A little love for my players.

Just a brief word of appreciation for my players who never cease to surprise me. I sat down to game last night fully expecting to have to argue a little about what I want to play, and maybe even having to compromise and play something that wasn't very high on my list of choices.

Without hesitation they picked my top two campaign suggestions with only one minor change suggested. They even volunteered to play Spirit of the Century, which makes me very excited.

After a rather disappointing last month it's great to see that my players are still right there with me.

Playtesting opportunities and back to gaming.

I was pretty excited to see that playtesting is about to start on the Dresden Files RPG. I mentioned on an earlier blog that I'm pretty excited about this game, so I went ahead and applied for a slot. I'm not hugely familiar with the world yet (having only seen the TV show and read Storm Front), so I doubt I'll get in, but the idea appeals to me.

Besides, playtesting means that the game may actually be coming close to a finished product, which excites me a great deal.

In the mean time, my various groups are all starting up their new campaigns. I've run two sessions of my GURPS game (tentatively titled "Eternal Warriors") and one session of Cold City, which is my first time using the Cold City Companion. It's a freaking great book, but anyone who has read my blogs knows what a fan I am of Cold City. I don't know why, but the darn thing just beats me over the head with cool-factor.

Tonight I'm starting my next game, for which I am trying something new. I won't tell anyone what we're playing. I know it's kind of starting to annoy people, but I'm a little tired of everyone showing up to character building sessions with a character in mind, or worse, a sheet in hand. If no one knows what to expect no one's mind will be working over time before we even get a chance to talk about what kind of group we want.

It's my hope that we'll get there, I'll present a couple of world options, we'll pick one, and then the players will talk about what kind group they want and what kind of adventures they want to play. With any luck we'll have character concepts in mind before we even talk about which system we'll use.

That's my hope anyways.

Tonight will likely be all character/group building, or at least I hope it will be. If so, we'll play this game again next week, and the week after that we'll start playtesting Chains of Aether. Since I had my car accident I haven't gotten the chance to work on it at all, so it'll be good to get back to it and finally get my chance for a "proof of concept."

One final comment. In my accident I lost my iPod. I'm not really sure if it flew out and someone picked it up (I checked the roadside after I got out of the hospital), or if perhaps the tow guys stole it (a possibility since I'm also missing some CDs that mysteriously vanished from my case), but regardless, I haven't caught any of my podcasts in the last few weeks and I'm really starting to jones a bit. I had no idea how much I had come to rely on them for entertainment during my drive into work.

With any luck the jerk at State Farm that is handling my claim will get off his butt some time soon and start reimbursing me for my losses.

The dangers of loose notes.

Last night, on my way into work, my car was hit head-on by a drunk driver. I have some injuries, but I'm more or less ok. There was some bleeding near my heart, but it resolved itself without surgery and I have a bruise on my lung that make deep breaths painful, but other than that there's mostly cuts, bruises, and the usual airbag/seatbelt injuries.
My car, which was less than a year old, was totaled, but even that's not the bad part. The bad part is that I keep a lot of notes on game stuff in my car. Just interesting ideas or what have you that I write down on what ever is handy.

These were unfortunately scattered all over the road in the crash, and during the night while I was in the ER they all blew away and were forever lost.

Remember that, though laziness may seem to be harmless, I've now lost months of ideas that I have no way of getting back. Put to put good ideas on recoverable media quickly and back up often.

As for me, well, my memory is too bad to really do much about what was lost, but I'm going to hope that I can rebuild the important stuff, or at least remember what it was that inspired me.

Buying attributes, and a small problem

I think I figured out what I want to do about attributes for Chains of Aether, which is good I suppose. There are seven attributes (including Centering), rated from 1 (human perfection) to 6 (unplayably low), with 4 representing human average.

For PCs I'm, considering a point buy for attributes. The hard part is coming up with a good number to use, but for now I'll go with my gut and hope playtesting gives me a result I like. For now I'm starting with 12 points, using the following table:

6: Not available
5: +1 point, no more than one stat this low.
4: 0 points.
3: 1 point.
2: 2 points.
1: 4 points, no more than one stat this high.

So, that done I do have one problem. I have no idea how I want to handle damage. For a penalty I'm thinking of lowering the number of cards available in a character's card pool, but I'm not sure entirely how to implement it.

