Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

Leaving Blogger

2007-07-12T10:39:00.001-04:00

I'm leaving Blogger to do all my blogging over on LiveJournal. It's easier for me not to have two blogs, and I get more feedback over there.

http://bar_sinister.livejournal.com/

Voice #9

2007-07-05T09:29:00.000-04:00

A new Voice of the Revolution!

Covenant review and John Harper interview

Show notes:

0:29 - Brennan starts things off with IPR news. New on the site:
Ninja Burger (PDF)
Faery's Tale
Active Exploits Diceless Roleplaying
Classroom Deathmatch
Finis: A Book of Endings to Give People New Beginnings
Urchin
5:02 - Covenant, by Matt Machell, is a roleplaying game of failing conspiracies.
20:12 - Paul sits down with John Harper, the designer of Agon, to talk about Go Play Northwest.
31:22 - In Pravda, Brennan discusses the process of printing your game.
40:35 - Brennan and Paul share their currently playing lists, which turn out to be rather long.

[How We Came to Live Here] Update

2007-06-22T16:00:00.000-04:00

Quick update on HWCTLH:

I have a rough draft of the basic rules done, and I am doing some editing based on quick review feedback from Jason Morningstar. It's always great to get a second pair of eyes to look at your design. I had a number of things in the rules that were basically just a legacy from an earlier version. These were rules that solved a problem I had, but as the rules evolved the underlying problem disappeared, yet the solution lingered on. I should have an alpha playtest version ready in about a week or so.

I've also been talking with Jonathan Walton about doing a character sheet for the game, and he also expressed interest in doing a cover. I will be consulting with him on this over the next month or so and we'll see what we get.

I'm excited to have some motion on the project! This one has been a seriously long slog, thanks to increased pressure at my day job, and the fact that IPR has sucked up all of my out-of-work time.

The Big Time!

2007-05-31T10:58:00.001-04:00

I got interviewed on a mainstream media outlet! Yesterday, I got a call from TheStreet.com, and talked about Indie Press Revolution. The interview went up today: Small-Biz Buzz: How to Feed the Gamer's Fix

Cool!

Voice Episode #8 Now Available

2007-05-30T11:53:00.000-04:00

The Voice of the Revolution Episode #8 is now live! Paul and I review Don't Rest Your Head and have an interview with Jason Morningstar of Bully Pulpit Games.

Show notes:

0:29 - Brennan starts things off with IPR news. New on the site:
The Dossier (PDF supplement for Cold City)
Piledrivers and Powerbombs (PDF)
Sports Fan Double Pack (PDF)
Donjon and Donjon Pack B-1 (PDF)
Primetime Adventures
3:18 - Don't Rest Your Head, by Fred Hicks, is a game about insomniac superheroes and the nightmares that want to eat them.
20:18 - Jason Morningstar, author of the The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, talks about the forthcoming Grey Ranks (set during the 1944 Warsaw Uprising) and The Roach Returns.
30:25 - In Pravda, Brennan talks about the editing and layout stage of game production.
40:15 - Brennan and Paul share their currently playing list before signing off.

Flawed Published Products

2007-04-27T11:45:00.000-04:00

So, there has been some buzz around the webs this week about indie game design and publishing, specifically here at Story Games and here at the Forge. The gist of these conversations is that some games have been published in an unfinished or half-baked form, and many folks believe that this is harmful to indie games in general, and unfair to gamers who may have purchased these products.

This is a topic of some interest, of course, and I agree with (most of) what everyone here is saying. Some of the solutions being put forward are excellent, including the idea of printing ashcans, or beta versions of games, in cheap formats for low prices, and then incorporating all the live play feedback you can get into a final version of the game. Plenty of people have done this, and it works.

If you've followed the discussions above at all, you will know that the reason I'm bringing the subject up here is that Mortal Coil gets called out for some heavy critique on these threads. I wanted to say my piece about it in my own space, rather than jumping into these other threads with long discourses about my own game. The main reason for this is I'm not really interested in getting into a long argument about the game on those other threads, or dealing with the attacks and well-meaning defenses that would inevitably come up.

I know that Mortal Coil has some problems with how the rules are presented. Lots of feedback from players, with the same questions coming up again and again, are an excellent indication that some areas of the rules are not well explained. If I had done a better job communicating everything in the text, I wouldn't have as many questions coming up about it.

Some players are going to contact me and ask questions no matter what. There are players out there who like to gather all the info they can before starting a game, even one that is well layed-out and explained. These aren't the people I'm talking about. The ones I feel I've failed are those who bought the game and couldn't understand it well enough to give it a try. Some of these people have contacted me, or gone on the web and found some of the FAQs and examples I've posted. Many of these people, on the other hand, took the game and put it on their shelf, and they will never play it. Those are the ones I feel I have failed.

So, mea culpa aside, I want to talk a bit about the expectations that go into a design and second editions. I've been accused of picking gamers' pockets by publishing Mortal Coil the way I did. I don't really see it that way. Mortal Coil is playable, and many people have figured out how to play from the text alone (I know because I have heard from some of them).

I design and publish games and try to put the best product out there I can, and I spent a lot of time thinking about how to present the rules in Mortal Coil so they can be understood. After getting all of this feedback, I have a much better understanding of how I missed, and what I need to do next time to present the rules in a better way. My next product will be much better. I also plan on revising and releasing a new version of Mortal Coil at some point, to better explain the rules. Nothing about them is going to change, I am just going to adjust the areas where comprehension was difficult, and add in the extended examples of play I've written for the forum. This will be a better product than the first version.

All I can do is learn, and improve. That's my duty as a designer, and that's where I am going to go in the future.

The Voice of the Revolution, Episode 7

2007-04-25T11:10:00.000-04:00

Episode 7 is now live! Paul and I review Hero's Banner and interview Chris Hanrahan of Endgame Oakland.

Show notes:
0:29 - Despite audio problems, Paul and Brennan are back for the April show. As always, the episode starts with IPR news. New:

The Zorcerer of Zo (PDF)
Intergalactic Cooking Challenge (PDF)
Nine Worlds (PDF)
Seven Leagues (PDF)
Vs. Monsters (PDF)

Dust Devils Revenged
Beast Hunters

02:41 - Hero's Banner, by Tim C. Koppang, is a roleplaying game that focuses on coming of age stories.
15:38 - Chris Hanrahan of Endgame in Oakland, CA, talks with Paul and Brennan about indie games from a retailer's perspective.
29:07 - Brennan talks about the process of procuring art for your game in the latest installment of Pravda.
39:26 - Paul and Brennan talk about what they're playing now. Paul even goes first this time.

Other games:

Polaris
Agon
Dogs in the Vineyard
Mortal Coil
Don't Rest Your Head
The Shab-Al-Hiri Roach
carry. a game about war.
Primetime Adventures
Mystery of the Abbey

Not Much Off the Writing Desk

2007-04-17T11:25:00.000-04:00

Or the Raven for that matter, lately. I know I've been remiss about posting here, and I thought that would be a topic for a post. I've been exceptionally busy with both IPR and Galileo Games in the last months. Here's an update on what I've been doing:

IPR has been going gangbusters for the last year or so, and the work is getting pretty significant. This year, I've done a number of things to reduce the amount of time I was spending on web maintenance and packing boxes. The company is successful enough that it was long past due, but that has required a lot of logistics and time juggling. Luckily, now some of the pressure is off (so I can concentrate on other things and add more pressure).

Galileo Games, unfortunately, took a bit of a back seat during this whole process, pretty much since GenCon last year. Mortal Coil is doing really, really well, better than I expected, and is still one of IPR top sellers. This pleases me greatly.

Bulldogs! ran out late last year, and it's taken me entirely too long to get things worked out on reprinting it. I did some revisions and updated the system for 3.5 (long overdue), and a new edition will be out this month.

My new project, How We Came to Live Here, is moving sluggishly. I just haven't had a lot of time to tighten it up. I have been playtesting, which has gone extremely well. The changes I am making are mostly tweaks. The text, on the other hand, is barely notes, and completely incomprehensible for anyone other than myself, and that's the next task: I need to get it written up in a form that can go to outside playtest.

That's the update for today, and look for some more stuff on here in the next week or so.

The Voice of the Revolution, Episode 6

2007-04-04T13:34:00.000-04:00

The Voice of the Revolution Episode 6 is now live!

Paul and I do a Conspiracy of Shadows review and interview Joshua A.C. Newman and Emily Care Boss.

Show notes:

0:29 - Welcome to the sixth (slightly delayed) episode of the Voice of the Revolution. As always, Brennan starts us off with IPR news.
New:
Vs. Outlaws
3:26 - Conspiracy of Shadows, by Keith Senkowski, is a game of Doom and Destiny in an analogue of medieval Poland.
13:11 - Joshua A.C. Newman (Shock:, Under the Bed) and Emily Care Boss (Breaking the Ice, Shooting the Moon) stop by to talk about their games and their gaming group.
27:11 - Brennan brings the next installment of Pravda, in which he discusses the importance of external playtesting.
35:52 - Paul and Brennan close the show with a brief discussion of what they're playing right now.
Other Games:

Conspiracy X
Call of Cthulhu
The Mountain Witch
Mortal Coil
Spirit of the Century
Primetime Adventures
Polaris
Full Light, Full Steam
Other Links:

Games Expo
Nerdly Beach Party
Game Chef

The Voice of the Revolution Episode 5

2007-03-02T14:59:00.000-05:00

The latest episode of the Voice of the Revolution is live!

This episode, Paul and Brennan do a Nine Worlds review and interview Push editor Jonathan Walton.

Show notes:
0:29 - Welcome to the fifth episode of The Voice of the Revolution. Brennan starts us off with IPR news.
New:
Legends of Alyria
Agon
2:34 - Nine Worlds, by Matt Synder, is a game of Greek gods and aetherships.
13:59 - Jonathan Walton sits down with Paul and Brennan to discuss Push.
24:21 - In Pravda, Brennan continues his series on game design.
31:02 - To wrap things up, Paul and Brennan talk about what they're playing now.

Other Games:
The Riddle of Steel
The Burning Wheel
The Shadow of Yesterday
Breaking the Ice
Memoir '44
My Life with Master
The Mountain Witch (and Kwaidan)
HeroQuest

Other Links:
The Sons of Kryos
Knight Realms

[How We Came to Live Here] Results of Dreamation Playtest

2007-02-15T15:12:00.000-05:00

The playtest I ran at Dreamation went extremely well. My rules are very rough, but the play that came out at the table (from an admittedly expert group of players) was pretty much exactly what I wanted out of the game. So, my task to continue to prepare these rules is to firm them up, and to deal with the problems that came out and the hacks I introduced in the playtest.

There are a couple of systems that need some serious work. I added player-character Ambitions as a sort of last minute tack-on, and they did not have sufficient influence in the game. These were basically goals the character had, and each time you attempted to move toward the goal and failed, it's value as a payoff would increase. I'm not sure they are entirely necessary. They did give some good role-playing hooks in the game, but I think the idea about player-imposed obstacles isn't really necessary, since everyone's passions about their character goals seemed to run so deep they weren't interested in purposefully failing.

The threat level of opponents is also something I want to really look at. Opposition outside of other player characters is formalized into three levels of threat, which basically translate into dice pools. The formal threat level needs to be balanced with the level of player resources available, but I think I may need to do fixed levels of resources in sample opponents, and indicate restrictions depending on stakes (simple, difficult, heroic). Some opponents may be too difficult for players to take on as heroic challenges until they have built up their resources over time. The playtest didn't get into the character-improvement mechanics at all. My main concern here is color: how to make these dice-pool enemies into something with some flavor that can be called on on the fly without a major demand on the GM's creativity.

I think that village building and relationships needs to be simplified a bit, too. The village relationship map was really complicated and confusing. I had four types of relationships for each PC, and I will probably reduce it to two types: friend/lover/ally and rival/enemy. That will result in fewer lines and some strong advice on how to build the village will help by introducing a "law of conservation of NPCs" sort of principle. I will also have specific rules about what types of social contests are required to change people's disposition, so you could have conflicts to turn someone's heart against someone else, or to win them over to your side.

Dice pools in conflicts are created by calling on one of four stats, related to a direction. How you choose direction in a conflict is pretty important and not yet sufficiently defined. The other problem I had with dice pools was that people were drawing on traits and rolling dice, and then failing to get the result they needed, and then drawing on another trait. This created a narrative dissonance, where players kept going, "And furthermore!" to call on trait after trait til they got what they needed. I think the solution here is to increase initial pool size, and let players call on traits to flip dice to the results they need. This keeps both a random and a strategic element to the conflict system.

Another thing to firm up is GM duties for conflicts and the like, and also what the GM does during interstitial scenes. Tension needs to be applied to the village on both the inside and the outside front each turn, which will help force the players to act and force them to make hard choices.

One last thought, it seems to be pretty important that you have both female and male characters in the game. I'm not sure how it would work without, but I can imagine some issues with player partisanship one side of the issue or the other. I may have to playtest with a single-gender character group and see what happens.

Game Design Process (Part 1)

2007-01-25T09:38:00.000-05:00

On the last Voice of the Revolution, I started a series of discussions on game design, and I thought it would be of interest to post slightly expanded essays on the topics I cover on the show here. The series will move chronologically through my own game design process from conception to final publication. This first piece discusses how you move from an idea to a game, and in later installments I’ll discuss playtesting, editing, art direction, layout, and lastly publishing and marketing your game.

We’ll start this first segment on game design. This is definitely the most idiosyncratic portion of the series. All designers have their own methods and processes of game design, and I am going to necessarily talk about mine. As I get more into the printing and production side what I’ll say is much more universal, but at this stage the design process is much more open to taste.

Concept
The first step in creating a game is to come up with a concept. This is the easiest part, and I would bet that 90% or more of gamers out there have a game concept they’ve thought of. Of course, many of these people do not have the inclination to actually write and produce a game, so this series is aimed at the portion who do.

