The Vornheim Decision

Well... Looks like it is going to be a nice Friday afternoon...

(following on from Monday's question) (thanks again Kelvin!)

Coming Soon

Less posts than usual this week; the maths is coming! Also hopefully an actual play report after tomorrow... Updates in the near future will also include:

• A couple of maths-related things that I am working on. The hold-up is mostly due to thinking about how to best present something mathematical within Blogger, without having to use lots of images or to use strange ASCII combinations. I also have to balance the level of detail as well, and think about what will be most comprehensible. Maths things on their way include:
• More on simulating the strange and mysterious dX.
• Thinking about the probabilities of different dice combinations beating other combinations in a game like In A Wicked Age.
• Ammo Maths, which I have been tweaking like mad, and which I now think I might have a breakthrough for: removing stubborn terms that will only tend towards zero anyway! Result!
• Some more thoughts for the zombie game that I want to play, which I am consequently pulling together piece-by-piece. So far I have the ammo mechanism, and I think I have the guts of the resolution mechanisms by borrowing from GHOST/ECHO.
• Wicked Wednesday posts; soon I should have 36, which is enough for a random table indexed by two d6. I might make a little pdf for it.
• Other strange little thoughts that have occurred to me. Personal circumstances recently have started me thinking about the "From Dusk Till Dawn" effect, and some other ideas I've had circulating. For example, your players roll up some characters based on something that they think to be true ("We're brave and noble warriors on a quest!"/"We're a gang of criminals in a cyber-future!"/"We are God's word in the American wilderness...") and then halfway through the second session you hit them HARD with a new reality. For example:
• "You are the last free people, everyone else is being over-run by a demonic bodysnatcher plague. What do you do?"
• "Your face has just been splashed all over every phone screen in the country, you're wanted. Everyone thinks you did it. What do you do?"
• "The Dead have risen, and people are saying they End has come. What do you do?"

I've also been thinking about this "switcheroo" idea in terms of loss. In order to unseat people, in order to get them to radically alter their paradigm and to think that the game setting is suddenly, possibly irrevocably, different and the PCs (and NPCs come to think of it) have to deal with a really different scenario, then they have to lose something. Lose their freedom. Lose a loved one. Lose their home. Lose their independence. It has to be a loss that is not in terms of their equipment, their XP or their gold/money (although those things might support it) - it has to be a loss to the character, not to the things written in the boxes on their sheet.

Anyway! That's all to come.

Upcoming

I have a Games Night and a Games Day to look forward to in the next week. I had to take a week off because of work - and worse luck, it seems like I might have to do the same next week - but tomorrow I have another session of Lamentations of the Flame Princess - after the great session a few weeks ago - and then on Saturday there's a group of us getting together to have a full day of Diaspora.

I'm interested to see where LotFP ended up during my absence (as you might recall, previously I was at death's door, and barely hanging on after being slashed open by a big lizard man). I've heard bits and pieces from a play summary; I wonder how quickly Charley Shortbread can get back in to things?

Diaspora is going to be interesting too. I know next to nothing about it, the keywords in my mind are space opera, Fudge dice, big universe, space travel. All of which combines to make me want to play it on Saturday!

Back

As well as work getting busier, I also went on holiday last week; which meant no Games Night for one thing, and no internet access for the most part either (because I purposefully didn't take my tablet PC). But all of this did allow me time to get a lot of thoughts and notes down from various games I've had whirling in my head, and even some which I had no idea about until I was away for a while.

In the coming weeks, while work will be busy, you can still expect more random game ideas, hacks, settings and oddities. Plus Games Night this week should be really interesting, as I'm going along to my first proper OD&D session, and probably playing with some new people too.