I think if I can get past this hurdle I'll be ready for a "proof of concept" playtest. It'll be enough to just play through a quick game and see if the system works the way I want it to before pushing on further.

It turns out that I'm a cheapskate...

Who knew?

I was over at Half-price books today and stumbled across one of the later Dresden Files books. I really liked the TV show, so I decided to check it out. Unfortunately they didn't have book one, so I went over to Hastings to get it.

Since when do paperbacks cost $9?

Don't get me wrong, I bought it, but wow it's apparently been a while since I bought a new novel, because I had no idea they cost so much.

It's funny really, I have no problem dropping $50 for an RPG I'll likely never play, but a book the cost of a movie ticket shocks me.

Ah well, I'm really looking forward to it, and apparently I need to get out more.

Speaking of the Dresden Files, I'm totally stoked about the fact that it's being made into an RPG. This is partly because watching it made me really want to play, but mostly because Evil Hat, makers of two of the best RPGs I've ever read are putting it together.

Man I hope it comes out soon.

The basic mechanic

The basic mechanic for Chains of Aether is pretty simple. Basically you just add your attribute plus skill (lower is better) together. This gives you the target number for a task of average difficulty. You then play a card. If the card's value if above the target number, the task is a success. The higher it is above the target number gives you the degree of success.

For tasks that are more difficult than usual you would increase the target number. For easier tasks just increase the value of the card.

So, why the cards and card pools are important:

The basic idea of card pools is to allow the player to think tactically a bit and hopefully to encourage him to describe his actions with little fear of them failing. Under most circumstances you will know whether or not you action is successful ahead of time because you get to decide which cards you are playing.

The other reason card pools are nice is because they allow for Chaining. I'll go into that in a bit more depth some other time, but the basic idea is that the number of actions you are capable of in a round is only limited by the size of your card pool (though you can spend to add items to a chain). As you describe your actions, you play a card.

I leap up on the table [play a card], kick the guy's shield out of the way [play a card], punch him in the face [play a card], and stab him with my sword [play a card].

This gives two benefits. First, the only action that really matters is the last one, but you increase the degree of success by the amount that each action beat its target number (target numbers are set by your lowest skill used), less one for each action attempted (this number needs to be playtested, but it feels right for now).

Second, each chain has a pay-off. The strength of the pay-off is determined by the number of actions successfully chained.

Like I said, I'll go into this in more depth later, especially its non-combat applications and how it works with allies, but hopefully this is enough to give you the basic idea.

Ok, I'm pissed

I found out at the end of last week that the place I had set up for my gameday fell through.

We were supposed to be doing it in two weeks.

Now I'm screwed. Luckily there wasn't a huge amount of money involved or anything, but I bought some prizes, printed fliers, that sort of thing, and now I have no idea what to do. With zero time left and no where to host it, I'm likely to have to postpone at best, and cancel at worst.

This crap makes me angry. You know, as a business owner I can't even imagine doing this to a potential customer, especially one who was intending on bringing in a great deal more potential customers. I know it isn't limited to gamers, but you'd think that people who play games would at least take them more seriously. The guy actually said, "Yeah, I've know we couldn't do it for a while now, but I didn't know how to tell you, and I knew you were busy getting ready for GenCon."

Getting ready for GenCon! He knew at least four weeks ago?!

Arg. I've spent the last week trying to find a decent place, and short of throwing myself on the mercy of the local FLGS I have no idea where else to try for a decent price. Heck, even if David (the LGS owner) did let us do it there, which I doubt, since Dragon's Lair seems to be phasing out RPGs, there isn't time enough to change the location without changing the date.

At this point I'm considering scrapping the whole idea and just trying to put on a little mini-con this spring. By then I could gather some cash and rent a real space, with a real contract.

The problem is, though I know Austin is a good gaming town, and I know central Texas needs a decent con for gaming, I wonder if the number of people who would come would make up for my out of pocket expenses. I wouldn't mind losing a little money to get the chance to do something cool for local gamers, but I don't want to lose my shirt and then have no one show up.

I frustrate myself sometimes.

I mentioned in my very first blog here that I wanted to do a little game design work, but I'm having several issues, and even though I know they're mostly in my own mind, I can't seem to get past them.

Right now I'm working on two games, but one is definitely on the back burner. The other, which I'm tentatively calling Chains of Aether, evolved out of that one, but since I think it'll be a bit easier I've decided to focus on that one for now.