We’ll use my own game, Mortal Coil, as an example here, since I have gone through the whole process for the game. The basic concept for Mortal Coil was a supernatural game where there were few or no limits on what players could do. The idea was for players to be able to mix angels, werewolves, vampires, sorcerers, fairies, and whatever other crazy ideas they had, and actually play these characters.

Like I said, the conception portion of a game is easy. I come up with interesting ideas all the time. The next step is to take that concept and actually build some game rules around it.

I am a subscriber to a theory of focused design. In a nutshell, that means that you need to decide early on what you want the experience of playing your game to be, and then make sure that the rules you create support that experience. Jared Sorensen and Luke Crane do some game design seminars in which they ask three questions: What is your game about, how is it about that, and how do the rules make it about that. These questions are an excellent starting point in design because they serve to really focus your attention on what it is you think is the core of your game.

Initial Rules Brainstorming
After these early steps, you get into the much, much harder part of game design: Crafting the rules that will form the core of your game. When I am working on a new game, I think about the various rules I will need a lot; when I’m driving to work, when I’m in the shower, really any time that I have a moment to myself, I will turn the rules over in my mind and try to come up with solutions to how things will work in the game. It takes me many, many of these puzzling out sessions before I have the basic structure worked out, and I can write an outline of the rules down.

I call these puzzling out sessions because with me, that’s what they really are. I am working over the rules in my mind and trying to see how they all fit together. With Mortal Coil, I mused for a long time about the problems I had with the occult genre. One of my main disappointments was that powers would sometimes fail, and I felt strongly that they should just work, rather than needing a successful skill roll or something to activate. This actually led me to the diceless design I ended up using in Mortal Coil. If you want to do something, you allocate tokens to it and it happens, unless someone else can stop you, of course.

Another Interview

2006-12-12T14:43:00.001-05:00

I was interviewed over at The Games the Thing by Ron and Veronica Blessing. I don't think I made a total ass of myself. I talk about Mortal Coil, design, my upcoming projects, and also IPR.

Check out the podcast here:
http://www.thegamesthething.com/

[IPR] Disintermediation

2006-12-06T15:54:00.000-05:00

I've been interviewed several times recently, and people often ask about the business model of IPR. I thought I'd post a little primer about some of the nitty-gritty of publishing and selling games, and where IPR fits in that picture.

So, to understand what IPR does, you need to understand the concept of disintermediation. To anyone who read business literature during the dot-com boom, the term disintermediation will be familiar. To everybody else, it's a long word for a pretty simple concept: cutting out the middle-man.

Any business that creates items it wants to sell has a problem: how do you get these things you make out to the people who want to buy them. Traditionally, it's been pretty hard to hook these two groups of people together. That's why stores exist. They gather up a lot of different items people want to buy, and customers come to the store to get all the supplies at one place. This is pretty simple. It does get complicated upstream, though. Stores often have the same problem their customers do: how do I find all the different people who have things I might like to sell?

This is where distributors come in. Distributors search out products and present stores with a big list. These are products they have researched, often purchased, and then sell on to the retail store.

You see this pattern in all sorts of industries, and you find it in the role-playing game industry as well. In the RPG industry, this is called the "three-tier system." Tier 1: the game manufacturer. Tier 2: the distributor. Tier 3: the retail store. The thing is, for small publishers like Galileo Games, the three-tier system had actually become a four-tier system. Distributors were not interested in researching, pursuing, or purchasing from very small publishers who may or may not be in business in six months (an understandable, if problematic, attitude). So, they were relying on fulfillment businesses, like Key20 or Impressions, to find and consolidate lots of small publishers together and then the distributors would order lots of titles together. These fulfillment businesses are like distributors to the distributors.

I'm sure you can see the problem that is starting to appear here. First off, retailers need a significant discount in order to keep going. They have a lot of overhead costs: rent, utilities, staff. They need to make a certain percentage, usually 40-50%, off each product to stay in business. Distributors need to make some money, too, or they couldn't warehouse and ship the books, maintain the staff to find and order the products, etc. They want another 10-20% of cover price. Then you add in the fulfillment house, taking 15-20% of what's left, and there is a pretty small piece of the pie left for the creator.

When the dot-com bubble was in full swing, there were loads of books and articles about how the internet would change this sort of arrangement. The word for this was disintermediation. The internet would facilitate buyers and sellers meeting directly, and cutting out all the levels of middlemen that had grown up in just about every industry imaginable.

This definitely happened, and you can see the results in a variety of places. The ones I think demonstrate this best are places like Lulu or OneBookShelf (formerly RPGNow and DriveThruRPG). These are places where creators post their work, and customers come directly to shop. Of course, the sites themselves act as middlemen, but at least one layer, and usually more, has been removed from the transaction.

However, there is another problem that occurs on these sites. Anyone who wants can post a product, and many do. There is soon a vast slush pile that potential customers have to shift through, and the value of the store owner becomes evident. IPR deals with this by screening all products that go up, thus insuring a level of quality. This quality may be idiosyncratic, because I am the one who does all the screening, leading to a collection of books that reflect my own tastes, but it is better than no screening at all.

I'm sure I'll have more thoughts and comments on this subject in the future, but I wanted to post this since I've explained it (in considerably fewer words) several times in the recent past, thanks to various interviews about IPR.

[Mortal Coil] T-Shirts!

2006-12-05T14:12:00.000-05:00

I'm excited! I put some of the art from Mortal Coil onto some t-shirts, which are now available via Spreadshirt:

https://www.spreadshirt.com/shop.php?sid=41270

There are two shirts with some of the full-page color art from Mortal Coil, and a third based on the fictional punk band Flaming Taft that came out of a game of Mortal Coil.

I'll see how these do, and if there is enough interest I'll probably print up a real batch for sale at cons and through IPR.

[IPR] The Voice of the Revolution Episode 2

2006-11-30T14:52:00.000-05:00

Some podcasts are more monthly than others. Due to some technical difficulties, Paul and I squeaked under the wire for our November podcast:
http://www.thevoiceoftherevolution.com/
Also, there's an annual ranking of "best indie games of the year" over on RPGNet. If you liked Mortal Coil, mention it on the list! I got some love early on in the thread, then it tailed off.
http://forum.rpg.net/showthread.php?t=298677

New Game Name

2006-11-17T15:17:00.000-05:00

After the feedback I've gotten, combined with my own preferences, I've decided on the new working title for The Fifth World. Henceforth, the game shall be called How We Came to Live Here.

Indie Game Fans Take Heed

2006-11-17T15:16:00.001-05:00

I set up a news list for Indie Press Revolution. Subscribe if you're interested in getting updates on new releases, upcoming events, and general IPR news:
indiepressnews@ yahoogroups. com

For convenience, here's a quick link to the group so folks can sign on up:
http://games.groups.yahoo.com/group/indiepressnews/

And perhaps more to the point, here's an RSS feed for the messages:
http://rss.groups.yahoo.com/group/indiepressnews/rss

Which Fred Hicks has added to LiveJournal syndication:
http://syndicated.livejournal.com/iprnews/

[Fifth World or Something] Quest Rules

2006-11-15T12:40:00.000-05:00

Last week, thanks to a long business-related train ride, I got several hours to work on that game (not called Fifth World any more). I put together the basic die mechanic, and worked out how one of the types of scenes is going to work in the game. The section I'm working on is about quests, where characters leave their community in search of some item or just to gain renown.

I've ventured quite far from The Shadow of Yesterday at this point, even though that was the original inpiration. TSoY just wasn't supporting what I wanted out of the game, and shoehorning it was starting to really frustrate me.

Here's a basic summary of what the quest system is about:

Characters have traits, which they call on to overcome challenges. I'm using Fudge dice for this, since they have a nicely constrained set of results. The players gradually build a pool of dice to use in a challenge, where + counts as an attack opportunity, - a defense opportunity, and blanks serve to absorb attacks. If a player uses a + on his turn, the target of the attack can either discard two dice of his choice from the pool (the attack succeeds), use one of his - dice to block the attack (the attack fails), or use a + and discard one die to suffer the attack but return attack.

Renown and inside pools can be used to supplement traits in the challenge. Players can also do criminal or dishonorable things which raises their outside pool. I wanted this to be an attractive option, so if a player runs his outside total up by one, he gets two new dice and can choose what value he wants on them. Outside basically gives the GM a pool of points he can spend to mess with the character after the challenge.

I ran this little conflict system out with some friends last weekend and it works quite well. The players, thanks to some rolls that weren't as useful, ended up tapping into the outside option, so the temptation is definitely there. It's also quite predictable how effective a character can be (barring really crappy rolls), so it makes challenges easy to construct. This is good, because there will be some quest guidelines for GMs to build proper challenges for the players. The more difficult the quest the players choose, the more renown they can earn by completing.

[Fifth World?] Name Changes

2006-11-14T16:10:00.000-05:00

It's been a very, very long time since I posted, my apologies.

Anyway, short version, it turns out that another group of game designers is releasing a game in December called "Fifth World," and they very politely contacted me and asked that I not release my game under the same name. Since they are beating me to the punch, I agreed to come up with a different name for this game. After some advice on various message boards, I've come up with a short list of names:

Twin Souls
How We Came to Live Here
Up from the Fourth World
So That This World Will Not Be Destroyed
Into The Light

Feel free to comment on these (and add other ideas if you have them). I've got time to ruminate, and the game's got the working title of The Fifth World until I settle on a new one.

[IPR] The Voice of the Revolution

2006-10-25T08:39:00.000-04:00

Good afternoon. It's nine o'clock and this is the Voice of the Revolution, broadcasting on 275 and 285 in the medium wave.

Paul Tevis, of Have Games Will Travel, has teamed up with me to do a monthly podcast for Indie Press Revolution. Our first episode is up, and you can listen to it here: http://www.thevoiceoftherevolution.com/

[IPR] Radio Interview

2006-10-17T10:12:00.000-04:00

A couple of guys from Eugene, Oregon have a radio show on the local college radio station. The theme of their show is getting your artistic work out there once it's complete. They are both fiction writers, and have their own indie publishing label. They contacted me last week to ask me on the show to talk about Indie Press Revolution and what we were doing in the role-playing game market, obviously with an eye to how this could apply to other types of creative endeavors as well. Dudley and James were great guys, and it was a lot of fun to do the show.

I'll update the link when I have one that actually leads to the interview.

Thanks for having me on, gentlemen!

Edit:
Ok, they sent me the wrong link. Here's the right file:
http://www.indiepressrevolution.com/pdf/kwva%20art%20hustle%2016%2010%202006%20show.mp3
It sounds kind of weird at first because they ran the same promo three times before the show starts.

Design Journal: Getting Going on The Fifth World

2006-08-31T15:43:00.000-04:00

It's been a while since I've touched this project. Last year, I decided to finish Mortal Coil, the game closest to completion at the time. I did finish it, and now it's out and ready for sale. Ever since I got it off to the printer back in June, I've been meaning to pick up on The Fifth World again, my project for next year. All summer long, that hasn't happened.

Yesterday, I took a long look at the project and tried to see what was hanging me up. I had decided to use Clinton Nixon's The Shadow of Yesterday as the core rules for the game, and elaborate from there. Some of my issues stemmed from attempting to repurpose those rules, because copying and altering the existing rules turned out to be pretty boring for me.

I was looking at the introductory paragraph of The Fifth World when inspiration hit. The opening paragraph is a brief sketch of a story about how the First People came into the Fifth World. It struck me that since the inspiration for the game was Native American folklore, that is the form the final version of the game should take. I had just read The Dictionary of Mu by Judd Karlman, and his setting takes the form of encyclopedia-style entries that gradually flesh out a fantasy world. I decided to present The Fifth World as a series of stories, told around the fire in a kiva, that gradually introduce the setting elements and various other aspects of the game. The rules would be in the form of asides in the margins, and appendices in the back of the book.

This is probably going to be a difficult way to present the material, but the goal is to make the rules clear while at the same time evoking setting in the strongest possible way. To do this, I am going to need to pare down the rules considerably, and the final result may not resemble The Shadow of Yesterday hardly at all. Part of my problem was me limiting myself to the TSoY rules, so this is freeing my creative juices a lot. I think it will end up being "inspired by" TSoY, rather than a full TSoY mod.

GenCon: My Take on the Whole Thing

2006-08-28T14:21:00.000-04:00

For some, GenCon started on August 10 and was over on August 13. For me, GenCon started months ago, and was over yesterday. The amount of planning that has to go into a major convention like this is daunting, and started way back in January of this year, for me. This all led up to the con, and then afterwards, I had lots of bookkeeping, inventory management, and backed up web orders to deal with. As of Sunday, August 27, all of this was officially done.

So, whew! I have three hats I was wearing there, the IPR hat, the Galileo Games hat, and the Brennan Taylor hat. I'll break out my impressions in three parts, based on this.

IPR
IPR went in with Luke Crane, Ron Edwards, Vincent Baker, and Tim Kleinert as a primary sponsor of the booth. I don't really know what this entailed for the others, but for me it meant that I paid for a full 10x10 portion of the booth (not quite 1/4 of the total cost, actually, the number was negotiated with Luke directly). In exchange for a 10% fee, I would handle all money/sales transactions, and I would process credit cards for the booth. Last year, they really didn't have this capability, and based on the sales this year, I'd say that hurt. A lot.

Based on the booth sales from last year (roughly $20,000), I calculated that if the booth did that well, I would break even. Well, the booth did over $33,000 in sales, so I did more than break even. That makes GenCon a much more successful con for IPR than Origins was. At Origins, I broke even, but made no extra money.

I brought Alexander Newman along, like I had at Origins, and he is a fantastic helper. Together, we run a tight ship, and a lot of problems I anticipated never materialized. Overall, I felt the booth ran quite smoothly, and it was extremely successful. We sold things hand over fist for most of the con. I can remember only a few short periods of time where the cash register was not busy.

