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Kanker’s Monkey: Fall of the Sorcerer Harish

By | 21 September 2011 | General | No comments

Behold, my entry to Ryan Macklin’s first(?) “Flash Game Design Friday.” It’s restricted to 500 words or less, and uses the principles: two dice that you don’t add together, and a countdown mechanic. 

“On the rise of the fourth moon in shadow of Anok the Sorcerer Harish harvested the souls of all the Kanker’s Monkeys of Malantha, save one.” -Kanker

Monkey Vengeance is a competitive roleplaying game where each player assumes the role of Kanker’s Monkey as he tears his way through Harish’s fortress seeking revenge. Each player needs the following:

  • scratch paper
  • writing utensil
  • six sided die (d6)
  • ten sided die (d10)

Dice

The d10 is a counter that tracks of how many complication points each player has ranging from 0 – 9. All players begin with 0 complication points, more can be earned. The d6 is rolled to determine the level of success of failure for a scene, these rolls can explode.

Monkey Creation

Goal

Each player begins with the partial goal “Harish doomed my species to extinction, therefore I will…” players must complete the goal by defining what they intend to do to Harish.

Limitations

Kanker’s Monkeys have great supernatural powers, you could think of them as something like Neo from the Matrix. The problem is that most of the monkeys never realize their potential. Kanker’s Monkey did. Defining limitations on this power keeps play in check, and allows the players to wind back their complication counter on a one for one basis.

Play

  • Play begins with the player that can most quickly recite the alphabet backwards.
  • Play passes to the left after completing a player’s scene

Scenes

  • Each player’s scene consists of the following:
  • Frame the scene by describing the environment and starting complication.
  • Other players then add complications to the scene by decrementing their complication dice, a player cannot face more than six complications in any given scene.
  • Negotiate the stakes for the scene with other players, and describe how the monkey deals with each complication in the scene.
  • Roll the d6. Success is achieved if the result of the roll exceeds the number of complications in the scene by less than three. Great success is achieved is the roll exceeds complications by more than three; turn back the complication die by one. Fail to achieve the goal if the roll is below the number of complications. Negotiate concessions against the objective with other players based on degree of failure, and turn back the count down on the complication die by one.

Confronting Harish

  • Players must achieve four successes before facing Harish. The confrontation scene varies in that there is no resolution roll: automatic success. Each opposing player introduces a complication to the scene for free.
  • Describe how Harish is deposed in vivid detail accounting for complications in the scene.

Winning

Win by being the first to find and defeat the sorcerer Harish. If multiple players achieve this goal in the same round ties awarded to the player with the best final scene. If the group cannot decide who who won, contested players should play best two out of three “ball in a cup.”

Down the Goblin Hole

By | 11 September 2011 | General | 2 Comments

In answer to a request for additional information about running the Goblin Hole, this post expands on the details provided in the previous post.

The Goblin Hole is an dungeon starter written by Marshall Miller for Dungeon World. It consists of a series of questions, impressions, dungeon moves, custom moves, things, and monsters. The basic GM goals and agenda are also listed for quick reference. Impressions are basically one liners to provide inspiration for encounters, the rest are fairly self explanatory for those familiar with Dungeon World.

When I attempted to run the Goblin Hole, I grabbed the sheet, and decided to wing it. I was playing with a small group of players who were not overly demanding on environmental details. So I was able to string together a loosely defined dungeon based on a subset of the impressions. It worked pretty well, but it missed a few fundamental elements.

The most basic missing element was a map. Granted, a map for this is not specifically necessary, I could have spent a few minutes sketching out my own, which I should have done, but didn’t. Luckily that never came back to bite me. Had I been playing with my normal group it would have because one of my regular players has to exhaustively search every inch of everything.

The bigger issue was basically that the starter was an incomplete front. I am not sure if this was intentional or not, but it stopped this starter from being a good pick up a play supplement. While most of a front is there, its missing grim portents, and faces. Dungeon World is so big of relationships, it felt weird for there to just be an implicit void. I almost wonder if the format would be better if it was organized like a front with some sections intentionally left blank so the GM remembers they need to fill in those details. In the case of the later I can see these supplements are great resources for games. The GM could grab a relevant starter, and fill it in with details from an existing front that the players are engaging with.

My only real complain is not a show stopper, and that is the formatting. I found the layout, and typography difficult to read. I have bad eyes, so this is probably not an issue for other people.

Ultimately, I was pretty happy with it even though I am pretty sure I did not use it as intended. And, I would recommend the use of the dungeon starters to others with the points I made above.

Dungeon World – Don’t Mess With the Paladin

By | 3 September 2011 | General | 2 Comments

Recently I had the opportunity to run two sessions of Dungeon World. First, I ran the adventure starter, Goblin Hole for a small group. And then, ran Purple Worm Graveyard for a larger group. Although both these games were run with different players, there was a common occurrence between the two: the paladin killed another player.

In the Goblin Hole adventure the paladin slew the thief. Granted this was an accident since he one shot her. And the decision was not made lightly as it was the result of a considerable amount of griefing (the thief did not like the precepts of the paladin’s order). In the second adventure the effort was more intentional. As the paladin went charging into a room the ranger attempted to trip him. This lead to a rapid series of events that resulted in the paladin beating the ranger to death. The odd thing in the second game was that no one tried to stop the paladin. They either stood their in shock, or healed the ranger between blows. It was a very strange occurrence.

