hiding his displeasure of seeing Lazarus. The two trade barbs. Lazarus reveals he is decades older than he appears but the General is not cowed by this and buries Lazarus in pointless data, leaving him to slip off and be briefed about the mysterious vial.

Zak’s kidnapping ends at a danker, nastier, more crime-purposed warehouse and he is dumped in front of Mok, a more tattooed and more pierced 37er than we’ve yet seen. He accuses Zak of killing his brother, but Zak says he loved Mok’s brother much more than he ever gave a damn about Mok, and suggests that Umbrito did the hit because Joanna also loved Mok’s brother. Umbrito spits daggers at Zak but Zak sells it – when his life is on the line, Zak will sell out his old friend to save himself. The gunhands turn their attention to Umbrito and a haunted-looking Zak slips away.

Meanwhile a haunted Hal drinks in a seedy bar – the seediest bar closest to Central, anyway. He finds a one-armed veteran to talk to and tries to reconnect with the city and its people, but they get stuck in the same veteran’s loop of being able to do nothing but share war stories.

Back to Zak, he runs into the street to find Lazarus in a Big Black Car waiting for him. Zak seems changed, subdued now his old life could get him killed. He apologises and confesses to Lazarus, who is playing the confessor and mentor. Zak directs the car to retrieve a bound and gagged with tape Quiver, who is being hoisted by a crowd. Zak tries to connect as the ganger of old but the wind has gone out of his sails and – on Laz’ advice – sends in the government goons to clear them out instead. Desperate for new friends in his guilt, Zak becomes the government man.

Back at the house, Roland hears someone enter and draws his gun reflexively – but it is Joanna and Umbrito, on the run and arguing. Roland dismisses Umbrito and has a big old shouting match with his daughter. He’s trying to make it what it was, but to Joanna it was broken then anyway, because she got the parent she didn’t like raising her and the one she did absent, and it certainly can’t go back now anyway. Roland accuses her of forgetting her values, her religion, her upbringing, and that of course, is her point too: she’s a different person than he wants her to be. She leaves, with no sense she will return.

Back at Central, Lazarus pours Quiver a drink as the nurse finishes his stitches. Lazarus is curious as to why Quiver is tense and offers himself to hear a confession. Quiver tries to hedge around the details but then it all comes out, the truth about him and Kate. And in the end, Lazarus offers no help or absolution, just enjoys the new information. Quiver storms off and runs into Zak. There is a soulful apology and reconnection. Zak says he’s ready to play ball. Quiver says he’s on Zak’s side, that’s his whole job. Zak says there’s a man called Mok who has taken over the 37s and needs to be stopped. Quiver says that revenge by the ex-bad boy looks bad, but suppression by the saintly soldier Roland looks good. Quiver assures Zak that the best story of all is a redemption story, about people who have done bad things but are more than their sins. He’s not talking about Zak.

Lazarus provides – somehow – a lock on Mok’s location. Quiver takes his idea to the bar where Roland has joined Hal to drink. Hal says it has to be done by the book, with a trial. Quiver says “We will make sure we have all the evidence we need” because Quiver loves double meanings. Roland likes it, he wants order. The decision is made. Quickly we cut back to Lazarus working angles, and meeting with the Cardinal (who gets a first name now, Erasmus) – he’s found out the General’s secret. We cut to the General recruiting someone explaining he has a special demolitions job for him.

Back to the operation, which is shot in parallel with Quiver performing another insurgency: a romantic dinner and seduction of Kate. A search light flashes on, and Quiver lights a candle. Roland and others point at maps, Quiver sets the table. Roland gives the “go” signal, Quiver presents dinner with a flourish. SWAT teams move in, one places a finger on his lips, and Kate does the same to Quiver. A 37 goon guard is taken out with an arm around his neck pressure hold, as Quiver moves his arm around Kate from behind. They cut the lights on the gangsters, and Quiver flicks off the light. A gangster gasps as a shot takes him in the chest, and Kate gasps for different reasons. And then an interlude.

Later, Zak stands outside the jail as the perps are led in in cuffs. Zak has moderated his rebellious white suit with an official flak jacket. Mok is the last to walk in, and the two lock eyes and stare. Back at Central, Hal pushes open the door and locks eyes with the man in his wife’s bed.

Roll credits. Zak’s theme here is Sabotage.