Things that went not so well:
1) The booth space for shopping was too small. I knew this was going to be tight, and boy, was it. Three browsers crowded up our booth, and since there was often a line at the register, shoppers were blocking the shelves most of the time. I'm not sure how to solve this, a few ideas have been floated for layout next year, and we shall see.
2) People don't come to the Forge booth to buy d20 stuff. I sold a few titles from the d20 publishers I carry, but for the most part, no one was interested. These books are all big, 8-1/2 x 11 inches, and they took up a lot of shelf space. For items that weren't moving, they sucked up some serious real estate. I want to support these publishers just like I support all of the non-d20 indie publishers I carry, but our space at GenCon didn't cut it for this. I am not sure what to do about this issue next year, and I will be discussing it with these publishers as we plan.
3) There wasn't any storage space at the booth. We had a lot of boxes full of stock that wouldn't fit on the shelf. We stuck these in the Wicked Dead section of the booth, and stored some more at another booth not affiliated with the Forge thanks to the generosity of the person running that booth. This was definitely not ideal. We sold lots of books, as mentioned above, and restocking was confusing and time consuming, and at least once, a book ran out and no one could find the backstock for an hour or two. We've got to have some sort of solution for this next year, perhaps a stockroom made up of temporary walls like Jason at Key20 uses.
4) Booth helpers weren't organized. Alexander did some organizing starting Friday regarding staffing and helpers, but this should have been done earlier. Some planning needs to happen before the con, and there needs to be a written schedule so everyone knows when they are supposed to be at the booth. This didn't turn out to be a big problem, but it had the potential to be far worse than it was, and I want to keep that from happening.

In conclusion, IPR had a great con overall. There were some big, serious problems I'd like to work on next year, but these were far outweighed by the good things that happened at the con.

Galileo Games
I came to GenCon as a Galileo Games representative to sell Mortal Coil, and it sold well. It was no mistake that I released this game at Origins, and then toured it to DexCon. There was some good pre-con buzz, and a lot of people came to the Forge booth with Mortal Coil already on their shopping list.

I didn't run demos early, but when I started, I sold an average of one game a demo. Total sales for Mortal Coil at the con were 60 copies. I was super thrilled at this number, and it put me in the top 10 for the booth.

I only had one Mortal Coil game on the schedule, and unfortunately, the listing failed to mention the system, only the scenario title. That kind of sucked, but I had four players at a Friday morning 8 a.m session, so that wasn't so bad. One was Shawn de Arment, who had played MC at DexCon. Another was a player who had been in a Bulldogs! game I ran at GenCon 2 years ago and was familiar with my work, and had e-mailed me before the con to ask if the session was Mortal Coil. Lastly, a British couple who thought it might be a D&D game, but were pleasantly surprised that it wasn't (not that they had anything against D&D, they were just playing mostly that the rest of the weekend and thought something different would be refreshing). They came to the booth later and bought two copies!

So, nothing bad to report here. For Galileo Games, GenCon was a blockbuster success. I had anticipated almost exactly what happened, and was not disappointed.

Brennan
As a participant, the con was not bad for me. I got some shopping done, and picked up gifts for the whole family. Krista got a V for Vendetta mask, Crispin got a Dragonology board game, and Lilith got a Fruits Basket card game and A Fairy's Tale RPG. I got Qin: Warring States, Bacchanal, a set of Bacchanal dice, Secret Lives of Gingerbread Men, House of Horiku, Cat, and Thirty. I also got a whole passel of games for free to review for inclusion at IPR. I plan on reporting on all of these as I read through them.

I got to play a couple of really good games after hours, also. I ran two sessions of Mortal Coil, one based in 1960s London where magic was surreal psychodelia accessed through drug use, and the other in the punk scene of the 1970s where music was magic, stolen from the Devil at the crossroads by Robert Johnson. Loads of fun, like Mortal Coil always is for me.

I also playtested a new game from Ben Lehman called Drifter's Escape, which was a really interesting experience. I'll probably talk about this some more in a seperate post.

On a fanboy note, I ate dinner one evening with John Wick, creator of Legend of the Five Rings, which I have played and enjoyed for years. I was excited to meet him, because he was something of a celebrity to me. Of course, familiarity breeds contempt (I don't really have contempt for you, John), and by the end of the con, I viewed him as a peer, just like all of the other really awesome game designers I get to hang out with there.

Also, I drank a lot with some crazy Scotsmen. They bring lots of fun with them to GenCon, and man, were there a lot of them this time out!

There wasn't a lot of time at the con for me to personally enjoy myself, but I really enjoyed the few moments I had away from the exhibit hall.

[IPR] Most Influential

2006-08-03T11:18:00.000-04:00

Indie Press Revolution won the 2006 Ogre's Choice Award for Most Influential Company! The Ogre's Choice Awards is run by Ogrecave.com, an RPG news and podcasting site. See the details here: www.ogrecave.com/ogres_choice/awards_2006.shtml

"You" Means the GM

2006-07-21T15:12:00.000-04:00

I got an interesting comment from Andrew Craig regarding my blurb for Mortal Coil on IPR:

"<...with magic powerful or subtle depending on your desires.>

'Aha, so it supports GM fiat', I thought."

This is interesting, because that is totally counter to the intent of that sentence in the blurb. As soon as Andrew pointed this out to me, it seems completely obvious how you could mistake the intent of that sentence. When I say "you" in this blurb, I mean all of the players, but when you read back cover copy on a game, "you" almost always means the GM, the assumed audience for a rulebook. Coming from that perspective, "depending on your desires" means the GM's desires, leading to, as Andrew says, fiat.

I do plan on editing the blurb a bit based on his feedback, but this was fascinating to realize.

Mortal Coil: From Concept to Product

2006-07-20T11:20:00.000-04:00

This is quite long, but may be of some interest to anyone doing publishing. It's mostly about timing and process.

The story of Mortal Coil begins quite some time ago, back before I had published The Legend of Yore. In those days, we were playing a lot of Vampire, and my group had grown quite sick of the system, especially my friend Glenn. One day, he threw down his dice in frustration after a soaked damage roll and declared he would never play Vampire again (our group's very own 'System Does Matter' moment). I started work on a supernatural game based on The Legend of Yore percentile mechanic, and in a few months we converted our Vampire characters and were playing this new game. For the next ten years or so I worked on it off and on, and by about 2003 it was still a percentile system, very combat heavy with simple skill rolls and big, big lists of various types of creatures and powers. Then I discovered the Forge.

I was polishing off Bulldogs! at around that time, and once that was done I turned my attention to the various innovative mechanics I was reading in the indie games I found associated with the Forge. I decided to go a fairly radical direction with Mortal Coil, and jettisoned pretty much all of the work I had done on it to date and reimagined the system entirely. Creature lists, power lists, disad lists, and ultimately, skill lists all got the axe. When I was done and had started on the new framework, it was not the same game. The lesson I take from this is that you should never be afraid to throw something out, no matter how long you have been working on it.

I had a rough version done last year and ran a few sessions with some local friends. It was very clunky and had a lot of problems. Then, I drove out to Origins with Thor Olavsrud, and on the long drive we talked about the game a great deal. He gave me lots of excellent advice. After Origins, I started to think about what my next project should be now that I was pretty much done dealing with Bulldogs!. I had three or four game concepts on my plate, all in various stages of development. I always work this way, actually, because if I work to intensively on one project I start to get bored and burned out. I then turn my attention to a new game and refresh myself before delving back into the original project. When I looked at all of the projects I had cooking, I decided to finish Mortal Coil because it was the one that was closest to being done.

Once I had settled on that, I thought about the coming year. Given the state of the rules, I thought I could get it all done for the 2006 convention season, and launch it by Origins, or GenCon at the latest if there were problems. Once I had my final release date in place, I started planning backwards to set deadlines for myself. I figured in about a month for the printing, which meant submission of files by June 1 if I was to make Origins. Back from there, I factored two months for layout and proofing, and a month before that for editing. Using this schedule, I knew I had to have a final draft of the rules by the beginning of March.

At this point I also started planning for the layout. I had an idea of how I wanted the book to look, and I had decided to try to get Jennifer Rodgers to do the art. I wanted all of the art to come from a single artist, and having worked with her on Bulldogs!, I knew Jenn was fast and reliable, and I also knew her color work looked great. She was busy during the fall, but I didn't plan on being finished with the writing until the winter anyway, and she put this project on her schedule for February. After discussing what I wanted, she estimated that the project would take roughly a month for her to complete.

I started working hard on finishing the rules and getting them ready for publication. I wanted to start playtesting by November. I didn't make that deadline, but I had a playtest version finished by December, and ran it with my own group. During the playtest process I was continually editing the game. In January, I ran it again at NerdNYC's Recess game-day. I had two sessions and a full table both times. During these sessions, I identified some really problematic issues with the rules as written, and corrected these before I ran the game again at the Dreamation convention. The Dreamation playtest went very well, and included Nathan Paoletta, Alexander Newman, Thor Olavsrud, Keith Senkowski, and Mayuran Tiruchelvam, all of whom had extremely useful feedback after the game.

I began the final, hard edit of the game. I was pretty ruthless at this stage. There were a lot if things in the game that were not strictly necessary, and I threw them all out. If something seemed redundant or I felt it was an extension of the rules meant to deal with some minor exception or other, I axed it. I have never been so severe in an edit before. I cut whole pages out of the book. When I was done, I felt like I had stripped the rules right down to where they needed to be. It wasn't an entirely comfortable experience, but the rules came out much better because of it. I was also getting very close to my deadline, as it was now February.

At this point, I began to work with Jennifer for the artwork. I am a pretty light hand when it comes to art direction. I gave her the basic feel I wanted for the work, basically an Art Nouveau style, which Jennifer enthusiastically agreed to. I gave her a list of about a dozen ideas for art pieces, and she agreed to do six interior color plates, the cover, and several small black-and-white decorative pieces for the layout. We negotiated timing and fees, and I agreed to pay her in three installments over the next three months. She had originally estimated a month of work, but it ended up taking nearly three times that long. I also made some fairly major changes when doing the art direction, but Jennifer was always very good with the suggestions. In the past, I have not been entirely comfortable with something in the art but not said anything. It's definitely better to speak up, that way you get exactly what you want rather than ending up unsatisfied with the work you've just paid for.

While this was happening in February, Mayuran had taken the playtest draft and ran a game for his group. This outside playtest was invaluable. The issues they were unclear on were ones I obviously needed to explain better in the text, and I made changes based on this feedback. He also had several very excellent suggestions about theme creation that made the whole thing really click. He suggested adding in Situation and Villains to the theme document building section, which suddenly makes the theme extremely relevant, and moving from these steps directly into character passions ties the whole game together. It had been good before, but Mayuran's suggestions made the game move up to the next level.

Jenn had done one piece by the end of February, and I had a final draft ready to send to my editor, Charlie Hogan, by mid-March, a bit behind deadline. I sent him the file and he began to go through it. Like Ron, I pretty much take all edits at this stage. I rarely ignore one of Charlie's suggestions, and it has to be something that I feel quite strongly about saving. A couple of Mayuran's suggestions got added in after this stage, but all of the post-edit changes were pretty minor. Charlie is a very detail-oriented man, and he did a great job with Mortal Coil by pointing out where important details were buried in the middle of a paragraph. Many of his edits were to pull out and emphasize some important rule. Charlie had never played the game, nor has he ever played any new school indie game. He was pretty amazed at some of the rules, and was constantly telling me he had never seen an RPG do some of the things the Mortal Coil rules did (I knew better, of course, since I had used just about every indie game idea I ever liked). Actually, the fact that he was completely new not just to the game, but to this type of game, helped a lot. His edits made the rules far more clear and readable than they would have been otherwise.

While Charlie was editing, more art was rolling in. I began to play around with my preliminary layout in InDesign, using the intro chapter to set the page parameters and play with margins and the like. As I did this, I gave Jenn direction on the layout art, since I had a pretty good idea at this point what I was going to need. Jenn put the finishing touches on the art in mid-May, and the final edit came in and I made all the changes in the Word file of the game book. I loaded the game up in InDesign, and began to lay it out. I had all but two images now, and I had Jennifer do the token movement diagrams for me at this time. I built all of those images myself in Photoshop using Jennifer's character sheet, a token graphic, and an arrow graphic that she had prepared for me.

I gave myself a whole weekend to do the final layout of the book, and I was done in about three days with all the final art in. Luckily, Mortal Coil isn't very long, and it was pretty easy to do. The last two steps were the table of contents and the index. I indexed the book by hand on paper at first, going through the book page by page and noting terms and page numbers. I then typed in and sorted the terms in Excel. I then imported the list into InDesign and layed out the index. The book was ready for printing, and I wrote a back cover blurb and loaded it in over Jennifer's image in Photoshop. Time was short, it was the last week of May, and I had arranged to get the files over to RPI that week.

Just before I sent them, I realized I had used the wrong page size in my layout. I changed the page size parameters (which included the margins), and then had to go through and re-lay out the book with the new settings. This only took a day, luckily (man, InDesign is so much easier to work with than PageMaker, which I used to lay out Bulldogs!), and I sent in the files, right on schedule, at the end of May.

The printer had some trouble with the cover image, and Jennifer had to resize it. After this change went in, RPI printed me a proof and sent it out. I got this in the first week of June. I noticed a couple of things I didn't like in the table of contents (things had gotten squished when I changed the page size at the last minute), and I decided I didn't like my original back cover blurb. I submitted these changes, and RPI ripped another proof. Rather than wait for it to be shipped to me, I went over the changes with my rep at RPI, and approved over the phone. This is a bit risky, but I have dealt with RPI enough that I trust them, and my old rep was very competent and detail-oriented. She is no longer with RPI, sadly, and I haven't worked with her replacement enough to know if he is the same sort of person.

Anyway, printing approved, they ran the job, with the completion taking place the Friday before Origins. Once the job was submitted, I started taking pre-orders on IPR. I knew that they weren't going to get the boxes to me in time for Origins, so I arranged for a fast shipment of 30 books to the hotel at Origins, to arrive Wednesday. These came in good order, and I sold out at the convention. The remaining books were supposed to be shipped that same Monday and arrive while I was away at the convention, but my new RPI rep messed up the shipping, and they went out on Friday instead. This did throw a little wrench in my plans, as I had scheduled a July 4 signing with Jennifer, and the books weren't there in time. We signed them at DexCon last weekend instead.

