All posts by

Dread: Beneath the Mask

By | 31 July 2011 | General | 1 Comment

A couple months ago I had the privilege of running a Dread session for my gaming group. We were taking a break from our normal Star Wars game, so it seemed like a great opportunity to try something outside the box. The adventure I ran was called “Beneath the Mask,” and is one of the included adventures that come with the book. The hook is as follows:

“It was supposed to be a relaxing weekend at your friend’s cabin. Then the power went out, and some psycho in a hockey mask attacked. Now two people are dead, and your host is a gibbering wreck. Can you make it through to morning?”

All things considered, it went much better than I expected it would. We began with a reading of the overview, and an explanation of the character questionnaire. The questionnaires where a little confusing for some of the players, but it worked out while. After they finished up everyone gave a brief introduction for their characters, and we then began the story.

The use of the Jenga tower in place of dice was genius, it really added an effective layer of tension to the game. I’ve played in horror games that attempted to be serious, and tense by they always end up deflating and turn into a kind of twisted comedy. There is a clear difference between rolling some dice and comparing against a target number, and pulling one or more blocks from a Jenga tower, the tension is built right in.

We did run into some road blocks though. We were playing on a particularly hot day, so we had the ceiling fan above the table going full blast. The fact that it kept the tower constantly swaying back and forth added a certain something to the game. Unfortunately, the tower fell twice due to interference from the fan which ultimately screwed up the pacing of the game since we determined that no one was removed from play when the fan knocked the tower down. This was not the only twist that set things a little off however.

The group never discovered who the actual killer was. When the player that was the killer was about to make his move that would reveal his identity, he knocked the tower over. So by some cruel twist of fate he was mauled by rabid racoons that were established to be in the area earlier in the game.

As a result all the character will still freaked out, and we had to go above and beyond the original adventure design to reach an alternative conclusion. The result was a dramatic escape sequence with heavy handed draw demands. It all worked out in the end, but it felt a little forced.

All things considered, I would easily recommend the game. On the undecim scale, I’d give it a 5.

Future of Dark Room

By | 23 July 2011 | Dark Room | 23 Comments

Much has changed in the years since Dark Room was originally written, and there are many options available at this time. Thus, the question to be asked is, does continued development of DR make sense? I spent a significant amount of time rewriting the application from scratch to run as an adobe air application. I did this because I was no longer using windows at the time, so dedicating some much time on a .net application did not make a lot of sense, thus a cross platform solution seemed more desirable. Unfortunately, Adobe dropped linux support shortly before the first beta release of the new program. So, I essentially stopped development on it.

I still want to have a cross platform application. I began trying to find new viable options, and I was just about to start a write up in python when I discovered FocusWriter. It is a cross platform distraction free environment, and it uses QT. It’s written in C++, which I don’t really like, but I could deal with it. I would almost say it is enough to use FocusWriter, but it is missing some key functionality from Dark Room I couldn’t live without. Therefore, at this point I am seriously considering forking FocusWriter in order to add in the additional Dark Room functionality.

Thoughts?

Lady Blackbird: Tale of Abstraction

By | 17 July 2011 | General | No comments

Yesterday I ran my first game of Lady Blackbird. The experience went better than I expected, but not as well as I would have hoped. I’m afraid that I am large to blame for the later. Originally I was expecting a problem with the shift from task resolution to conflict resolution since the group has almost exclusively played traditional games. Thus, the tone was set early at a level of abstraction that I was not really looking for.

This level of abstraction not only got us our of the back and forth grind of encounters, but ended up pulling us out of the role playing as well. Basically the way the game played out what the group spending type describing what exactly they were going to do, and rolling. If they succeeded, we moved on, if they failed a complication was added. In that respect things worked fairly well.

The area that really came up lacking was doing things that did not require a roll. We tended to summarize activities, conversations, etc… all these efforts did allow things to proceed at a good pace, but I think we lost something in the process. Luckily, the group did seem to enjoy it in principle so we may revisit the game as some point in the future.

Effects of Magic on the Real World

By | 12 July 2011 | General | 2 Comments

One of the major issues I have associated with fantasy settings is that a world filled with magic is essentially medieval plus wizards. It seems even more silly in the context that many settings purport to be thousands of years old. So, what I want to do is make a basic game that could help model the effects magic on an otherwise realistic world.

Originally, I was thinking about setting this up in the ancient / dark ages since my interest is primary on the fantasy realm. Player knowledge would become a significant hindrance though. Effectively players would have unfair knowledge about technological development that could be leveraged with magic. In order to deal with the problem, the game should likely be set in modern day.

I am thinking of setting up a small self contained scenario for this, kind of like Lady Blackbird, with pregens. I want to keep the characters disassociated from the players in order to avoid weirdness. The scenario would kick off when the group uncovered a set of “items of power.” That essentially give those in possession of the items the ability to wield magic. Magic should not be limited in functionality, other than the final result of the effects cannot create paradoxes.

