All posts in General

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.

Burning Wheel Revised Going Out of Print

By | 18 May 2011 | General | No comments

Today, one of the more revolutionary games of its time is officially going out of print. For the full details checkout their website: Burning Wheel Revised: Rest in Peace.

In the meantime the new, mysterious SSS11 project has gone to print, and should be available for pre-order in late June. Keep your fingers crossed, it has big shoes to fill!

4e Combat as a Skill Challenge…Sort of

By | 13 April 2011 | General | 1 Comment

I’ve been thinking a lot about the disconnect between activities in 4e D&D. The system fundamentally consists of three unbalanced aspects: roleplaying, skill challenges, and combat challenges. Based on the way the books, and published adventures are written the game generally spends about 75% of the time in combat challenges (usually three per four hour session). The rest of the time is some break down of roleplaying and skill challenge (say around 10 and 15% respectively). Granted there is overlap between the different areas, but this is just what I have experienced in play. So, what I would like to do is shift the focus a little bit, and make the skill and combat challenges about even in length while encouraging more roleplaying in both. My idea is a bit of a middle ground.

While trying to think of a way to speed up combat challenges I was trying to figure out how to run them as skill challenges, which the system does not lend itself well to. So, really what I needed was something in between. Basically, an attrition based skill challenge system. Now, I am not saying that you should run all combats this way, but quite frankly most of the combats in D&D are just filler and are not a worthy use of an hour of gameplay. So, I figure if we can figure out a way to get in these essential, but uninteresting battles into the game without being a major time sink its a plus.

This got me thinking about the disconnect between between skill challenges and combat challenges. Skill challenges seem to be rather all or nothing, and over rather abruptly. Whereas combat challenges are very tactical and time consuming. The crux of the issue seems to be that skill challenges present you with an artificial floor and ceiling for accomplishing a goal using a narrow set of skills, and applying the success/failure template to most situations feels unnatural. On the other hand combat challenges introduce a wild array of tactical options in order to reduce opponents to 0 hp. While the later is a well polished system, it generally does not contribute meaningfully to fiction on a round by round basis.

Therefore, my proposal is a sort of middle ground a skill challenge of attrition. The system would work fundamentally the same for combats and non-combats. The encounter would be organized into a set of threats. Each of these threats would have a specific DC, harm threshold, and static damage output that would be used to generate aggregates for the challenge. The challenge would start with a stakes negotiation to reinforce why its happening, followed by volleys between players and the threats. The threats would function on a reactive basis depending on the actions of the party. Depending upon the success of the party they may have additional options, such as dealing additional damage, or taking no damage from the threats. At the end of each volley, depending on the outcome of the rolls the group would collaboratively describe the events based on powers used, etc…

While this is fairly straightforward for combat it poses an interesting question about dealing harm other than physical. The system only tracks physical harm via hit points and healing surges. Therefore, alternative forms of attrition are necessary. The most obvious answer would be resource attrition. For example, a nature challenge may deal damage in the form of adventuring supplies. A city based investigation may deal damage in the form of monetary expense to represent characters expenditure to pay bribes, etc… A trickier issue would be determine how to deal harm in a social conflict. For example, if the player are arguing a defense for a criminal in a public trial, they may receive damage to their reputation. How would you track that within the base boundaries of 4e?

While this is mostly a brain storming session I do intend to write a follow up with actual rules to use in a “combat skill challenge.”

Test Gallery Format

By | 15 March 2011 | General | 2 Comments

Lunch Crowd

By | 15 March 2011 | General | No comments

I suppose one of the minor conveniences of daylight saving time is that I no longer have to fight the lunch crowd, since people are eating their lunches at eleven now.

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