Convention Season

2006-07-19T15:27:00.000-04:00

I haven't posted in quite some time, and I apologize for that. I have been working quite hard for both Galileo Games and Indie Press Revolution for the last month or so:

- Mortal Coil was released, and is now available to order.
- I attended both Origins and DexCon in the last three weeks.
- The quarter ended, and I had to do the books and pay all those crazy game designers on IPR.

Anyway, I will be posting a slew of Actual Play reports over the next week, and I will be putting up a tale of publishing success for Mortal Coil, to contrast my last publishing story about The Legend of Yore.

In the meantime, check out this excellent post over on The Well of Urd. Thor has some great advice that I strongly urge all game designers to think about.

Origins Aftermath

2006-07-06T11:37:00.000-04:00

I have returned from Origins. My fellow booth monkey Alexander Newman has posted a detailed report of our activities there, and his discussion can be found on the Forge: http://www.indie-rpgs.com/forum/index.php?topic=20285.0

There are also a couple of podcasts from Origins where I or my game is mentioned:

Mike Sugarbaker of Ogrecave interviewed me at Origins about IPR:
http://www.ogrecave.com/audio/index.php?id=41

Paul Tevis and Ken Hite talk a little bit about IPR and Mortal Coil in the latest Have Games Will Travel: http://havegameswilltravel.libsyn.com/index.php?post_id=106869

Origins

2006-06-26T06:47:00.000-04:00

I will be at Origins this week representing Indie Press Revolution. The con starts on Thursday and runs through Sunday.

Mortal Coil will also debut at the convention, and I will have books to sell there. The printer is shipping them out today, so I had them send a box to my hotel to have them in time.

Come by and visit at booth 751!

Mortal Coil Available for Preorder!

2006-06-15T11:55:00.000-04:00

It's at the printer now, and printed copies will be coming in by the end of June. Go to Indie Press Revolution to preorder now!

I will personally sign each preorder copy when they are sent.

UPDATE! The lovely and talented Jennifer Rodgers will also be signing all preorder copies!

Playing Trollbabe

2006-06-14T11:49:00.000-04:00

My Friday group was shorthanded last week, so the three of us who were there played a session of Ron Edward's Trollbabe. This is a good, solid game, I was pretty impressed. I definitely see it's influence on Dogs in the Vineyard.

Here's an actual play report: A Tragic Misunderstanding

Mortal Coil Preview

2006-06-09T10:40:00.000-04:00

Hey! Mortal Coil is now at the printer, and will be out by the end of the month. I am going to set up preorders through IPR next week. In the meantime, here's a preview:

Mortal Coil Play Chapter

The good news is that this means I am going to have a smidge more time on my hands for a while! I promise to post here soon, I actually have a couple of things to say that I just haven't had time to write.

What Is Mortal Coil?

2006-05-19T16:01:00.000-04:00

Mortal Coil is a game about magic and passion.

Mortal Coil is about magic. When you play Mortal Coil, your group creates a magical world from the ground up, starting with the setting, all in about half an hour. Mortal Coil is not setting specific--it's wide open. You can create games about ancient gods, flying carpets, student wizards, or all of the above. Every player is able to add new magical facts to the world during play, and the setting evolves and grows as you are actually playing. The only rule is that magic always has a price.

Mortal Coil is about passion. When you play Mortal Coil, you will create a character defined by several passions. These passions tie your character to the situation, to the other characters, and to the supporting characters and antagonists. These passions drive the story, as your character acts on, denies, or changes these things that are important to him.

Mortal Coil uses no dice. Characters are defined by three sets of characteristics. Starting a game takes no preperation, and you get good stories out of it every time. Stories about magic and passion.

Mortal Coil: The 10-Minute Demo

2006-05-12T12:16:00.000-04:00

Over on The Forge, there's some really good advice about convention demos, and some aimed at GenCon specifically. Since I am debuting Mortal Coil at the convention, I am putting together a 10-minute demo and walkthrough for the game.

A demo should be a scenario that gets right to the good stuff, and I am planning on using a scene from an actual game I ran with my group. The setting is Old Gods, where the deities of dead religions gather in a Philadelphia bar, and the situation is a love triangle rivalry between Pluto, Jupiter, and Proserpine. The nice thing about this scenario is that it will be easy for folks to drop into, if they know anything about Greek or Roman myth. Even if they don't, a love triangle is a concept just about everyone understands. Also, it can support up to three players (and in my experience, you don't really want more than this for a convention demo). Another benefit: I only need to write up three characters for the demo.

I am going to take a page from Timothy Kleinert's excellent Mountain Witch demo and do what he did: Write a complete script that anyone could pick up and use. This helps me, because then other people can run the demo easily.

I'll be posting the demo here when it's done.

Mortal Coil Character Sheet

2006-05-09T15:15:00.000-04:00

Another preview:

To add some explication: A lot of the business of playing Mortal Coil focuses on moving your tokens around, and so the character sheet has a big graphical and layout emphasis on those things (with all the little circles to store your tokens in). The bottom of the sheet has all of the "written down" stuff, which you refer to when the tokens are moved and assigned.

I like what Jenn did with the sheet, it is attractive but not busy, and holds all of the important info.

May Day Sale at IPR

2006-04-24T12:34:00.000-04:00

Indie Press Revolution is holding a big May Day sale. Gamers of the world, unite! It's 20% off everything in the store, so great deals on some awesome indie games. Get Bulldogs! for $19.95 and Bulldogs! Races for only $4.75.

They have great stuff over there (I run the site, so I know), so hie thee at once and stock up!

Mortal Coil Cover!

2006-04-13T18:39:00.000-04:00

It has arrived!

Mortal Coil Cover

2006-04-03T14:05:00.000-04:00

I'm practically jumping out of my seat with excitement! I got semi-final sketches from Jennifer today on the Mortal Coil cover. Looks awesome! I can't wait for it to be done so I can post it for all to share.

It depicts the bar from the Old Gods game, with Odin and Juno on the front cover, and Venus, Anubis, and Sedna playing cards on the back cover (Thor is in the background tapping a keg, and there is a drunk leprechaun under Venus' chair on the back, too).

Gone Writin'

2006-03-31T10:03:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the long hiatus. I've been working hard on Mortal Coil, and it's mostly whipped into shape. I made a lot of edits based on independent playtesting, and I think it is just about there. The draft is being edited now as well, and I am planning on starting layout in the next few weeks.

Artwork for Mortal Coil

2006-03-09T14:34:00.000-05:00

For Mortal Coil, I decided to have a unified look in the art. To achieve this, I'm working with one artist, Jennifer Rodgers. She's pretty charged up about the project, and so am I.

The art will primarily be full color chapter heading splash pages. Any other art will be decorative design elements.

The first piece for the Theme chapter is complete, and here is a preview:

Not So Bad

2006-03-01T15:52:00.000-05:00

I wrote the "Play" section for Mortal Coil very quickly a week or two ago. It's all about tips and techniques for creating a good game. Anyway, while I was writing it, I felt it was very half-assed, and when I was done I was thinking it was basically an outline for what I wanted the final section to be.

I just reread it today for editing purposes, fully intending to add a lot of text and expand on things. It turns out that it is pretty good! If I expand it a lot, I'll just end up repeating myself. It's not a college paper! I don't have to pad it out!

Just goes to show that you should never judge your own output at the time you are writing it. Get a week or two of distance and reread it. It might surprise you!

Feeling Shut Down

2006-02-28T11:20:00.000-05:00

Krista and I were talking about a recent game of Mortal Coil (posted as Arthurian Enthusiasm on the Forge by Michael Miller), and she mentioned that she felt I, as GM, was shutting down her contributions in the game. There is some history to this, both on my side and on her side.

Krista has suffered several complete sexist shut-outs in role-playing situations before, she has shared this with me. The guys playing the game derided or ignored any contributions she tried to make, and I don't think this is a unique experience among gaming women. I think she still carries a lot of this around, and when someone contradicts her in a game, this all comes up.

For my part, as a GM I try to take an even hand. I can also be abrupt, especially when dealing with seven players like I was that Friday. Because of my attempt at fairness, I think I might have gone overboard trying to avoid giving special privilege to my own wife. I know I have done that before.

I am not so sure about this time, because Krista, and Jason, who ended up helping her with her character, got to the game late, and missed a couple of crucial details. I think this contributed, because the first couple of things Krista tried to do contradicted things that Kat had done and established earlier, and I was concerned that Kat's contributions not get trampled on. Krista told me later that me cutting off those things really caused her to pull back in the game, and she didn't feel like she engaged the story because she was hesitant to try to add anything after.

It's a rough balance, and I really don't like offending people or making them feel marginalized, and even in a game like Mortal Coil where there is a lot of player contribution to the game, the GM still has a role as moderator, if only because he has the most information at the table. Talking it out helps, but I didn't even realize that Krista was feeling this way while we played, and that makes it really hard for me to deal with at the table.

Mortal Coil Work

2006-02-20T09:29:00.000-05:00

I've been away from the blog for a while because I am trying to finish up the text for Mortal Coil. This should be done and ready for formal playtest shortly. I will probably call for playtesters at the end of the week. That's about when I expect to make any new posts.

In other Mortal Coil news, Jennifer Rodgers is going to do all of the art for the book. She will be doing the cover and six full-color interior images, which will be the main art in the book. All other artwork will be decorative page border and set-out titles. The book will be done in an art nouveau style. As some of the art is completed, it will be posted here and the web page will be updated.

Also, check out the latest play report for Mortal Coil: Arthurian Enthusiasm.

Why Brennan Was an Asshole

2006-01-31T16:01:00.000-05:00

I have mentioned before (just not on this blog) that I used to be a real asshole as a player. I was demanding, and, when bored, totally destructive toward other players in the game. When I actually had fun in a game, I was almost always playing the same sort of character: an arrogant, self-righteous jerk who thinks he knows the answers to everything. These characters viewed the world in black-and-white terms and everyone else was forced to negotiate with the character's world-view in order to work together in the game.

Just recently, however, I played two very different games. In a game of Dogs in the Vineyard, I played a young man who was very insecure, and doubted his ability to be a dog. Then I played a game of Burning Wheel with an extremely naive elf prince. Both were extremely fulfilling experiences, and I got a big endorphin rush from both. The best gaming I have ever had.

Whenever I tried to play naive or vulnerable characters in my games previous to this, I got nothing. This led to the bored, destructive play I mentioned above, because the GM and the other players ignored my issues. When I played a complete asshole, they couldn't ignore my issues and have my character around. My character shoved his issues in their faces, and they reacted. This made me happy as a player, and, for the most part, made the other players happy. Everyone I discussed my characters with, including me, thought that I was playing this type of character out of some sort of wish-fulfillment, that I had some desire to be this morally certain.

It turns out that I was just hitting the other players in the face with my emotional cues because that's what got them out on the table. The new systems I am playing with now, like Dogs in the Vineyard and Burning Wheel, let me explore a full range of emotional issues with my characters, and the other players at the table all help me. I don't need to play the hard-driving asshole anymore to get my play agenda addressed. That doesn't mean I won't play this type of character any more, it just means that now I don't have to.

What a relief.

Dreamation Round Table

2006-01-26T10:11:00.000-05:00

The guys at The Perfect Score recorded the game design roundtable discussion at Dreamation. I participated in the discussion, and you can hear me discussing Fifth World about 20 or so minutes in. I am also a loudmouth, so you can hear me giving advice on some other games in development, too.

Why Is a Raven Like a Writing Desk?

2006-01-25T14:36:00.000-05:00

In case you were curious:

The Hatter opened his eyes very wide on hearing this; but all he said was, 'Why is a raven like a writing-desk?'

'Come, we shall have some fun now!' thought Alice. 'I'm glad they've begun asking riddles.--I believe I can guess that,' she added aloud.

'Do you mean that you think you can find out the answer to it?' said the March Hare.

'Exactly so,' said Alice.

'Then you should say what you mean,' the March Hare went on.

'I do,' Alice hastily replied; 'at least--at least I mean what I say--that's the same thing, you know.'

'Not the same thing a bit!' said the Hatter. 'You might just as well say that "I see what I eat" is the same thing as "I eat what I see"!'

'You might just as well say,' added the March Hare, 'that "I like what I get" is the same thing as "I get what I like"!'

'You might just as well say,' added the Dormouse, who seemed to be talking in his sleep, 'that "I breathe when I sleep" is the same thing as "I sleep when I breathe"!'

'It is the same thing with you,' said the Hatter, and here the conversation dropped, and the party sat silent for a minute, while Alice thought over all she could remember about ravens and writing-desks, which wasn't much.

Old Gods at Dreamation

2006-01-24T12:42:00.000-05:00

Mortal Coil runs again, this time at Dreamation. I had an overflowing session, all six slots were full and Nathan Paoletta joined at the last minute, making this a seven-player session. Also in attendance were Alexander Newman, Keith Senkowski, Thor Olavsrud, Mayuran, and two other players with whom I was not previously acquainted, whose names were Nathan and Jillian, if I recall correctly.

The scenario was Old Gods again, and again we started with the theme document. One of the first things that was established in the document was that gods had no powers unless they were in the presence of believers (or other gods). Again, initial theme facts had a big influence on the tone of the game. Jealousy toward one of the player gods who still had some worshippers drove most of the conflicts during play.

The gods this time: Alexander played Hermes as a bitter delivery man, Keith played Mithra as a completely dissolute and violent addict, Thor chose to play Munnin as a supplier of memories in the form of drugs, Nathan P. played Coyote, who turned out to be the butt of everyone's resentment, Nathan played Xipe Totec, the flayed Aztec god, Jillian was playing Easter, and Mayuran played Sesmu, the owner of the bar.