Next time on The Cells:

  • Quiver blinded by the flashbulbs of the press, raising his hand in defense.
  • Behind a chain fence, a protest reminiscent of Occupy shouts and marches. A reporter is heard saying “Jason King has galvanized the ditcher community”
  • Quiver arguing with Mr Grey. “Dammit, these are good people.”
  • Zak strutting in Central, in a grey suit, looking at home with power. He comes into his room to find a woman holding a baby and his jaw drops.
  • Mok threatening Joanna across a prison meeting table. “This goes further than you know” he says.
  • A building explodes in fire.
  • Livinia standing at a grave. She says “I’m still going to go through with it”
  • The General stands in a hospital room. “I might have found a way”

The Cells Part One: Starting Our New Prime Time Adventures Game

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So I’m back in the player-saddle for a campaign and it’s time to talk about it here. We’re using the clever (and even better mechanically now in 3rd edition) Prime Time Adventures, an RPG which emulates television shows mostly with a mechanic that focuses everything on “screen time”. If it’s an episode about you, you get to do more. If you’re peripheral you get to do less. Simple and elegant.

The nature of the series though is left open, and our GM has taken an interesting approach to that, above and beyond what the rules suggest. As a result, we’re playing a game with more player input in setting than I’ve ever done, and a setting so obtruse it has an almost anime feel. Also, the process we took to get there has been as interesting as the game itself, so I’m going to record that process as well.

Our GM started by asking us to name one or two stories we enjoy. The focus was on television, or comics because they are also very similar serial media, but could be anything. The list we generated was quite awesome, and I kept it for homework to watch and read all the things on it that I hadn’t yet. The list:

  • Locke and Key (Comic)
  • Ergo Proxy (Anime series)
  • Shade the Changing Man (Comic)
  • I, Claudius (TV show)
  • Rome (TV show)
  • Blake’s 7 (TV show)
  • Firefly (TV show)
  • Saga (Comic)
  • Rat Queens (Comic)
  • Desperate Housewives (TV show)
  • Pleasantville (Film)
  • Dark City (Film)
  • The Americans (TV show)
  • Black Sails (TV show)
  • Vikings (TV show)
  • The Prince (Book)
  • Interstellar (Film)

We also talked about what particularly we liked about these shows, and we developed some key themes that kept coming up over and over again in this discussion, such as:

  • Power of families and cultures effecting individuals
  • Multiple viewpoints on agendas and missions and duty
  • The mundane, human elements brought to the central focus of fantastical or cinematic stories
  • The normal, small, everyday and human becomes critical to larger, epic, superhuman stories
  • The facade and pretence of cultures and environments, which can even extend to brainwashing or near-as
  • Facades to the point of false memories and unreliable narrators, creating great mystery
  • People being caught between two worlds, or travelling from one into another, returning to their home

With that list of seven things (for six players and one GM), the GM asked us each to write one sentence. Not quite a pitch, he didn’t want us to be that specific, but just an idea to explore. Our sentences were

  • With the last chance of humanity in their hands, every decision has the weight of history
  • An OId West town with divided power is thrown into greater turmoil after the discovery of an alien artifact
  • A boy-band is about more than just fame when they are all metahumans
  • Civil servants must maintain the facade under mad or absent masters
  • Teenagers are forced to carve their own path when their parents or mentors vanish
  • After peace is declared, opposite sides must work together to preserve it at all costs
  • People are randomly paired up and forced to share a cell for a year to experience other viewpoints

What happened next was a strange discussion where we tried to jam as many of the ideas together to create an idea. The last idea really captured people’s imaginations, and we were able to combine it with the peace and the weight of history and the civil servants and the lost mentors. The Old West and the Boy Bands fell, but we kept the idea of spooky aliens and metahuman powers. We decided on a political thriller show, not unlike Kings or Homeland – mysteries, intrigue and human foibles in the face of holding humanity together – but in a world very different and very confusing, which makes me think of anime but then there’s stuff like Orphan Black too.

We decided to call it THE CELLS. I went away and made this picture to sum it up. The GM went away and came up with our pitch:

The war ended in a flash of white light. That much we’re sure of.

There was a flash of white light and then everyone on Earth lost a day of their memory. And when they came to, they stopped fighting. They had to. Most every weapon of war in the field had melted. Every piece of body armour had burnt free of its wearer. Every drone and war jet had crashed. There was fire everywhere; the casualties were astronomical.

Some places were luckier than others. Some people fought the fires, even though they have no memory of doing so. Some saved important supplies and infrastructure though they have no memory of doing so. Some pulled wounded soldiers from burning tanks though they have no memory of doing so. Some were heroes though they have no memory of being so.

Then the word came down from Global (the Global Alliance High Command but no one calls it that). There would be no more war or the white event would happen again. The remaining military would enforce order for a period of one year.

