Has the Kitchen closed?

I’ve started writing on Decommissioned again lately.

 Is anyone still in the kitchen? :)

Progress

The next version of Fade is now coming along well. I’m writing a minimal rules set for my own playtesting – my objective was to have exactly zero words that were not required or me to run the game, although that has already fallen by the wayside. Starting again on a new document instead of editing the old one was also quite useful (in a breaking the mental chains way).

However, stripped down revision has already made some improvements. Memory engineering has lost it’s ‘old school combat, but not’ structure. It’s now just special rules for messing with drugs and memories, using the simple conflict resolution system. Drugs are also a lot simpler, with only fewer but broader effects. There is still room for a lot of variety in what different spooks have, I hope.

Hopefully this revision will be finished in a week or two, then I can get some more playtesting done.

[Canon Puncture] Episode 09 is up

Episode 9 of CP is up.  I interview Remi Treuer about his Game Chef entry and we talk about improv and the Durham 3 podcast.

Please check it out, give me feedback.

Updates?

Okay, fellow Omegans. It’s been a few weeks and not so much activity. Time for a report on how we’re all going on these next drafts. I figure this might help getting some motivation for the less motivated and maybe some discussion going again.

I’ll start. I wanted to take a few weeks break before revising Fade, just to let the ideas swim around my brain a bit. Then my computer died (no data loss – just old components blowing), pretty much just as I was planning to start my major revision. Today my nice new laptop got delivered and, in between playing with what it can do and getting it all set up I have begun by big revision. I hope to have it finished in the next couple of weeks, after which some playtesting can begin.

What about the rest of you?

[Other Projects] Canon Puncture 08

Canon Puncture podcast episode 08 is now up.  You can subscribe through iTunes or check the feed at http://feeds.feedburner.com/canonpuncture

This episode we read and respond to an email from Judd of Sons of Kryos, play some Andy Kitkowski stuff about his Game Chef entry (which is frickin hilarious) and talk about the end of the Dungeon and Dragon magazines.

[What Remains] Status Report & Playtest Session

Hey everyone!

So work on What Remains has been slow-to-nonexistant, as most of my spare game-thinkin’ time has been going into reading all the top 8 (and Team Omega) games and fruitlessly attempting to start conversations about them on the GC boards.

But then this last Sunday, two members of the local gaming community were like ‘hey, let’s playtest your game this Tuesday!’ And we did. The session was pretty revealing, both in terms of what was working and what was decidedly not; some known issues were confirmed, and some others were raised. Here’s a point-form rundown of what worked and didn’t:

Pros

* The basic premise of play worked very well: laying out the landscape, describing objects, and building memories together into a single life.

* I really liked the way the ‘I’ voice moved around the room. I mean, it was supposed to work that way on paper, but it was still gratifying to see it actually happen.

* In particular, the Unfolding a Memory phase — where players ask each other follow-up questions to memories — worked very well, at least in terms of the fiction-building. In terms of mechanics and the rotating roles of Questioner/Speaker, not so much.

* The tone of the game seemed to find its way naturally into the elegiac/nostalgic/reflective space I was hoping for. Two of the three players had read the text.

* The basic gameplay produced a fairly cohesive fiction, without a need for additional mechanics (such as links and anchors.) Players had some trouble adjusting to the idea that ‘our character’ wasn’t a particular age, but after awhile we began to add memories from different eras of his life (though he never really got any older than mid-twenties, the starting era, in part because of the landscape we chose.)

* The ‘role’ of scribe/writing-down-guy passed around fairly organically, though not necessarily in accordance with the rules. More importantly, the need for someone to be writing things down did not seem to interfere significantly with the mood of the game.

* The draw-tokens approach to moving the wind worked fairly well, though one player felt that having 8 cardinal points instead of 4 made dealing with edge-of-grid cases unnecessarily thinky.

* We never gave our character a name.

* Rambling in the first person really feels okay, when all you’re trying to do is remember something. I never felt like what I was saying was inadequately artsy or ‘not important enough.’ (though in one case I felt like I had accidentally gotten all cliched indie face-stabby). That said there should also be more advice in the game about ‘knowing when to stop’; in some cases I felt we continued to add more and more stuff, even after we had mostly ‘found’ the core of the memory. Just like the memory-reciting works fine if you don’t know what you’re going to say before you say it, it also works fine if you just stop more or less whenever.

Cons

* Turn order was confusing, even for the person who wrote the game. In particular, the way the roles moved around during the Unfolding phase and then jumped back to a different reference point once the Wind phase started was confusing. The fix we adopted after initial confusion resulted in players recalling/speaking a memory, then immediately having to ask a follow-up question of themselves — I found this very difficult in terms of headspace, since each role requires a very different orientation towards the fiction (speaker v. observer.)