When the time came around to assign passions, I pushed really hard, which I was thinking was my mistake in the last game. Everyone did as instructed and took loves and hates toward their fellow players. In part because of this, the game took a really dark comic turn, especially with all of the drug themes that were introduced. It played out mostly as a violent, drug-addled farce, with all of the gods attempting to tear each other down. There was a great deal of laughter around the table.

A couple of observations:

1. After running it three times, I don't think improper passion setting is the problem with this scenario. It worked with my home group, but didn't really come across at conventions. This is because there isn't a real point to this setup: no quests, missions, or any sort of outside threat. Really, the scenario needs to play off the relationships between the gods, and that means that it needs pregens. My Apocalypse Boulevard game ran quite well at Recess, but I suspect that was actually a fluke. When I am playing Mortal Coil at a con, I need to take a page from Luke and carefully construct the passions so they interlock and create a compelling situation that can't be ignored.

2. The reward mechanic does something really interesting. There is a pool of tokens in the middle of the table that can be given out at any time, and player can nominate others to receive them (unless vetoed). In the games where it starts to really hum, I noticed that the players have come to an unspoken consensus about what should be rewarded. In Apocalypse Boulevard, it was innovative uses of nursery rhymes to create spells for the children. In the Dreamation Old Gods, it was doing something shocking or unexpected that made everyone laugh.

3. This scenario ended up being very player-vs-player, and I brought in an NPC when things started to drag, just to provoke everyone into actions. The way Mortal Coil is structured, the GM has a huge pile of tokens to create adversity for the players. Since I was doing very little, the one time I drew on this really had a big effect on Alexander. Afterwards, he said he was a little shocked by the amount of force I could draw on in the one encounter where I used these. In Apocalypse Boulevard, with a strong oppositional force that I had to budget my tokens on, this was not a problem. In a game where it is almost all player-vs-player, I had an inordinate and seemingly arbitrary amount of force I could bring to bear. Alexander suggested I play a character next time, and that might be the way to go in a situation like this.

All in all, I was again not completely satisfied with how the game went. Everyone there had a really good time, and we laughed til our sides hurt. I learned some more about the game, and came out with a couple of new small tweaks, so it was fruitful from a playtest standpoint. And everyone is still talking about it, so my own misgivings are probably not shared by the players.

Dreamation: Con of the Designers

2006-01-23T15:22:00.000-05:00

I hit Dreamation last weekend, along with a metric ton of other game designers. It seemed like game designers outweighed actual players by almost two-to-one. Not really, but there must have been nearly 15 designers there. It was great shooting the shit and trying out each others games. If you don't attend Dreamation and you are anywhere nearby, I encourage you to go. You will have a blast, and the face time with the game creators is unparalleled. There are more game designers at GenCon, but you won't get to talk to them for 20 minutes if you want to.

I came in on Friday, and ran The Mountain Witch right off the bat (9:00 am). I had three players, whose names totally escape me (except for Clinton Nixon, but that's because I know him). This was a great session, even if we had a bit of accelerated scene structure. By the end, the characters were almost more willing to murder each other than take on the witch, which is exactly as it should be. So, con off to an awesome start.

I schmoozed and shot the shit with everyone for the rest of the day, and played the wickedly addictive Jungle Speed (beware!). That evening I had a game of Mortal Coil, which shall deserve its own post. I will just say that seven players is just beyond the limit for this game.

Saturday brought a couple of demos, one of Timestream, a very cool time travel game that I would really like to check out in detail (conflict of interest warning: this game is about to go up on IPR). Nathan Paoletta, the designer, also demoed an upcoming game, Carry, about Vietnam-era soldiers that looks really promising. I want to see more of this as he works on it.

I also had the pleasure of sitting in on a Burning Wheel session, run by Luke Crane, the creator, and across the table from Jared Sorensen. This game was all Duel of Wits, and it rocked aloud, that's a fact. It really got me charged up to play Burning Wheel with my own group, a development that is currently in the works.

At last, on Sunday, Jared and Luke put on an excellent game design panel, where even ringers like me were allowed to put forward game design ideas for a roundtable discussion. It was really, really excellent. I heard there would be a podcast, and I will definitely post a link when it goes up. This session was standing room only, and Rebecca, a con organizer, was extremely pleased by this. She said Dreamation panels were never that popular.

I was also video interviewed for The Perfect Score, and I will link that as well, when it goes up.

[Mortal Coil] Actual Play at Recess, Part II

2006-01-17T14:05:00.000-05:00

I ran Mortal Coil at the latest Recess game day in New York. There was time at the mini-convention for two sessions, and rather than run the same one twice, I decided to try two different scenarios. The first one was really successful. The second one fell pretty flat for me, due to a number of issues. The concept for this second session was called Old Gods, a game about the gods of dead religions who gather in a bar in Philadelphia. The Old Gods premise is far more demanding of the players, since there is no built-in conflict. The players must create and generate this conflict with their character conceptions and passions, and if I am to run this one again, I will need to really push everyone to create really punchy, conflict-laden characters. In this particular session, I totally failed.

Even with the limited time at a convention game, I start with only the basic concept and the players and I build from there. From the get-go, this game of Old Gods was different from the one I ran in my own group at home. In the home group, we had established that the gods were immortal, and if they were killed in mortal form it was inconvenient, but they could return. When the Recess group started, one of the first facts established is that although gods could not die of old age, they could be killed, and when they were, it was permanent. This created a far more grim air to the game than we had in the previous game, and points out how the system allows each group to put their own individual stamp on the game world.

Adding facts to the game world was the part of the system that several players liked the best, and they put this to good use during play, creating new powers and abilities for themselves. This had a big effect on the actual play, as I will describe a little later.

When we got to aptitudes (a set of traits Mortal Coil uses instead of skills), people really started to struggle. Interestingly, it was much harder for people to come up with aptitudes for their gods than it was for the street kids in the previous game. Players wrestled with these for some time, and several players even forgot to create any magical aptitudes for their characters and had to change them afterwards.

Then the real trouble began. Players began to choose passions for their characters, and I explained what these were and what appropriate passions should be. Passions are the hooks for the character, what motivates them to act and therefore what ties them into the story. I advised everyone to choose passions that referenced the other characters at the table, and the bar that the gods all frequent. Only one player did this, and this was Bill, my friend who had participated in the original playtest and had sat in on the earlier game at Recess. Even then, Bill’s character turned out too passive. I don’t remember what else he took, but they were all about calm and immobility (he was playing a Japanese earth god). One of the players chose such totally inappropriate passions that I immediately spotted them as a problem, and convinced him to change them out. The two passions he originally chose were for watching people and for reading books, which would definitely have made the character a passive observer for the whole game.

As I mentioned above, none of the other passions related to any other character or to the bar. My biggest blunder here was not catching this early and correcting it right away. I moved forward with the game, and the fact that none of the passions interlocked in any way led the game to be a meandering mess, with no real exciting hooks, and I grew increasingly desperate to engage any character at all. In the end, I railroaded a scene with an assassin and gathered everyone together in a quest-style mission which I thought totally sucked.

The players all seemed pleased, however, and certainly they expressed no disappointment, and most of them were quite interested in the system after we finished playing. I wish this had been a better demo, like the first session was, but it seemed like I was the main one who noticed the serious lack (or maybe they were too polite to say it). I ended this session early because my son was starting to come around and bug me to leave.

If I run this game at any future convention, my main goal when crafting the characters will be to ensure that the passions are strong and interconnected, since that is what creates really good play with this game. I learned something, definitely, but I still feel bad that this scenario was basically a failure at this event.

[Mortal Coil] Actual Play at Recess, Part I

2006-01-17T14:02:00.000-05:00

I ran Mortal Coil at the latest Recess game day in New York. There was time at the mini-convention for two sessions, and rather than run the same one twice, I decided to try two different scenarios. The first one was really successful. This concept was called Apocalypse Boulevard, a game world inspired by this article. The second game, and my problems with how it turned out, will be posted later.

Even though these were convention games, I started only with the most basic concept and then built the theme document with the players. The theme starts out with the basic premise of the campaign, and all of the players, including the GM, have a pool of resources to use to add to this document. Building the starting theme facts and characters took less than an hour. Even though I only had a four-hour slot, I think this step is really important and I probably won’t skip over it even for full convention demo games. Short booth demos would be a different matter, but there is plenty of time in a full session and this part earns much enthusiasm from the players, and everyone is really bought in to the game once we are done.

To start the theme document, I mentioned the article, which many of the other players had actually read, but a couple weren’t familiar with it. The gist, that kids in the shelter created their own religion, and had access to some magical powers to protect themselves from harmful forces that adults couldn’t see, were accepted by everyone. The other basic fact that was established was that all of the spells the children used would be based on nursery rhymes or fairy tales.

As the players began to put together characters, I advised them to create interlocking passions, so the characters would be tied together and it would encourage the group’s story to be about each other. The players definitely stepped up here, and we had many characters who loved and admired other player characters. There were a lot of passions for protecting each other, and protecting their parents (if they had any). This is great grist for the mill as a GM, since it was very easy to create a strong external threat to get everyone working together and focus the session.

Aptitudes, which stand in for skills (sort of) in the Mortal Coil system, are generally a hard concept to convey, but everybody in this session picked it up pretty quickly. I don’t recall explaining more than twice, which is good. In playtest, this section of the character has generally proved most troublesome for players to grasp. The main difficulty is that an aptitude is expressed as a noun, rather than a verb or adjective. For example, a kid can have an aptitude called liar, rather than the skill of lying or lie.

When actual play began, people really got into playing their kids, using kid-like interpretations of the world and celebrating the small victories they had over some clueless adults. Mortal Coil uses a pool of bonus tokens as a reward system, and the players have a lot of control over how these are handed out. These flowed easily in this game, and we had only a couple left in the pool in the end. Most of them were given for innovative or surprising uses of nursery rhymes and fairy tale references, so this really encouraged everyone to come up with creative uses of this setting fact and created some really strong flavor for the game.

The basics of plot were strong external threat, in the form of some skinheads (led by a demon in human form). One of the kids picked the demon’s pocket in the first scene, and then the rest of the scenario was all about the skinheads trying to get the stolen artifacts back and the kids planning how to stop them from threatening the shelter and their families, as well as the other kids.

Mortal Coil has a currency system that allows players to add detail to the game world, and the few problems that arose were basically clashes of vision for the facts being introduced. These weren’t really problems, as they were quickly solved by consensus.

There was a divergence into some investigative activity at the library, a scene which would normally have been a bit tedious, but in fact ended up quite entertaining. Setting stakes for the information-gathering conflicts made them very interesting, and role-playing the poor librarian, confronted by some unsupervised kids with very uncomfortable questions about swastikas and the First Amendment made for an amusing scene.

The final conflict ended up a bit rushed, because I was running out of time, and I skipped over some of the villains’ actions and mostly concentrated on the demon alone, but that was a decision I made in the interests of time and the conflict seemed plenty exciting.

There were two main things I learned about the system in this game, which didn’t affect play too seriously, but that clearly need better clarification in the rules. First, large group conflicts will not always resolve in a single set of actions. Everyone declared actions and we determined the results, but once everything was resolved it was still unclear who would win the original stakes set for the conflict. I just had everyone initiate another round of actions, and then a third round when the conflict was still not resolved at the end of that. By the resolution of the third round of actions, the demon had decisively lost, and the kids won their stakes.

The other issue is how characters help one another. This isn’t clearly outlined in the rules, and it really needs to be. The system I used for this session wasn’t quite right, and I want to outline the precise procedure in the rules.

All in all, I don’t think the players really noticed this, especially with the first issue, since that played out how I would want, I just hadn’t written it down.

This was a very successful play test of the rules, and the players all seemed to have an excellent time. The rules were easy to explain and there were very few snags at all. That made me extremely happy, and I went into my next sessions with my hopes quite high. That session was something of a disaster in my mind, and worthy of its own post (coming shortly).

Dreamation

2006-01-17T12:06:00.000-05:00

Dreamation was a huge indie-fest last year, and this year looks even bigger. I am really looking forward to hitting the con this weekend! I am running Bulldogs! on Friday night, and Mortal Coil Saturday afternoon, and I'm looking forward to catching up with all of my friends who are going to be making it. Clinton Nixon, Keith Senkowski, Michael Miller, Jennifer Rodgers, Luke Crane, and loads more. Come by if you can!

Conventioneering

2006-01-13T15:20:00.000-05:00

I've been really successful at local cons here in the NY/NJ area getting an indie games track together for local cons. This idea is an easy export, so to find out more on how I did it and the support IPR is offering, check out the new Indie Press Gang forum.

Currency

2006-01-04T15:27:00.000-05:00

Lately I've found myself very interested in resources available to players and GMs to spend in the game. I really like this as a way to increase the ability of players to influence the outcome of events in the game world, and to make statements about their interest in what is happening in the game. I included the bonus tokens in Mortal Coil that serve this purpose, and one of the eureka suggestions I got there was to use bonus tokens as a GM resource as well, rather than fiat-based assessments of difficulty.

Interestingly, I think my main influence in this area was Deadlands, which uses poker chips in a similar fashion, held by both the GM and the players and spent to bump actions taken in the game if they fail and the player really doesn't want the failure in their task-based resolution system. This actually works really well, and gives me, as a player, a feeling that I have some recourse besides simple luck of the dice.

Another idea I have had for many years is a game utilizing the murder mystery genre. This is the main fiction genre that is still almost completely untapped by RPGs. The issue is how to create the mystery in such a way that it is engaging to play and also does not require tons of up-front prep on the part of the GM. To tie this back to my discussion of currency as a game mechanic, one of the ways to do this might be a sort of bidding system where players spend a resource in order to get their idea about the mystery written into session plot. This is barely a kernel of an idea right now, but it is definitely the most fruitful thought I've had about a mystery game to date.