During that year, those who wished to contribute to the running of their city-state were required to submit to a year of defactionalisation, spending the year in confinement with members of competing ideologies. From this pool of willing prisoners would emerge a new generation of leaders into a world without war. Or else.

The willing from the Cells.

Stream of Consciousness Game Design: SUPER SHOWDOWN

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So most RPGs kind of focus on players playing one character at a time. But most comics these days are ensemble affairs, where half a hundred guys criss-cross continuity in continuity-shattering events. About time we simulated that. And thus: SUPER SHOWDOWN (with a foreword by Ilan Muskat)

Foreword by Sexy Game Designer Ilan Muskat:

I’m ruggedly handsome, but I don’t have any design credits. I’d better design some games in time to write a foreword for your next one! – Ilan

Chargen:

Everyone makes up a team of superheroes. The team can be just one person (The Hulk, Spidey) or a big team of guys (The Avengers, the X-Men). Say no more than six characters each though. Each hero in your team is represented by a single die: a d4, d6, d8, d10 or a d12. The smaller the dice, the less subtle you are. Someone who just pours out power like Cyclops would be a d4, someone who has a lot of little tricks and is hard to pin down, like Nightcrawler, is a d12. The number of dice represents endurance, how much you can bring that power to bear. Cyclops might have like 4d4 because his visor gets knocked off all the time, but the Hulk might be 20d4. Write down on a piece of paper (A4 or foolscap in size) who is in your team and which die represents them. So you might have something like this:

Iron Fist (4)d10
Power Man (10)d4

Put the die for each character next to that character. Just one! That die itself is a stand in for that character. IMPORTANT: each player should use dice all of one colour, different to colours/designs used by others at the table.

Come up with a name and an ethos and a niche for your team. Eg Heroes For Hire: They are mercenaries on the mean streets of Hell’s Kitchen.
Event-Gen

Now take all the dice from all the players and throw them from one of the table so they roll hard across the whole thing. Any dice that end up on your piece of paper are in your comic during this event. You may claim one character of your team that didn’t end up on anyone’s sheet back onto your sheet as well, but you could totally get a whole new team. So why is Daredevil and the Wasp in Heroes For Hire? That’s what you have to figure out. Meanwhile the guy who came up with the Avengers has to figure out why Power Man is working with Herbie in Stark Tower.

Villain-Gen

Two options here:

1) Hero v Hero. All heroes not on pieces of paper have gone rogue. Divide them equally and randomly among the players. The team possessed by the player to your left is who your team will be fighting this issue.

2) Hero and Villains unite. Everyone makes up a small rogues gallery for their team using the rules above (at least one fewer villains than they have heroes). Then everyone draws a line down the middle of their paper. Then all the villain dice are rolled again, across the table. Any villains on the left side of your sheet have teamed up with the heroes for this story. You get to decide why! Ask the people who invented the villains for tips. Villains not on paper become the enemy of your team using the method above: collect them up, divide them equally and randomly between players, fight the villains on your left.

In this case, heroes in the first big roll that don’t land on anyone’s sheet are Not Appearing In This Story. The same goes for villains on the right side of your paper. Maybe they’ll be killed in a big fight. Maybe they’ve been captured. Maybe they’re off in their own storyline having a Secret War or Annihilation or somesuch. Put them aside for the NEXT event!

IMPORTANT: for a good, balanced game, you want about equal numbers of heroes and villains, so when you roll the dice, try to make sure the area covered by everyone’s pieces of paper is about half the area where the dice will fly.
Combat:

“Villains” (aka the guy on your left) always roll their dice first, and announces some kind of scheme to destroy the world. Then heroes roll to respond. Here, both you roll all your dice for that character ie, roll ten d4s for Power Man. Or roll one d4 ten times and note the results.

Compare all your dice to all their dice.

Matched results: If one of your results exactly equals a villain dice, that’s confrontation! KATHOOM! POW! The die you matched with yours is knocked out of play! Yours isn’t!

Villain dice lower than yours: You get in their way somehow, but don’t slow them down. They don’t do evil. Nobody loses a die. The battle looked awesome though!

Villain die is HIGHER than yours: Choose: either you get beaten up (lose a die) or something bad happens. The evil plan takes shape. Aunt May marries Dr Octopus. Dr Doom kills a puppy. Something like that.