It really started as a solution for an issue I'm having with my other game. I wanted a fairly typical
roll-under percentile system, but I wasn't content with the degree of randomness that a straight percentile roll allows.

Unable to find a good solution I came up with something that I thought offered some predictability and had some potential for an interesting tactical twist. Basically it works like this:

Players have a stat called Centering. It basically represents perfect balance in one's life. The six other stats, which govern the usual things (combat, magic, intelligence, social acumen), all circle around Centering. Raising these things makes you better in the field they represent, but the further any stat is from your Centering, the smaller your die pool is. Hopefully this encourages balanced builds and gives non-magical or unenhanced characters a reason to shine without making focus characters any weaker.

Die pools are important because players roll a number of dice equal to their pool at the beginning of an adventure. Then they line the dice up in front of them, and choose the ones they want to use each time they attempt to use a skill. This gets rid of most randomness and adds a tactical element to the game. Players must choose when to use their high rolls, while bleeding off low rolls on easy or unimportant tasks.

When a die is used, the player rerolls it and adds it back to their pool. The difficulty here is that, should you only use high rolls, eventually you're going to run out and you'll only have low rolls remaining. That's why having balance is important. Large dice pools mean lots of dice to choose from.

Die pools also allow for Chaining, which is a little complicated, so I'll save that for later. Basically it just means creating action chains by sequencing the dice from your pool (and possibly the pools of allies who are assisting you).

The problem is that having a lot of dice just sitting there on the table is asking for trouble. While at GenCon I came up with an alternate idea. I would use cards instead of dice. Cards are easy to hold in large numbers, and much less likely to be knocked over. I really liked the idea, but it didn't really fit with what I was trying to do in the other game, so I spun the idea off into a game of its own.

The problem now is that I'm left with a conundrum. I have no idea what the new game is to be about, and it frustrates me because I can't just think of something. Every time I think about the game I focus on what the characters can do rather than who they are, and that's not what I want at all.

It's an old problem of mine, and one I don't know how to get past. Whenever I design a game starting with the rules I always focus on powers over story or characters. I don't know what it is about my brain that just shuts down, but I do much better design work when I start with a solid game concept first, and just let the rules grow around it.

I guess that's it, that's why I frustrate myself. I know I have this problem, but I have no idea how to get around it.

Playtesting group

I was listening to a podcast (Voice of the Revolution I believe) and thinking a little bit about what I wanted to do with my group when an idea occurred to me.

I spend a lot of time playing. Right now I'm going to be running games three times a week, and playing in another game every-other week. The problem is, I ended all of my games before GenCon, and I have no idea what I want to play with all of these groups. Then the guys mentioned how hard it was to find good playtesters, and it occurred to me that it might be a lot of fun. I've run some playtest groups in the past, but since I have three separate groups of veteran players right now, it might be a great time for me to look into doing it again.

Anywho, I think it might be a good idea to start looking into the idea. If there really is a need, I think I'd really like to volunteer my group for the task.

Reviewer for sale or rent.

Thanks to some good advice from CW Richeson and a suggestion from the guys at Zeitgeist Games I've decided to start reviewing game products. I'll publish reviews here, at ENWorld, and over on RPG.net.

Unlike the informal reviews I did over on my other blog I'll do my best to give clear, in depth reviews on as many products as possible, and where possible I'll playtest materials before publishing my thoughts.

This'll give me a chance to continue contributing to the RPG community in some small way, and it'll give my group a little variety in the games we play, something we really enjoyed about working on the ENnies.

If anyone has a product they'd like to see me review, please just let me know. My collection is pretty extensive, and if I have it I'd be glad to talk about it. Right now I plan at least one review a week (to be released on Mondays) starting September 17, when my personal schedule slows down a bit. If I can get something up before then I will.

If anything should be submitted for review it'll go straight to the top of my list, and I personally plan on a two week turn around. Barring emergency I should always hit this, unless we need a little bit more time for playtesting. My schedule allows me plenty of freedom to read, write, and play.

Anywho, thanks to CW for the suggestion, and thanks to the guys over at Zeitgeist for getting me started. If anyone has questions or idea for reviews, let me know here or at jeramyware@yahoo.com. If you email me, please put the word [Review] in the title so my spam filter doesn't eat it.