* Managing the physical space was about as much of a nightmare as I feared. Index cards turned out to be too small to contain both touchstone names, touchstone details, and all the memory details we had added — one player commented how the cards looking ‘full’ made him reluctant to re-open or continue to build on an existing memory. We never had more than two touchstones at a given location, and even that made the whole board/play space seem very spread-out.

* The end of the Unfolding/Q&A period seemed more final than expected, which also contributed to players not re-opening memories as much as I had expected.

* The game moved much slower than I thought. At the current rate of pacing, the 3-player game probably would have taken five or six hours to complete — I would like the average game to take around 2 hours, more or less depending on number of players.

* The wind phase was awkward and often felt tacked on. In some cases players would forget it, proceeding directly to the next turn unless reminded. The call & response ritual dialogue for the wind felt stilted, compared to similar dialogues in other parts of the game, which did not feel silly at all. A player suggested nixing the ‘where does the wind blow?’ at a minimum.

* Players tended to describe location & touchstone details in greater detail than I had expected. Not a big deal but it slowed the game a bit, and (maybe more of a concern) it seemed to blur the lines a little between the location/touchstone phase and the memory phase (where rambling and extra details are fine and even encouraged.)

* Nobody used anchors or links, except me (I only used links.) In one case I recorded a link on behalf of someone else (this is how it should work anyways, which is totally not explicit in the rules), in one case I specifically said ‘I’m creating a link’ and marked it down. One player suggested that the crowdedness of the play area discouraged him from bringing in an anchor, because there literally didn’t seem to be anywhere to put it (we were using wh40k figs.)

* We only played to the beginning of round 3, but it wasn’t clear whether the wind was adequately threatening. We started with a 4×4 grid then eventually reduced it to 3×3. We had one memory lost due to clerical error (it should have just been moved), and another was relocated by the wind. (The touchstone, ‘the sky’, ended up in the location, ‘the cellar’, which made me very happy.) The fact that we started out building memories with a larger number of currency tokens than I expected contributed to this, as did starting with such a large grid for so few players.

* Conversely, looking at the board and the lack of anchors/links, I suspect that the wind would have very quickly decimated a large part of the landscape if we had continued to play.

* Adding details to both locations and touchstones kind of felt like too many details, without a lot of reward. Both the other players had expected the actual physical objects to play a stronger role in the game, as had I. This isn’t a Con exactly, since that’s cool, but it was interesting to see that we naturally fell into a much more narrative mode than I had expected. I’m not sure what to do about that if anything — my favourite memory of the evening was a largely disconnected vignette about our daughter getting her mittens-with-string tangled in the jungle gym.

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Anyways, next step is to come up with a To Do list for parts that need rewriting/redesigning — and then hopefully some more playtesting!

[Decommissioned] System

I received a great deal of feedback on the mechanics I created for my Game Chef entry.  Rather than plod through the dice and how they worked then, I want to tackle my design goals with D-Com (the robots dying version).  Once I have that hammered out, it might be a more effective system.

 1. I want the PCs to be completely bada$$ at character generation.  This will illustrate the fall from power as a system.

2. I want a system where the PCs degenerate over time.  I like the idea of the system enforcing an endgame, pushing the players to act boldly and stay focused towards their stated goals.

3. I like the idea of a Sacred or touchstone.  I want something defined within the rules that acts as a measure of the dedication and spirit of the PC.  The “why they decided to die” should be a stat.  This “stat” should be something the player can swap for a physical stat.  The idea behind this is I want something showing how the will of the robot carries them through the degeneration.

More to come later, work is getting hectic.

Fade Power 19

So, I haven’t really done any work, as such, on Fade. I am still thinking about how best to move in my revision. As a procrastination/kickstart technique I went through the power 19 for it. Here are the results. I think that the next revision is going to have a few slight changes of emphasis that should create significantly different play. But I still haven’t nailed down exactly what they’re all going to be yet.

Anyway, power 19 for Fade, for your reading pleasure:

Fade is about secret agents in a society in which violence is no longer possible. They have the ability to alter peoples’ memories using special drugs, and their enemies will try to do the same to them. So, it’s about what happens to people when they can’t rely on their memories, and what happens when memories change.

The characters will mainly go on missions to protect their home Palace (nation), attempting to strategically alter the memories of key people in order to further their Palace’s interests. They will face other agents with the same abilities, so their memories will change in play.