Merry Christmas

2005-12-23T10:44:00.000-05:00

I've definitely heard that the RPG industry doesn't have a Christmas rush. Sales at Indie Press Revolution this year definitely put the lie to that collective wisdom, however. In the first three weeks of December, sales were two to three times greater than usual. In the last week, it's dropped back down to a more typical level. I think Christmas has a lot to do with that.

I wonder if this isn't because of the longer print cycle of indie games. It's tougher to plan for Christmas wish-lists on products that have a three-month shelf life, but indie games are around for a long time, and many people plan to buy games for months or even years before they get around to doing it. Much easier to put a product like this on a Christmas list. No matter the reason, that's good news for both IPR and small publishers!

[Mortal Coil] Old Gods Get Mean

2005-12-19T16:56:00.000-05:00

So we got together again last Friday for another playtest session of Mortal Coil. This was a follow-up session to the one I wrote about last month, and we preserved the characters and the theme document from that first session. This session gave the rules a much more vigorous workout, and I felt that as the GM I was able to introduce a far more compelling conflict. The first session was a basically a quest story, where the characters tracked down and recovered some purloined beer from their favorite bar. While everyone enjoyed it, and I felt the rules had been very successful in the session, it was a bit lame. I had chosen to play off of a conflict in everyone’s character. They all had written Passions related to this bar, and a threat to it was the easiest one to come up with on the fly in the first session.

One of the ways this session was more successful is that I applied better stakes to the conflicts, and the thread at the Forge about this issue was invaluable. When I finish writing up the rules, I plan on tightening up the instructions on how to do this considerably.

Here’s what happened in play. We had only two PCs this time. The player of Loki didn’t show, and my wife had let me know beforehand that she wasn’t up to playing that night, so we had Pluto (Russ) and the leprechaun (Bill) as our player characters. I had prepared a few NPCs for the evening that tied directly into the character’s Passions (surprisingly easy to come up with, actually—it took me about half an hour to put nearly a dozen together).

So, Pluto and the leprechaun are having a drink at the bar. They notice a newcomer, and Pluto learns this fellow is Coyote. He mostly seems to be there to mess with the other gods. He is defined as a trickster god, and this actually gives this NPC access to the facts that were created by Loki’s character in the last session since both are the same type of god. Soon after, Jupiter arrives, accompanied by Proserpine, Pluto’s old flame. It becomes clear that Jupiter is here to rub Pluto’s face in the fact that Jupiter has picked up someone his brother lost. Juno also happens to be in the bar, and attracts Pluto’s attention. They decide to try to humiliate Jupiter and peel Proserpine away from him. The leprechaun is happy to assist, and so, it turns out, is Coyote, after the leprechaun lures away the ladies he had been wooing. The only new fact in the game is established at this point: that leprechauns can charm and distract people with song and dance making their victims lose track of time, but that if the victim can outperform the leprechaun, the tables are turned and the leprechaun is charmed instead. Coyote then turns his attention to Proserpine under Jupiter’s nose.

Pluto tries to distract Jupiter to allow Coyote the chance to move in, using one of his Passions (a hatred of more successful gods) twice in the same conflict. This causes the Passion to increase and another to fall. Pluto fails this conflict, the consequence being that Jupiter now knows what Pluto is up to. They come up with a new scheme, Pluto conferring with Coyote in the bathroom and getting his tacit approval. They will try to lure Jupiter into a drinking contest with the leprechaun, a contest that the leprechaun is sure to win. Russ wanted to add a new fact about Jupiter, that he was proud and easy to lure into contests, but I countered that this was not a folkloric fact about Jupiter. None of us could come up with a good example when this had happened in myth, and referring to the rule on our theme document that the facts must be based in real folklore, this got dropped.

Coyote managed to lure Jupiter into the contest, and while the leprechaun packed away considerable quantities, Coyote used his Magician aptitude to fake drinking. Jupiter lost miserably, and passed out. Coyote then scooped up Proserpine and left the bar.

The next morning, Jupiter awoke, and went hunting Pluto seeking revenge. The leprechaun trailed along behind, in case he was needed. Jupiter confronted Pluto in his office, and Jupiter decides to get physical with Pluto. Russ decided that he wanted Pluto to resist with his will rather than try to get in a physical conflict with the far stronger Jupiter. Not wanting to call on his hate a third time, Russ decided that all of this had created a new Passion for him, a Hate for Jupiter, and dropped another Passion he had never used. With the help of this new Passion, Pluto managed to face his brother down with willpower alone. Humiliated, Jupiter stormed out (greatly weakened by both this and the drinking contest, in which he had fatigued himself).

The final conflict took place that night, when Pluto returned to the bar and found Jupiter trying to scam on the bar owner’s wife. Both the leprechaun and Pluto joined in to force Jupiter to leave, and he had little choice at this point, slinking away three times denied.

All in all, it was a satisfying session. Pluto was definitely the spotlight character this time out, although it Loki’s player had made it, things would have been a lot more complicated. I plan on focusing on the leprechaun next time I run this.

Several rules were invoked this time that worked very well.

An appeal to add a fact was vetoed based on a previously established rule in the theme document.
Pluto’s Passions changed a great deal during the game; once because he called on the same Passion more than once, and another time because he felt that a new Passion would be more appropriate. Russ’ comment was that the Passions really reflected a dynamic and evolving picture of what was important to the character, which is the purpose of this mechanic.
Fatigue gained from going “all-in” really had a telling effect this time out. Basically, characters have a pool of action tokens they can use in a conflict to perform different acts. If the player decides to commit all of the tokens for a single action, one of them is spent (temporarily, they do regenerate). Jupiter ended up having to do this three times, and by the last conflict he was seriously weakened, so much so that he had to retire and come back later if he wanted to win anything.

I see several things I want to clarify and tighten up in the rules as written to better reflect how we were actually playing, but the rules were humming this time and everything worked together the way it was meant to. We even remembered to throw around bonus tokens for any of the cool actions people took during play.

The Legend of Yore: A Fantasy Heartbreaker Story

2005-12-14T15:42:00.000-05:00

Our tale begins long ago, in 1986. Our hero, a young lad of 16, begins his long journey into game design innocently enough, on a family car trip. Bored, the boy decides to design his own role-playing game. Thus begins a journey that is not to end until the next century, a story full of reverses, disappointments, and the cold clutch of reality.

In 1986 our hero’s experiences with role-playing are quite limited. He has played Dungeons & Dragons, RuneQuest, and Middle Earth Role-Playing from Iron Crown Enterprises. This is the extent of his experience. Still, he has been exposed to a number of different and innovative sets of rules, and has found them lacking in some respects. As he designs his own game, he comes up with several ways to streamline and simplify rules that he has found in these other games. His game, at this stage called “Archers & Alchemists,” contains a couple of innovations: a basic life path system that leads to career-based rather than class-based characters, and a table that reduces combat actions to a single simple roll. The game is fun, and he and his friends enjoy playing it. He continues to run it for his friends through 1992, by which time it has acquired a new name, “The Legend of Yore.”

At this stage, it is suggested to him that perhaps he try to publish this game. Up to this point, the thought had not crossed his mind, but now, the seed has been planted. Why shouldn’t he get his game into print? It is as good as, or better than, many other games out there. He begins to research what would be required to do this. He talks to hobby store owners, he talks to his gaming friends, and his relatives. He learns of the distributors who buy games and sell them to hobby stores. From one hobby store owner, he hears some words of discouragement: “My advice—play this game with your friends, don’t try to print it.” Our hero dismisses this advice, and decides to print his game.

Now resolved, our hero gathers money, setting up a company and selling shares to family and friends. With this capital in hand, he seeks out artists willing to work for free or for a small fee. His friend offers to edit the book for him, free of charge, and buys desktop publishing software to do so. Our hero spends nearly a year getting his book ready for publication, and finds a local printer. Once all of the work is complete, he prints 1000 copies of The Legend of Yore. The year is 1996. He sells the first few to his circle of friends, and begins trying to promote his game.

Two distributors show interest, and place orders for his game. Our hero goes to local hobby stores and runs demos. He attends local conventions and runs the game. One of the distributors even writes a full-page article about his game in their quarterly circular, praising The Legend of Yore as a great new fantasy RPG. He buys a booth at GenCon to promote the game. Then, disaster strikes. A flood damages much of his stock, and several hundred books must be destroyed. He has a lot of lightly damaged stock as well, some of which he takes to GenCon with him. Cutting the price of the flood-damaged books to $5, he sells out of his stock at GenCon. Flush with success, he returns home hopeful and excited.

It turns out that the low price was the main driver of sales at GenCon, and the word-of-mouth he hoped for never materializes. Not deterred, he begins a supplement for The Legend of Yore, consisting of a GM’s screen and four adventures. He continues to promote it locally and at local conventions, getting a few sales in this area. Troubling news begins to surface, as two hobby stores contact him, letting him know that their distributor has informed them that he is out of business and The Legend of Yore is out of print. He tries to interest hobby stores outside his area by sending them a free sample. This does not result in any orders.

This turns out to be the beginning of the end. Our hero returns to GenCon the next year, and sales are meager. Those few who drop by indicate they hoped for a supplement or something at this point. Sales, never stellar to begin with, continue to decline gradually over the next few years. In an effort to kindle more interest, our hero sinks another few grand into a printed supplement, ordering 900 copies. Sales do not improve, and no distributors will take the supplement.

This is how it continues, until sales finally trail off to nothing in 2005. The remaining stock of The Legend of Yore, about 300 copies now dried out and falling apart, along with the majority of the supplement printing, is pulped.

--------------------------------------------------------------

I hope you found this story interesting. This tale of woe is not a tragedy, however. Although The Legend of Yore was a waste of money from a business standpoint, I do not regret publishing it. It got me started on the game design train, and I am really happy where that train has taken me now. I also learned a lot of valuable lessons along the way which led directly to my current POD printing philosophy, and to the creation of IPR as a way to help other folks avoid the problems of the three-tier (really four-tier, these days) distribution system.

The Legend of Yore is in many ways an archetypal fantasy heartbreaker, and I find it so problematic these days that I would only republish it with a complete rules revision. I find many aspects of the game world embarrassing, and would only be satisfied with a complete rewrite there as well. Someday I may do these things, but I have a lot of new projects I am interested in now. I think somebody said that everyone should write a fantasy heartbreaker, and this is mine. I learned a lot about game design on the way, as well. Doing something is the best way to learn it, and I learned a lot the hard way.

One thing I absolutely do not regret, however, was ignoring the advice not to publish it at all and just play it with my friends.

Recess: This Is How We Roll

2005-12-08T15:27:00.000-05:00

Check it out: Recess VII is taking place January 14th, hosted by NerdNYC. This is an awesome game day, well worth your time if you can make it.

I'm going to run two sessions of Mortal Coil there, it's beta debut! Come and see.

Forge Forum Focus

2005-12-07T15:21:00.000-05:00

Just a quick note for those interested. Clinton has established a forum on The Forge for Galileo Games. Feel free to visit and to post.

The Forge

2005-12-02T12:47:00.000-05:00

OK, so Ron Edwards is closing the RPG Theory forum and the GNS forum over at the Forge. This is a bit significant, since these fora were spots where some really fruitful discussion took place (albeit two or three years ago). A lot of criticism gets laid on the Forge (just look at the thread this spawned on RPG.net), but my personal opinion is that what has happened in the last two or three years represents a Renaissance in RPG design, and most of the credit for that can be laid quite firmly at the feet of the Forge in general and Ron Edwards in particular.

Exciting stuff has come from here, and gaming will never be the same because of it. A huge crop of new designers have been tutored by the Forge, and these ideas continue to seep outward. Who knows if the big mainstream games will ever fully be on board with new theoretical ideas, but the Forge has functioned like a salon or some new art movement in the overall moribund world of RPG design, and this will ultimately change things in very fundamental ways. It might be years, but treating game design as an art that deserves to be studied and discussed is a great accomplishment. My design has improved incredibly, and I am now able to get what I want out of a game when I finish it.

This has been a fairly rambling post, but I can't emphasize the importance of the Forge enough. All in all, these changes there are for the better, and I continue to be excited about what is going on in our little game design community.

[Mortal Coil] Playtest Version

2005-11-29T12:06:00.000-05:00

I thought I would post the latest rules update here. This is the version I sent out for playtest, and I will probably do all updates off line. Don't expect to see anything new until the print version comes out next year.

[Mortal Coil] Additional Thoughts on Old Gods

2005-11-28T14:35:00.000-05:00

As Ron Edwards describes over on the Forge, a good Narrativist game is defined by premise. Having run a session of Mortal Coil, a game with a very Narrativist goal, the premise has presented itself in a way that, as the game designer, I find very satisfactory. The world-creation process of Mortal Coil, expressed in the theme document, combined with character creation, exemplified by the character's Passion stats, creates premise through a collaborative process, with all of the players having input, including the GM (in this case, me).

We started with the basic theme; old gods of dead religions gathering in a bar in Philly. This has a melancholy feel from the get-go, and from this starting point, the players and I built up the game world, including a rule that rewards reminiscing in play mechanically. When the players moved on to character generation, they chose some very telling Passions. Examples: Loki's fear that he will be the last loser left in the bar when everyone else moves on (which manifests itself as Loki trying to keep everyone else there, even if it means foiling their plans to get out); Pluto's hatred of gods more successful than himself, paired with a duty to see to it that things remain in their proper order; and, our volcano goddess' hatred of active volcanos.

All this adds up to one thing in the premise: envy. That is the true theme of the game, resentment and fear of failure. All of this built up by the players when we started the game.

I am really eager to run another session of this game and put in some serious bangs that relate to this theme.

Mortal Coil Playtest Report

2005-11-21T14:18:00.000-05:00

I ran the first playtest for Mortal Coil last Friday. I had four players in attendance, Bill, Eric, Russ, and Krista. Krista dropped out to go to bed about an hour before we stopped playing, but she was present for character creation and most of play.