The question becomes, how to model the interaction of magic within the world. I’m thinking a basic die mechanism that can be used to measure the degree of success when attempting to use magic for something. And, while the player always succeeds, their margin of success determines the level of complication created by the act. Complications would scale relative to the effect desired.

As far as complications are concerned, I am thinking about creating some tables that could be rolled against in order to generate some ideas. But, complications that are directly relevant would be preferred. The trick of the matter is trying to figure out how something like, an unlimited supply of free gasoline would affect the world.

What would be the best way to model such a thing?

Strands of Fairy Tales

By | 27 June 2011 | General | 3 Comments

Strands of Fate may be my favorite roleplaying game that I have never played.

Over the past few months, after experiencing a fair amount of burn out from 4e D&D I began fiddling around with the idea of creating a game system of my own as a short of thought exercise. At first, it was entirely too much like D&D, since I was basically starting with that concept and changing things that I did not much care for.

Eventually, I began deconstructing the fundamental aspects of what was required to actually roleplay. From that point I began building an entirely new game from the ground up. Periodically I would run into a few road blocks, and start to look around to see how other games handled the issues. Soon there after I unlocked what the indie gaming community had to offer. And, even though I have only played a few of these games it has really changed the way I look at things.

One day I stumbled across FATE. I was aware of of the system, but I had not really looked into it much in depth. Primarily because the games using it had always been ponderous tombs. One day while looking through some forums reading about the Dresden Files RPG (which uses FATE) I came across a striped down version of fate from someone’s signature. I was quite amazed to see how similar it was to the game I was working on. So I investigated further. And, while many of the core tenants were the same, they were some what different, I would say they shared about 55% of the same principles.

Later in my investigation, I stumbled across Strands of Fate (SoF) bore a remarkable similiarity to my game, say 75% match. So, I purchased the book and began reading it. It is perhaps one of the best written RPG books I have seen, I assume the author must have a solid technical writing background. While I have not yet played the game I have created a character with my brother and girlfriend, and it is kind of awesome. It is amazing how divergent of a character you can develop without being constrained to the cookie cutter builds you see in most traditional gaming systems.

Let me take a moment to describe Barrack, the misfit gremlin from the clan Orkork with a heart of gold:

Barrackus was born into the typical life of a gremlin. He was born in a liter of nine, and devoured his eight siblings. For a while he fit the mold of the Orkork, fat cantankerous gremlins who relied on their wits rather than brawn. He was his mentor’s star pupil, earning him infrequent beatings. The problems began when he started playing with his food.

The Orkork clan’s primary food source was travelers along the road between two city states. Frequently humans would become injured, easy targets. However, rather than simply preying on the weak, Barrackus preferred to nurse them back to health before eating them. Many arguments broke out, fellow gremlins were furious that they would have to go hungry in order to satify his hobby. One day, in a fit of rage, Grognog devoured the chieftain thus assuming the position. His first act was to exile Barrackus for fear his ways would spread. Normaly such a sentence would be death by communal feast. But, Grognog was afraid Barrackus was inflicted with a disease of the mind that might spread through consumption.

The journey of Barrackus was much more exciting that he ancipated, he went to strange new places, and ate people of all different shapes and sizes. He even managed to seek out some like minded individuals who were interested in “fixing” things, or breaking them. He frequently misunderstood the difference.

One day, he met a shaman, who begged not to be eaten. He promised powerful magics in exchange for his survival. Barrackus agreed, he didn’t know any magic, it was exciting! While the shaman showed him many different things he really only clung to two. The most important being the ability to teleport himself. He was only half paying attention, but he at least figured out how to teleport to somewhere he could see. This greatly expanded Barrackus’ stomping grounds as he was no longer constrained by the rivers that were the boundaries of his world. Second, he learn the “interpretive dance of transformation” that allowed him to “fix” things in a different way. Learning these techniques took time, and he became great friends with the shaman, until the day he finished eating him. Barrackus still looks back on those times fondly.

Later, Barrackus encountered a fellow inventor, a kobold of similar stock. He was working a way to improve a dragon. Effectively, the transformation would make the dragon immortal, and give it the ability to regrow lost limbs. Effectively making it a god made flesh. Barrackus was so confident in the formula he tested it on himself, and it worked! Sort of. Yes, he stopped aging, and yes he could regrow his limbs. The later was a rather undesirable test. But, it had a side effect. Rain now burns him. The kobold make a few tweaks to remove the side effect and presented it to the dragon. Barrackus was surprised to hear that the formula killed the dragon.

Everything was coming up roses until Barrackus was struck with the death curse of a witch. While he was eating her he commented on how much he enjoyed being clean shaven, because when you had a beard gore always got stuck in it. The witch gave him a “beard curse” effectively making him invulnerable to common elements in such a way that no blade would be able to shave him. It was quite perplexing as he could shave until the blade made contact with his flesh, but it was then repealed. Quite frustrating indeed.

Now, Barrackus has teamed up with the kobold that granted him his immortality, and a mischevous brownie. Together they work as group of troubleshooters who going around “fixing” problems, which usually ends up in them making things worse, much worse, than they were to begin with.

Page 3 of 18612345...102030...Last »