Flexible villains are more likely to succeed but generally don’t do quite as much damage. Abomination with his chunk of d4s hardly ever rolls higher but when he does he totals a city block, kills hundreds. Mystique (1d12) gets the better of heroes all the time but just runs off and does more planny plans stuff, or sleeps with Wolverine or whatnot.

After all dice are assigned, any dice left get rerolled, for act 2! Keep going until one side runs out of dice. If it’s the Heroes, the villains win, or at least conquer the heroes (but perhaps their plans to murder innocents is foiled, so it’s not bad. The heroes may teeechnically win, maybe retreating to their hide-outs all banged up – but villains aren’t punished. If the villains run out of dice first, they are totes foiled and all either killed or arrested (genre-permitting). If a character has no dice left for themselves, they don’t make it to round 2 or the end of the story. Decide what happened to them! Peeps with lots of dice hang around longer! But cost more to build (just work out what feels right for point buy, I trust you).

Of course, you can duck the hit and pass it on. The question is, how many times will they let Bad Things Happen to keep their dice around to go the distance?

If you’re getting hammered, ask for help from another team! CROSSOVER EVENT!  Problem is, if you do, then their villains come into play as well! Doh! Or, swap one of your characters for one of theirs! If you do this, you MUST invent a love story to explain why! (“Kittie Pride come and help Spiderman instead of Thor! Because THOR LOVES IRON MAN! and Iron Man is DRINKING AGAIN!”)

When you (and any of your buddies) have done your event, someone else does theirs! While Daredevil and Wasp were fighting Giant Man and Magneto, what were the X-Men doing? And why? When everyone’s done, retrieve the other dice and play with them, or start from scratch!

OPTIONAL RULE:

If at any time, a die falls on the floor, that character permanently dies or is massively depowered or something. CONTINUITY IS SHAKEN FOREVER! Everything else is resettable.

And that’s how you play the game.

How I Run Mysteries

Posted on by dconstructions
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Somebody on RPGNet was doing a survey on “general mystery running advice”. Since it’s been a while since I posted here, I thought I’d post my thoughts on that.

If there’s a mystery, I think of a whole bunch of ways players could find out the answer. Let’s call them Clues. eg let’s say a redhaired guy did it. Then a clue is: strands of red hair.

Then I put the clue wherever the PCs look. So it’s never “there’s red hair at the crime scene” but “there’s redhair wherever the PCs look”.

Sometimes you can even step back and be even more general about the clues, so “wheever the PCs look” there is “an appropriate clue that points to Teh Solutions”. eg if they go totally for motive then I will, on the fly, make sure there are heaps of motive clues that point to redhaired guy.

The other important thing is to use the idea of focus. If a scene is leading to a strong lead, I put lots of screen time into that scene. Like say there’s redhair at the crime scene, I describe it slowly. I call for lots of rolls. I play the NPCs up as dramatically as I can. I take the time to explain how fricking awesome the PCs are for finding the clues they do. Whereas if there is no lead, I just summarise and cut. You see this on cop shows all the time. If there’s no leads but the police think to do something, we don’t show them doing it, we just cut to the next scene and the cops go “we canvassed two hundred bars and nobody had seen our guy”.

Which is the final tip: watch TV. Crime shows are everywhere and despite the caveats that players aren’t Lennie Brisco, crime shows are written, for the most part, to allow ratiocination (ie letting the viewer solve the mystery). Hence they are good at skipping useless avenues and focussing on strong avenues, to name but one technique mentioned. And they’re good at Making The PC’s Skills Important – if one character is an expert in Ancient Japanese History then holy shit there will be a lot of crimes that can be solved through that. And learning that kind of mental judo, the art of going “no matter what the problem is, Ancient Japanese History can solve it” makes for good GMing, because you learn to go “whatever the PCs do solves the problem”.

This is what it always comes back to: WATCH TELEVISION. No medium ever created has had more in common with, nor more to teach the roleplayer. Sometimes I think I should do a Hamlet’s Hitpoints except focusing entirely on watching Law and Order.

It’s not just an RPG that fits on a business card…

Posted on by dconstructions
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…it’s a GREAT RPG that fits on a business card. By the always goddamn fricking brilliant James Wallis. I like the way it understands pacing and plot. I’ve always been a fan of “procedures”, as Ghostbusters called them, where the plot beats are hardwired into the game mechanics, and this does this beautifully.

As the man says, it’s pretty free-form, but what isn’t these days?  And it’s short, too, which we really need more of. I mean short to play AND short to read. Short is good if only because it’s easier to sell (in every sense).

Only problem is, I have no way to get business cards apart from stealing them from that big jar at Subways. As always, gaming has driven me to crime.