A brief primer on Mortal Coil: this is an RPG with a supernatural theme. The game is completely diceless, using instead several types of tokens that players can use in a variety of ways. Players have a pool of magic tokens that they can sacrifice to add to the game world, so the GM and all of the players at the table create a world collaboratively while playing the game. Any time a player wants to, he can create a new fact about magic in the game world. All new facts also have a price, however, some condition that must be met so they work, or some situation in which the fact does not operate. Characters also have passions, attributes that describe what the character cares about. These have a strong mechanical effect if you can bring them into play.

After we all gathered Friday night, we began with the first step in playing Mortal Coil. This is the theme document, a sort of constitution for our game world. I had a basic idea: a seedy bar in Philadelphia that is frequented by gods of dead religions, gods that have no worshippers any longer. I had done some internet research, and come up with a couple of gods to use as NPCs, a bartender and his wife/girlfriend, and a little goblin character who works in the bar. This is all the prep I did for the game.

When we began, I proposed my idea, and introduced the NPCs. Everyone was on board with this, and we established the basic ground rules for our game. Since this bar existed in the real world, magic would be powerful, but any magical effects would be explainable by natural phenomena. We also established that any magical creatures and effects created should be based on actual folklore. Russ then proposed that gods can regain a spent magic token if they reminisce about the "good old days" with fellow gods, the idea being that this would help maintain the tone of the game. I also added the fact that gods could assume human form, but there would be some tell-tale sign that they would always have which someone in the know could use to identify them. With these basic guidelines agreed on, we were ready to begin character creation.

Everone began to consider their options, and came up with their characters. Russ created Pluto, the Roman god of money and the underworld, envisioning him these days as a failed stockbroker. He is still attracted to money because of his godly domain, but transactions these days are far more complex than he can handle, and he just isn't very good at it. Eric decided to play Loki as a bad standup comedian. He wants to be funny, but just can't pull it off because he's a bit too mean-spirited. Bill chose to play the only non-god in our entourage, a leprechaun who hangs out at the bar because the beer is so good. His concept was basically a grouchy little bastard who really resents having to keep track of his stash of gold. Last, Krista decided to play a Polynesian volcano goddess whose volcano had gone extinct, and now the locals weren't afraid of her any more and she didn't get any sacrifices.

These were all great concepts for the game, which was shaping up to be a semi-comedic story about a collection of cosmic losers. A couple of facts got established in the character generation process, mostly in the area of supernatural aptitudes (such as "leprechaun," "trickster god," and "volcano goddess"). What could be done with most of these aptitudes was not yet established. The facts about these aptitudes that were added during character creation were that leprechauns could teleport themselves from place to place, but not while they were observed or restrained (the price), and that the god of the underworld could pull items from his pockets, but nothing particularly valuable or large.

We then began to play, opening with Pluto going on about how things had changed, and how you used to be able to buy your way into the underworld with two coins, and now even panhandlers didn't want your change. This led into some fun free form banter than helped set the mood. At that point, Ninkasi arrived to reveal the hook for the evening. The bar had run out of beer! She swore that there had been enough for months more in the kegs below the bar, and everyone wandered down to investigate. Looking into the huge tank, the gods (and leprechaun) discovered that someone had dug up underneath the bar and drained the beer away through a hole in the bottom of the keg. Pluto, Loki, the leprechaun, and the volcano goddess decided to investigate, since all of them had at least one passion relating to the bar (mostly loves, but Loki had a fear that he would be the last loser there once everyone else had gone on to other things).

The group followed the tunnel below and came out in a railyard, where some folks wearing boots had loaded the beer onto a truck and driven it away. Loki decided to add an ability to shapeshift to his trickster god aptitude. I set the price that he sometimes forgets who he really is after he changes shape, getting too into character. He turned into a bloodhound and started to trail the truck. Pluto decided to call Ra's hack service, and a taxi soon showed up. They followed the truck to a small grotto of trees in a suburban neighborhood, and found a large rock there with steam rising from beneath it. The group decided to knock and see who was home. I sacrificed a magic token from my GM stash to create a new type of creature, the Norse myth dwarf. A surly, dirty dwarf answered, and then the group managed to push their way in to the dwarfs' underground home. There was their stolen beer! They tried to convince the dwarfs to give it back, failed, and then got into a scuffle. Pluto called up some spirits of the dead (he had a 'speak with the dead' aptitude, with the price that he had to make a blood sacrifice, as in the Odyssey, to summon them up). He now decided to add an ability to command the dead to his 'god of the underworld' aptitude, and Bill suggested the price that he can't ask them to do the same task again for a year and a day afterward. Passions also showed their power when Loki called on his fear of being left behind in the bar to bring some serious beat-down on the dwarf he was fighting. The ghosts ended up scaring off the rest of the dwarfs, and the group returned to the bar with the beer, triumphant. Ninkasi gave them all a kiss (except the leprechaun, he got a pat on the head), and all was right with the world yet again.

This was my first full playtest of the rules using the passions, aptitudes, and magic tokens in their current form. It went really well, there are only a couple of minor tweaks I want to perform on the rules before I send them out for third-party playtesting. I am really happy with the way things came out. For some reason, I am always surprised that these rules work as well as they do.

Some of the comments afterward were to emphasize the theme document in the rules text. This really is the most important thing for satisfying play, since you basically set out your goals and basic ground rules here. Our game ended up very jokey, and some players voiced the concern that if you were trying for a really dark tone, that could be a problem. After some discussion, though, everyone agreed that the basic premise of this game creates that sort of tone, and that you could use the theme document to create a more horrific or suspenseful game.

One thing everyone agreed on was that the magic token mechanic was great. They loved the freedom of adding new facts to the game, and they thought that a price attached to each fact was really cool, too, since it creates an instant limitation on whatever power or detail that is added to the game.

Another issue that came up for me was the number of action tokens characters get. I upped the starting total in this revision of the rules, and it seemed like folks had a bit much to throw around. One thing I definitely need to emphasize in the rules is that if any conflict is going on, there needs to be multiple things for people to use their action tokens on. If there is only on goal, I'm afraid it might be far to easy to overwhelm it with tokens. This is the area I want to do the most playtesting, I think.

Old Gods Update

2005-11-18T15:58:00.000-05:00

Just a quick update, since I am making some preparations for tonight's Mortal Coil playtest.

I have decided (thanks to some additional research by some awesome nerds) to add the goddess Ninkasi to the mix. She's Sumerian, and prepared beer for the gods, so how could I not include her in this scenario? She and Sesmu, from my last post, will own the bar together. They make a cool couple, I think.

And, to round out the NPCs for this setting, they have an employee, Topfboden, a biersal. This surly little guy will clean up around the place.

I am really looking forward to this session! More on how it goes later.

Sesmu

2005-11-16T13:50:00.000-05:00

Preparing for my Old Gods game this Friday, I did some research for the bartender. I wanted a relatively obscure god of alcohol, not Bacchus or Dionysus. Still, I wanted the guy running the bar to be connected to drink in some way, and via the awesome Encyclopedia Mythica, I found this guy:

Sesmu
The Egyptian god of oil and wine pressing.

That's all they say about him, and with an article that small, I figure he's obscure enough. I've never heard of him, after all. So, Sesmu it is.

After a little additional research, I found some additional facts that make me want to use him even more. Not only is he the god of wine, thanks to the wine press, but he is also the god of executions, because of the resemblance of wine to blood, and the fact that beheadings take place on a block reminiscent of a wine press.

A very interesting back story for a guy who runs a seedy bar these days. I'm looking forward to seeing how this game world turns out.

[Mortal Coil] Old Gods

2005-11-15T14:19:00.000-05:00

I am preparing for the first playtest session of Mortal Coil this Friday. I have two ideas for sample games that will be included in the text of the book to demonstrate how you start a campaign and how you play. One is very low magic, the other has lots of magic. I figured why not start out with the big magic, so I am going to run the Old Gods campaign idea.

The basic concept is really just a sketch, because with the new magic token system, players will have a lot of say in how things work in the game world. I wanted to start off with just an idea, and let it take shape as we build characters and create facts for our game world. So, Old Gods:

There is a bar in Philadelphia, a seedy old place on a rundown, out-of-the-way street. This bar is special, however, because it is frequented by old worn-out gods. No one worships them anymore, but they still linger, walking the earth, and dropping in to this bar for a drink every once in a while.

I'm interested to see where this goes in play when everyone begins making characters and defining what these gods can do.

The Wild Woman

2005-11-14T15:42:00.000-05:00

I am resolved to post here more often. I let weeks go by sometimes, and that will not do.

Anyway, because I like fiction, too, here is a brief vignette in tribute to one of my fantasy goddesses:

I found it some distance from the beaten path, my shortcut growing longer by the moment. There, in a little grotto formed by a broken, rotting stump, someone had placed her. She was only about six inches high, carved from a tree branch, her body made to look lithe and attractive. Her arms stretched above her neck, but she had no head or face, only new stems and leaves growing from the old dead wood between her shoulders. Around her were nuts and berries gathered from the woods, and a squirrel skin laid like a robe about her feet. As I gazed at her, I felt the stillness grow deeper, as if the eyes of every creature of the woodland were upon me. Even the trees leaned more closely. My breath caught in my throat, I hurriedly laid my own sacrifice at her feet, and moved away from the unknown shrine. When I found the path it was welcome, the hand of other human beings clearly cut through the forest. I felt the wild close by, now, as I gathered my cloak around my shoulders and stepped more quickly on my way. I would take no shortcuts through these woods in future.

[Mortal Coil] Play-Testing

2005-11-09T15:46:00.000-05:00

Sorry for the long drought, here. I've been busy and distracted, but I really should have been posting here more.

I have finally nailed down the last rules regarding Magic tokens in Mortal Coil. I think the game is in good enough shape to do some initial play-testing, and then I can refine these rules. At that point, I will reach out and ask others to give it a try (although it needs some serious editing before then--I doubt anyone could decipher it at the moment).

Anyway, I am quite pleased that I managed to get to this point for this game. It's been years and years, but I think I finally have a handle on what I want Mortal Coil to do.

Playing Capes: Mayhem in the Museum

2005-10-19T11:59:00.000-04:00

I went to Ubercon in New Jersey this last weekend to run full-session demos of indie games. Our first real session of play was on Friday night, when another scheduled game failed to go off, Russell Collins and I played Capes with a globe-trotting Australian (he had scheduled a stopover in the tri-state area specifically so he could come to the convention).

Our Australian friend was a good-natured and enthusiastic player, and after the first turn he quickly grasped the Capes mechanics and was soon playing like a pro. I believe this was Russell's first time playing Capes (although I may be wrong). I have played it several times in demos, taught the rules to several people, and run a full session with a couple of friends. This was, however, the first time the rules really clicked for me.I think the reason for this was that I had finally gotten to a comfort level with the rules to allow them to fade a bit into the background, and although I was pursuing conflicts that I wanted to win, as well as introducing conflicts with the express purpose of earning story tokens, I was also engaged with what was happening in the SIS. My previous play experiences had ended up very mechanistic, and I had some trouble engaging with the characters in any way in previous sessions. Interestingly, I think it has a lot to do with the play styles of those sitting across from you. In order to really enjoy this game, you have to equally enjoy the superhero story you are creating along with enjoying the game aspects of the mechanics, such as earning story tokens, getting rid of debt, and earning inspirations.

The basic profile of the game was two villains (me and the Australian) and one hero (Russell). I set the scene as a museum opening with all the leading lights of the city in attendance. My character was a Mind-Reader/Seducer, up against the hero Shapeshifter/Hotshot. Another villain, a Teleporter/Older-but-Wiser, was there as well. One of the things that made the three-way work so well was the fact that neither villain had the same goals in the scene. The teleporter was working some angle to replace the mayor of the city, while my mind reader was trying to lift a jewel from the opening. The two villains working against one another is what allowed the sole hero to be effective in the scene.

My favorite moment, however, was when the Australian, having earlier been thwarted in his Goal: Get the mayor to resign, won a conflict Event: The wall collapses on the exhibit. Russell's hero, having moved the civilians out of the way during the back-and-forth on this event, let the Australian's villain win that one, not really caring about the outcome at that point. The Australian promptly narrated that the wall collapsed on the mayor, killing him (and later convinced the hero character to run for mayor in the deceased man's place). This guy really got the mechanic of the game, and we were all surprised and delighted at how that one turned out.

[Mortal Coil] Magic Tokens

2005-10-04T15:05:00.000-04:00

Going further on the Mortal Coil development, let's review the setting statement:

Mortal Coil is a game of emotional drama with a supernatural theme.

We dealt with the emotional drama portion of this with the passion system. Now let's take a look at the supernatural theme. I have envisioned Mortal Coil taking place in what is expressly our own world, but with fabulous or magical details added in. The game was originally conceived in large part as an alternative to Vampire: The Masquerade, but I don't want to limit its scope at all at this point. The more I worked with the system, the more I wanted to make the magical portions at least partially customizable by group, and this is where I still want to go with it. Mortal Coil vampires, for example, should be defined by the group itself.

To do this, we need some sort of currency within the game that can be spent to create this content. I already have a set of tokens called Magic Tokens, but I am not entirely satisfied with what they do at the moment, and I want to give some power to all players at the table, not just those who decide to play magically based characters.

Mortal Coil is intended to be a fairly general supernatural game. All kinds of different campaign worlds can be created for potential play, and the tools for doing this will be in the hands of the players. They will collaborate to create a unique game world, with its own rules of magic.

What Magic Tokens will do is create a special sort of world-building right for players when they use the tokens. Sacrificing magic tokens will allow a player to create a new magical fact in the game world. When character generation begins, the players will begin to create the sort of world they want to play in, and decide what the level of magic will be and begin to define its characteristics. When creating a character, facts can be established by sacrificing magic tokens to buy magical abilities for the characters. These facts will then be established parts of the world.

For example, a player building a vampire character can draw on all sorts of folklore to create this type of character. Are vampires burned by sunlight? Repelled by crosses? Can they fly? When the player creates the character and adds these magical characteristics, they become facts established in play that now apply universally. Likewise, during play, Magic Tokens can be sacrificed to establish facts about magic in the game.

