UPDATE: Wow, I have missed OS X. I think was finally started to get used to all the headaches that Windows and Ubuntu cause me, and now running with OS X is like coming home again. Sadly, this is only going to make me want to replace my defunct MacBook Pro all the more.

On October 31, 2011 Google Reader effectively died. By stripping away the social features, google reader is little more than an average RSS feed aggregation. To read the full blasphemous press release check out the following:

http://googlereader.blogspot.com/2011/10/new-in-reader-fresh-design-and-google.html

My argument is that traditional roleplaying games all offer a very similar experience, at least in the rules as written. So, regardless of whether you are playing D&D, Pathfinder, Star Wars Saga Edition, it will have the same general feel. It is certainly true that the games are different, and there are differences of abstraction, and genre. But they tend to have a heavy crunch factor focusing on combat, and task resolution. I am an advocate of “play everything,” so if you haven’t played these games you certainly should. Ultimately, my perspective is that while these games are different they not different enough to get the best bang for your buck.

Rather than switching to another traditional roleplaying game (which would represent a significant time investment for learning an extensive rule system, and the financial cost of purchasing all the required texts) it may be better to look into an story game that offers a novel play experience at a reasonable cost. For the sake of discussion I am going to break these experiences into six categories: transitioning from traditional games, resolution scales, mixed success, alternative perspectives, GMless play, and alternatives to dice. There are a number of different aspects and minutiae, but I feel these are the larger categories.

Transitioning from traditional games is an exercise in trying to find a middle ground between traditional games, and story games. The two primary systems I recommend here are FATE and Solar System. But, since SS features conflict resolution I am going to recommend FATE for this category. There are a number of fantastic fate games available, for venues demoing this month I am recommending Bulldogs! or Diaspora as they both represent good, concise FATE implementations. Many people still recommend Spirit of the Century, but I think it is starting to show its age as FATE 3 has developed significantly since that initial release. For home groups willing to spend several sessions can definitely take a look at the large works, Dresden Files is a particularly good game.

Resolution scales demonstrate alternatives to traditional task resolution systems used in most roleplaying games. For venues running one shots I strongly recommend Lady Blackbird. Its free, light, and always a good time. The only drawback is that the GM should be familiar with the source games: The Shadow of Yesterday, and Mouse Guard. For home groups, the later two options are excellent. The Shadow of Yesterday runs on the Solar System, which features a conflict resolution scale with a special task resolution scale called “bringing down the pain.” Mouse Guard is basically Burning Wheel light bringing in character motivations GM vs. Player turns, and all kinds of good stuff beyond conflict resolution scale and definitely worth the effort.

Mixed success is a novel design feature made popular by Vincent Baker. Focusing on achieving a gray area between success and failure, yes you succeed, but with consequences. The Otherkind dice are great for demonstrating this, but I have found that Otherkind doesn’t always click with people. As a venue, if you have a good GM you might want to look at Ghost/ECHO, which uses Otherkind dice in a cool setting. Otherwise I would look at running Apocalypse World, or Dungeon World (a drift of Apocalypse World and original D&D). Mouse Guard could also be used here, as failure is what makes the game interesting, because it introduces conflicts into the game.

Alternative perspectives is about playing from a uniquely different perspective. Most games traditionally portray the players as paragons of heroism to varying degrees. While it is true that numerous games offer other options, I am recommending My Life with Master for play this month. There is just something that seems to resonate with people playing henchmen for an evil master. This game also demonstrates concepts like predetermined outcomes, shared collaboration, etc…

GMless play holds a special place in my heart. I believe there is something fundamentally dysfunctional about the traditional GM v. Players relationship. There is something about playing gang up no one person, and in exchange you grant them what amounts to Godlike power in the game. Hurray for mechanically enforced artificial social structures! But, I digress. For venues focusing on one shots I strongly recommend Fiasco. Fiasco is dramatically different than traditional roleplaying games, as are many GMless games to varying degrees. Fiasco is a great game though, and can easily be a blast, even with people that have never roleplayed before. For groups, I would recommend something that will last longer, such as Love in the Time of Seid. There are so many good games in this category it shouldn’t be to difficult to find a topic local players are interested in.

Dice are used in nearly all tabletop roleplaying games; they are a bit of a fixture. That does not mean that dice are needed for a game to be good. In fact, the lack of dice is what makes some games great. My pick for the one shot in this category is a no brainer: Dread. Dread is a roleplaying game where the players act out horror films. Each player is given a questionnaire that they fill out, and the GM leads them through the story. Whenever there is a question as to the success of an action in the game players resolve that task by pulling from a Jenga tower. Its a horror game with a built-in tension mechanism, brilliant. Knock over the tower and you’re out. This is one of my first recommendations for people looking to get into roleplaying games, because the rules are simple and accessible for almost everyone. There are many other diceless games out there (many of which use playing cards or a sort of karma system) feel free to dig around and explore new options.

In conclusion, I am advocating that you not only play a new RPG this month, but you play a game that offers a novel play experience for your group. So get out there, grab some texts and learn some rules, its gaming time!

Here is a small list of games I usually recommend grouped in the above categories:

Transitioning

• Bulldogs!
• Diaspora
• Dresden Files
• Strands of Fate
• Starblazer Adventures
• Spirit of the Century

Resolution Scale

• Lady Blackbird
• The Shadow of Yesterday / World of Near + Solar System
• Mouse Guard
• Trollbabe

Mixed Success

• Otherkind
• Ghost/ECHO
• Apocalypse World
• Dungeon World
• Mouse Guard / Burning Wheel / Burning Empries

Alternative Perspectives / Player Agency

• My Life with Master
• Montsegur 1244
• Dogs in the Vineyard
• Breaking the Ice

GMless

• Fiasco
• Love in the Time of Seid
• Polaris
• Shock: Social Science Fiction
• A Penny for My Thoughts

Diceless

• Dread
• Mortal Coil
• Amber Diceless

Other Great Games I Didn’t Spotlight

• Primetime Adventures
• In a Wicked Age
• Lacuna
• Annalaise
• Dust Devils Revised
• InSpectres
• The Mountain Witch
• Don’t Rest Your Head
• 3:16
• Zombie Cinema
• Kagematsu
• Freemarket

“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.”

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.

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.

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.

“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.

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.

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?