Each mission, one player looks after the opposition (and plans the mission objectives¹) and the complications that will occur. The others play the roles of their spooks as they plan how to achieve the objectives and then execute the plan.

The setting is keyed on two things that reinforce the game’s objectives. Firstly, the agents can alter memories. Secondly, violence is not an option for conflict. The rivalry between the Palaces adds a source of conflicts.

Character creation includes building the home Palace of the characters, giving everyone a shared home base. The characters are built primarily as a collection of key memories.

The game (currently) rewards success on secret agent missions². So, for the OP, putting together a cool but not too tough mission and for the rest, planning and executing their solution to the situation well.

There are two types of reward in the game. Characters can improve (or just change) via player choices about their memories (memories each have an associated ability, so this can be improved). Secondly, missions might allow the agents to learn of new types of drugs that increase their options and/or effectiveness in the future.

Narration and credibility are pretty evenly shared out. At any one time, one player will be the OP (GM role) but the intention is that this job is shared out evenly. OP has a set budget to build opposition from, chosen by the rest of the agents. The OP is also free to generate new details for the Palace that the mission concerns (but not to contradict details previously determined in play). The agent players get to choose the mission objective and how hard it should be. Once the mission begins, they play their agents as they plan and execute the mission, responding to the complications and opposition that the OP generates. Although character memories may change (including which Palace they are loyal to/working for), how these memory changes are interpreted is up to the player (they may even choose to ignore certain memories – after all, they know that memories may be false).

Making you care – the fact that your character is primarily defined by a set of memories, and that these can be changed, is grabby for me.

Resolution mechanics are intentionally simple for most tasks/conflicts, with an opposed single die roll, highest wins. Effectiveness varies in that what kind of die you roll can be from d4 up to d12. There’s a bonus mechanic that allows you to reroll you die if you (e.g.) narrate in one of your memory descriptions³. There are more specific rules for drugs and memory alteration, with memory changes requiring getting close to the target, dosing them with special drugs, and then talking to them to seed the memory you wish to create/alter. Each step is resolved as a normal task, with some special effects for each drug type.

The resolution mechanics focus on memory changes, which is the core concern of the game.

Characters may advance (or degrade) via memory changes (not all voluntary). Changes can add new abilities, remove abilities, increase or decrease effectiveness, and increase or decrease memory strength⁴.

The game should make people think a little about personal identity, hopefully while they’re having some fun with con job/technothriller type stories. Issues of loyalty and trust may also become central as play goes on.

Extra attention and colour goes into the drug rules (to make them interesting to play with), the underlying rules of how the society works (just to ensure there aren’t any gaping logical holes in the world⁵). I also want a lot of tables for mission generation and ideas, so that it can be run with minimal or no preparation time.

I’m really excited by the idea of playing someone who cannot rely on their memories. It seems like another version of the cool feeling you get when a Call of Cthulhu or Unknown Armies character begins going nuts. The setting, which is a mishmash of stuff from various SF authors that I like, also really works for me. No particular thing in the setting does that, it’s something about the combination.

With the exception of some of the other Game Chef 2007 games, I’ve never seen anything that really messed with a character’s identity so much. In Fade, your character can be changed to be completely different to how they were generated, only part of it under your control. A character constantly in flux like that is pretty rare.

I’d like to get this published, via POD, by the end of the year (I made myself a promise to get something finished this year. It might be that I only get an ashcan ready version in that time, which is cool with me (I have trouble getting time for extensive playtests, unfortunately).

My target audience is gamers like me – interested in trying some unusual stuff in their gaming, prefer one shot or short run games, and low preparation time.

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1Maybe the spook players should determine the mission objective(s)? I think that would lead to stronger stories.

2This area is currently up for major rethink and revision.

3A few other things also give you a bonus, that is just the most common one.

4That is, how easy it is to remove the memory.

5E.g. Ways for people to get around the no-violence rule.

[Other Projects] Canon Puncture Podcast

The 7th episode of my podcast is now up.  The show focuses on indie and traditional RPGs.  This episode features a discussion about the d6 and d20 systems and Paul Czege talking about the Ashcan Front!

You can subscribe through iTunes or here:

http://feeds.feedburner.com/canonpuncture

[Other Projects] Avatar Game

So… I haven’t written anything more for The Grafted Rose yet, but I finally finished a draft of my Avatar: The Last Airbender-inspired game, something I started fiddling with last year about this time. The current playtest draft is posted up here on my blog, if people are familiar with the cartoon show and are interested in commenting.

As a game, it’s a weird fish. Nothing has any real mechanical weight. Basically, it’s a set of pacing guidelines with a few other things worked into it.