The exact mechanic is still a bit in flux, but I will post more as I work it out.

Game Orders

2005-09-27T15:27:00.000-04:00

I'm sure everyone is on the edge of their seats waiting for me to report on all of those games I ordered a while back. Yes, they all came in, all within about 5 days of placing the order, so great service. A quick note: I don't represent any of these games through IPR, but I might at some point, and I have actually talked to a couple of these publishers about the games. Take what I say with grains of salt to taste. I will go into each one in detail in seperate posts, but here is just a bit about very first impressions:

Breaking the Ice: I got this one first, about two days after I ordered it (Emily must have dropped it in the mail pretty much the same day). The game is a half-size booklet, staple bound, of roughly 30-odd pages. It has a cardstock cover, with color, and some clip-art looking pieces inside. There is also an illustrated pair of players, depicted consistently throughout the book, and on the cover, all by the same artist. This is pretty cool, it visually ties the book together, and lets you put faces to the sample players in the examples. I thought it was very interesting that the artwork featured the players, rather than some hypothetical characters in the game.

Under the Bed: This one blew my mind, just from the basic layout. It is a little booklet, about four inches wide and two inches tall. It runs maybe 20 pages. The rest of the game is a set of cards that are used when you play. These rules are no longer than the ones you find in a typical board game. Awesome! It's all black and white, even the cover, which was glossy cardstock, and there is only clip art inside. Still, this is a really cool looking little game. It really doesn't look like an RPG.

Primetime Adventures: I got this one next, with a note on the envelope letting me know that Bulldogs Rules. :) This game has a half-size format, with a pretty crude perfect bind. I'm not too confident that the binding will last through sustained use, but pretty much all of my game books fall apart, so not really a big deal. This has a two-color cover with an old TV picture tube on it. The art inside is much more typical RPG art, with depictions of characters and scenes from the game. Since this game is about role-playing a fictional TV show, it makes sense to show the various characters.

With Great Power... : The packaging I received this in made me laugh. The game came bagged in a polyurethane comic bag, with a strip of scotch tape holding it closed, just like a graphic novel fished out of a comic store back issue bin. Very cool. That really sets the tone for the game. Interestingly, it doesn't have an awful lot of art in it, considering its a comic-themed game, but what there was was pretty good. There is even a rules example section laid out graphically, like a comic, which was a very nice touch I thought.

Coming later, actual reviews of the content. I haven't been able to play any of these yet, but I hope to get a game in for at least one before the reviews start coming out.

Thoughts in Tandem [Mortal Coil]

2005-09-20T12:05:00.000-04:00

For those of you not in the know, yesterday was my wedding anniversary (conveniently placed on National Talk Like a Pirate Day, to help me remember). Krista and I have been married for 13 years. What might this have to do with gaming, and Mortal Coil, you ask? Well, when you have been together with a person for as long as we have, sometimes your mental energy just links up.

As I was driving home from work last night, I was going over some things in my head regarding Mortal Coil. I am working on the design for this game, as I have been for many years now. It has been a real struggle lately, and the design work I am doing has drifted, rudderless, for a bit now. I was trying to figure out what to do about this as I drove, and came to the conclusion that I needed to determine the focus of the game in order to focus the mechanics (more on this in a bit).

But what should happen at dinnertime? Krista, unprompted, turns to me and says, "What is Mortal Coil about? What is the point of Mortal Coil?" I hadn't mentioned that I had been thinking about that very topic as I came home, it just popped into her head roughly the same time it had done so in mine. Who says telepathy doesn't exist? (And who knows which one of us thought about Mortal Coil first!)

So, what is Mortal Coil about? Like mentioned in my previous post, Dead Drop and Focused Design, the very first step in game design really needs to be an answer to this question. Mortal Coil had its origin (original working title Darklands) as a home-brew alternative to the classic Vampire: The Masquerade. Our group had grown a bit disenchanted with the White Wolf system, and I developed a supernatural game using The Legend of Yore system. As the years went by, I tweaked and mangled the system for Mortal Coil until it no longer resembled its original form in almost any respect. The basic problem I was having with it was that there was no focus. It was a combat/magic/everything else system. I needed to decide what sort of game I wanted Mortal Coil to produce, and design for that.

Here is the new focus for Mortal Coil:

Mortal Coil is a game of emotional drama with a supernatural theme.

The key to getting the game there lies in the newish mechanic called Passions. To get the play where I want, these Passions need to be the central mechanic. Here are some non-tested notes for the Passion mechanic:

Everyone has a set of Passions, rated between 1-5. There will be a total of 5 points distributed among these Passions, in any way the player sees fit (1-1-1-1-1, 1-2-2, 2-3, 1-4, 5, etc.). Passions of rank 5 are obsessions, not too emotionally healthy for the character. 4 is borderline.
Characters have a set of Passion tokens per session equal to the number of Passions they possess (the above examples would have 5, 3, 2, 2, and 1 respectively). These tokens can be spent in play to add the Passion rank to an action. Players can choose which Passion to spend the token on (you could spend it on your 4-point Passion twice, for example, rather than having to spend it on the 1-point Passion and the 4-point Passion).
If you spend more than one token on the same Passion in a session, it will rise one rank. Since you may only have a total of 5 points in Passions, another Passion must go down.

Obviously, this gives a mechanical advantage for bringing a character's emotions into play. The GM will be able to call on Passions occasionally, too, if he feels it relevant for the Passion to oppose a player's action. This system also gives the control of this key mechanic to the player.

I will need to see how this works practically, but it is a start, and I think it moves Mortal Coil in the right direction.

2005-09-16T16:24:00.000-04:00

This was posted on The Forge by Albert of Feh:

I have to say, I really like the explicit mechanical success == narration rights paradigm. In more traditional RPGs, I (as the GM) have always felt like I was some sort of black box responsible for the state of the SIS. With the exception of the most basic and isolated character actions, all input had to go through me. While I could hand full control over to a player for spotlight moments, there were never any guidelines for when to do it, what the scope of that narration could be, or anything else. It was really tiring to be that black box.

I've found that, with InSpectres and tMW, I get to open that box and let all the players muck around inside along with me. And suddenly I have effective guides for how to pass around the tools inside and let everyone have a go. Instead of pulling it all along by myself and ending every session utterly out of energy, everyone is putting work in, and so I end up with more energy after three hours of play than I had when I began!

You know, I think there's no going back.

I am totally there. One of the things "traditional" RPGs demand is a lot of GM preparation. I just don't have the time or inclination to do this any more. I generally figure out one or two plot points and drive the action that way, but mostly play herd over the players' desires and actions for direction. It is really refreshing to play a game where the rules take some (or all) of that burden off of you as a GM.

Game-Buying Spree!

2005-09-12T16:04:00.000-04:00

I just went on a major game-buying spree (I am using my Galileo Games account in the name of research). I just picked up Breaking the Ice, Primetime Adventures, Under the Bed, and With Great Power. I have heard a lot about all of these games, and I probably would have picked them all up at GenCon if I had been able to go this year. I will give reviews when they come in!

Pools!

2005-09-12T14:05:00.000-04:00

I have had a bit of a breakthrough on The Fifth World, my Shadow of Yesterday-based game rules that I am working on. I was having trouble with one of the core concepts, called Outside points. The main barrier I was having here was that the consequences of using these points was too dire. No one would ever want to transgress because of the negative effects. I finally had an epiphany for these, and that is to use the pre-existing pool system in TSoY.

Now, characters in The Fifth World will have three pools, as follows:

Inside: The inside pool represents the character's connection to his community and clan. This pool is refreshed by engaging in community-building: chatting, helping your neighbor, doing maintenance around the village, etc.
Outside: The outside pool represents the character's alienation from the People. The more transgressive acts (crimes) the character commits, the higher this pool grows. These dice can be used in conflicts, but they will have later negative consequences when used. This pool is refreshed by isolating oneself, spurning neighbors or family, and generally acting antisocial.
Renown: The renown pool represents the character's fame. This will be important for increasing ranks in kiva societies, and is refreshed by bragging about one's exploits. Renown is neither outside nor inside, but can lead in either direction.

These are not entirely fleshed out yet, but this is a good start on where I want to go with this game.

Dead Drop and Focused Design

2005-09-07T15:52:00.000-04:00

One of the games that is percolating in my head is called Dead Drop, a Cold War-era spy game. I've definitely had a bit of a block about this game for a while. I know what I want to do, but I haven't had any great ideas to solve the problems. I just read Ben Lehman's post in his blog, and his contention about focused design got the gears grinding.

Here is what I see as the main challenge in Dead Drop: determining what the final theme and shape of play will be, and creating a strong design that supports that theme every time. Reading and playing games like Dogs in the Vineyard, My Life With Master, Inspectres, and The Mountain Witch has really opened my eyes to this type of design, and one of the features these games share is a very focused nature of play. Rather than "here is how to make your character, now go and do whatever you like," these games say, "here is how to make your character and here is the scenario you will be going through every time." Variation occurs in play as the players deal with the same or very similar situation with different characters and different takes on the material. I think this style of play would be really good for a spy game of the sort I am trying to develop, and that will help me constrain the general scope of play as well.

This is a pretty fundamental design philosophy. Choosing to take Dead Drop in this direction will have a huge impact on the ultimate play experience. I do think I can make a really intense, immersive spy game this way. The key questions of Dead Drop are how far will you go, and at what point do your actions begin to cheapen your very goals. A tightly focused design can really bring these to the forefront.

Legend of the Five Rings

2005-08-26T16:07:00.000-04:00

I play Legend of the Five Rings with my regular group. We started this game with our group in Colorado about seven years ago. After Krista and I moved to New Jersey, we started up with a new group, with Krista keeping her character from the old game. This has been a long, dramatic, and fun game, with the characters reaching a level of power now that they are going to shake the foundations of the Empire.

This experience leads to the point of this post. I have read a number of critiques of L5R, including this rather disastrous account of a GenCon game. The main thing I keep asking myself is why are we having such a good experience with this game, when others are obviously not? I don't think the game is particularly poorly written, it is a good example of a large RPG publisher's design-by-committee method. It does get a bit muddled when it comes to source material, and the high-ranking NPCs really seem to fall easily into "GM PC" disfunction.

I really have two points here. The first is that the game has a very coherent point to play, which is to accumulate Honor and Glory and increase your character's station in society. There are a number of discrete mechanics which directly support this, and they work pretty well. They could certainly use better guidelines, beyond pure GM fiat, but if implemented as it seems they were intended, they do this. This has been some of the most satisfying advancement in my own game, and now that the characters are all fourth and fifth rank samurai, they are well-established, famous, and esteemed members of their respective clans.

Second, L5R works best if you don't hew too closely to the metaplot. My game works well because I use all of those rich NPCs as accessories to my player characters, not the other way 'round. Why have seven NPC Thunders when the PCs could perform that function just as well? I have found in setting-rich games that it is best if the setting revolves around the characters and their actions. That's where the fun is.

In conclusion, I have a somewhat ambiguous review of the game. If protagonizing GM techniques are used, you can get some rewarding play out of this game. The text does support a very spectator-based game as well, and may in fact slip that direction most of the time. I don't have enough direct evidence to say one way or another.

GM Techniques - an Epiphany

2005-08-23T16:53:00.000-04:00

Krista started an online Harry Potter game for some offline gaming friends. Three of us made up characters, and then made initial posts, about a month ago. That is where things pretty much stalled out. I have been talking with her, and she was sort of at a loss about how to get things going. I recommended kickers, a concept from Sorcerer. A kicker is an event designed to start play with an exciting and unavoidable scene. The basic idea is you describe an event central to your character's concept that your character cannot ignore. I wrote a new post for my character that incorporated a pretty big one.

My character’s parents were accused of being Death Eaters and were killed by Aurors. The kicker is that he receives an anonymous note telling him that the truth about his parents will be revealed, he just has to meet with the note-writer at a particular time and place.

After this, the game still didn’t go anywhere. While Krista and I were packing last Saturday, we got to discussing game design theory a bit, as I was putting my game books in boxes. As she has done in the past, Krista expressed her annoyance at my game theory babble, saying she really couldn’t tell what practical use it was (a testament to my rotten explanatory skills, I would say). Then we began talking about the structure of play in Dogs in the Vineyard and The Shadow of Yesterday, and how the players’ choices pretty much create the plot and drive play.

She had an epiphany. I finally managed to explain this. She explained to me that she had been having all of this trouble all along because she was trying to create a plot, and then couldn’t figure out how to work all of the characters in. And she was having trouble coming up with a plot in the first place. Suddenly, a weight had been lifted from her shoulders. She could let us do the work, and worry about NPCs and backstory as the players created scenes and supporting characters with our contributions. Now she is excited about running the game and is eager to get things moving.

It felt great for me to be able to help her make a breakthrough on this game, and to finally describe all of this theory bullshit in a way someone who hasn't been discussing this for years could understand. When folks talk about a “great GM”, they are usually talking about someone who listens to the players contributions and makes game play about them and their characters. This concept is so fundamental to how to play an RPG and have a good time, and yet it is so rarely communicated. I’ve run games instinctively, learning these techniques over the years of role-play GMing that I have done. Through trial-and-error I discovered what techniques work. I rarely start with any materials, just a basic idea of possible villains and a direction for the plot. Then, I take whatever the players contribute and construct the game around that. For those of us raised on "modules," this can be a difficult transition.

Game Design Related

2005-08-23T16:22:00.000-04:00

I've created this new blog specifically for game design related posting. I was doing a lot of this over at my LiveJournal account, but I think I really have two "audiences." One is fellow game designers and enthusiasts, who aren't as interested in the ho-hum posts of everyday life, and then those friends who may be interested in these day-to-day details but are bored silly by game design posts.

So, why not have two blogs, I say. This one is for game related stuff, and I will be tracking the progress of my various projects here, posting problems and things I am thinking about, or just general ruminations on game design. The other blog will be more personal and will deal with my life in general.