Aside from this oddity things seemed to run pretty well. Character creation was a breeze, and there were no problems with the “no duplicate classes” rule. We had a good round table Q&A to establish bonds.

None of the players were familiar with either Apocalypse World, or Dungeon World, but this was not a limiting factor because of the focus on character activity rather than rules guiding activity. In fact the more rules the players learned the worse it got, because they stopped focusing as much on what their characters were doing, and starting reading moves as menus.

Really the only major issue I ran into was with the larger group. Players felt combats required “rounds” where everyone was afforded an opportunity for action. This felt most natural from them being primarily traditional gamers. The issue that I had with it was that it was forcing disengaged player to participate in scenes they had no interest in. To me, one of the benefits of conversation actions is that it allows players with investment in the current activity to fully engage the system, while allowing those who don’t to get a breather. I would have much rather the group broken up by their focus so we could have flipped spotlights around, but the notion of “don’t split the party” was too ingrained for the one shot.

Generally speaking I am pretty happy with the system, but I think I would like to run and play in some more games before making a final assessment of it.

Extending Action Point Utility

By | 21 August 2011 | General | No comments

4e D&D is a game that is designed for combat as all the mechanics of the game sing within. Outside of combat, play is more loosely defined and most of the game’s mechanics are no longer engaged. In this post I am taking a look at the utility of action points.

Action points are only usable within combat, they serve no other purpose than to give a player a free standard action once per encounter. It seems to me that we can open this up and come up with other uses for these action points. For inspiration, I have pulled from the concept of fate points from FATE.

On the right we have a sample power to replace the standard action point. Basically, we’re looking at an at will power that can be employed for a variety of purposes, many of which do not specifically apply to combat. While the power is listed as no action, it is limited to once per round to prevent excessive use. Let’s take a look at the possible effects we can achieve with this new action point.

Gain a standard action this turn

This effect is the standard action point effect, and is restrained by a special condition that it can only be used once per encounter. Its a solid effect, and there is no reason to change it here.

Gain a +2 bonus to a non-damage roll

This is straight forward, and perhaps the least useful effect for the power. It only grants a +2 bonus, but it can be invoked after die roll, which can be a life saver.

Press an advantage for a +4 bonus to a non-damage roll

This is largely situation. Basically, what we are looking at is allow a player to exploit a logical advantage they have within the fiction that is not regularly supported by the mechanics of the game. For example, a character may be attacking with a height advantage, or bringing up damaging evidence in an argument that sways the crowd in his favor. Situational bonuses are a pretty common DMing practice, this is just applying a specific mechanic for it.

Make a declaration

Basically, this allows a player to assert a minor fact into the fiction. This is not indented to hand wave obstacles or instantly solve problems. For example, a character finds himself in a dark dungeon without any of his possessions. He finds an unlit torch, and spends an action point to make a declaration “they didn’t find my flint and steel” so now he can light the torch. Not a huge deal, but helpful. This could also be used in other situations, for example the characters encounter a soldier. She happens to be in the army one of the characters is/was in. That player makes a declaration “I know her from the war.” While not directly important the declaration introduces some interesting possibilities for the story.

Invoke for Effect

This is similar to the the concept employed by press an advantage. Frequently in play there are events that occur that would naturally result in specific consequences that are not supported by the mechanics of the game. For example, say the characters set a boulder trap, and a monster springs the trap. The boulder strikes the monster, and does its damages, but that is it. So, one of the characters invokes an action point for the effect, “the boulder knocks the monster prone.” Again, nothing game breaking.

 

While these actions open up the action point to other areas of the game, they are still limited to being earned to once per milestone. But, now that we have all these fun new options wouldn’t it be nice to earn more action points? I’ll address that topic in a future post, but essentially my solution is to replace the milestone award with an award mechanism that uses something like the keys concept from the Shadow of Yesterday.

Turning Jimmy John’s Into Comfort Food

By | 17 August 2011 | Rant | 3 Comments

Yesterday, while I was allowing Laura to rest after her surgery I was in the mood for comfort food. And, a sourdough melt from Culver’s sounded pretty good. But, I don’t eat a lot of meat, and that thing is greasy as hell to boot so I knew it was pretty much out of the question. Instead I decided to drive past Culver’s to Jimmy John’s in order to pick up my preferred sub, the number six (vegetarian), no mayo, no avocado, with dijon. Before I took my first bite the idea hit me. I could combine these two things into a delicious mega-sandwich.

I went back over to Culvers, and got that melt. I removed one of the slices of grease soaked bread, and placed the two halves of the burger into the sub. This stroke of genius resulted in an amazingly tasty sandwich. I had the nice, crisp vegetables from Jimmy Johns, and the crunchy, greasy, cheesy mess of the melt.

Needless to say I had to take a photo of this piece of heaven to share with the world. However, anyone thinking of trying this at home, be warned. I am pretty sure that sourdough melt from Culvers covers about your daily intake of calories!

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