Continue reading »]]> How to host a murder

This is the rough first draft of the chapter of tips and suggestions for would be directors, aka game masters. I have the feeling it may come off as preachy, definitely opinionated and with a bit of ‘this is the right way to do it’ but I’m not sure that’s a bad thing in general since invariably such things are based on opinion.

And frankly if you’re an experienced GM, you probably never bother read these sections in an RPG and if you’re not, then any advice is good advice? Or that’s my story and I’m sticking with it.

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Directing Your First Game -

What follows are some tips and recommendations that I can make based on my personal experience. There’s no guarantee they’ll work for you, your group or your method of play. I offer them not as ‘the’ way you should play but simply as example of one way to play.

These are all hard learned lessons from 30+ years of GM’ing. Years where I’ve been just as guilty as anyone of ‘bad technique’ to put it mildly. Hopefully something in the below will help you make your games as awesome as they can be.

Narration -

As the Director one of hats you’re going to wear, perhaps the most important one is, the narrator hat. Describing what the players see, hear, smell and feel in the location you’ve put them in is critical to engaging the players’ interest in what’s going on.

There’s a small middle ground of ‘this porridge is just right’ that you have to dance in. Too little narrative and the players don’t really get a sense of what’s going and don’t engage. Too much narrative and you start to lose people as they zone out wondering who’s ahead in the game or remembering they need to pick up a gallon of milk on the way home.

And unfortunately I can’t really tell you exactly where that middle ground lies as it varies from group to group, setting to setting and honestly from session to session.

Your initial narrative for a scene should set the tone and mood you’re looking for in the scene and in general be the longest block of narrative you offer without the players interacting.

After the first narrative, just fill in as the players ask questions about what they see or hear or smell with brief but descriptive answers to their questions.
As an example when running a 1920’s dark noir setting where the players are investigating some strange deaths and disappearances I might use something like this as the mood setting. It’s a bit long but suited to my particular group and the sombre tone I’m shooting for and is tailored to the actions the players have stated they were going to take:

“The trip over through the darkened streets is uneventful. You circle the block eyeing the area and the dark building you’re interested in. As you drive past the entrance you spot a flare of orange red glow as someone takes a drag on a cigarette in the dark alcove of the doorway. The light illuminates two faces nestled back in the shadows before it fades to a small ember, the faces turning to watch your car out of sight. A black model T sits at the curb, seemingly empty.

A alleyway filled with heavy shadow runs behind the building between it and others, choked with discarded trash.

You park on a side street out of sight of the building. As you get out of the car the strong smell of salt and rot wafts your way, pushed by the winds coming off the dock distract that lay a few blocks to the west. The distant sounds of cranes and lifts indicates the dock runs 24/7.

Moving into a shadowy vantage point you study the building your informant told you the gang was holed up in. Above you on the top floor, golden light shines through the windows, flickering occasionally, probably lantern light or candle light. Not surprising as the building looks condemned. The lower windows are broken or missing glass completely leaving gaping black holes.

A red star comes flying out of the dark front entrance to hit the pavement in a shower of sparks, the cigarette quickly extinguished by the cold damp street.”

As the players asked I’d then offer more information on the building, “It’s made of the typical brick of the area although covered in stains from age. There are 22 floors and probably a basement level judging by the stairs that lead down from the street level in one spot.” or the general area “Most of the buildings are shut down or condemned although a small furniture store appears to still be business and a laundry service. Both are closed at this time of night though.”

But it’s that first narrative for each scene that really gives you an opportunity to set the stage for your players to perform on.

Cooperative Storytelling -

Narration brings us to a subject near to my heart. Choices. You have to let the players invest in choices. Choices are extremely important for them to feel they’re actively participating in your story and not just riding the rails as you move the train from fight scene to fight scene.

Nothing disengages a player faster than figuring out they’re being railroaded, that there’s nothing their character can do that has any real impact on the story you’re basically cramming down their throats.

Yes, you have a story to tell and you should have a chance to tell it. But the story you want to tell should have a starting scene, a middle point and an end direction. Everything between those should be strongly impacted, flavored and heavily influenced by the player’s actions and choices. This requires a lot of mobility and flexibility on your part. You have to be able to set aside things you’ve spent time working on, maybe to never be used, to adapt to the choices the players have made.

You can use story elements to steer the players toward certain actions and choices but again, don’t straight-jacket them into slavishly following them. They may simply not be interested in your story and want to tell one of their own. If that turns out to be the case, shelf your story or have it run in parallel and be told to the players as news of other events while they pursue their own story threads.

To give you a short example of what I’m trying to encourage you to not do. I was in a sci-fi game once and the GM had this story to tell. And there was nothing we could do about it.

The fight in space? We lost even though we won because the bad guys suddenly had uber weapons when it became apparent we were going to win through great tactics and dice rolls. We were forced to use the escape pods. And guess what? There was a single planet in range. With a single place to land. Convenient.

Where we were faced with a locked room puzzle. We spent an hour or more coming up with some pretty clever ways to get a door open. None of which was the one way the GM had decided would work.

We finally, in character, sat down and got our lunch out, one of the few things we managed to escape from our bajillion dollar ships with and ate it. Waiting for the bad guys to come kill us since only one person had a weapon better than a rock.
In a strange epiphany one of us got the idea, per GM narration, to combine our one phaser with a tricorder and a belt buckle and adjust it to the frequency of the material of the door which caused it to open.

Choo choo, all aboard!

Don’t be that person.

Narration vs Combat -

How you split your time between narrative and tactical game play is another one of those areas that’s strongly driven by your story, your players and your setting. I’ve had sessions where dice were never rolled in anger and others where it was one continuous running fight. Those are not the norm but they have occurred.

In general I shoot for 1-3 tactical scenes for a given session. Less for a more narrative setting and group, more for when the setting calls for it or the players are getting antsy to ‘roll some dice and kill some things.’

Your first session or two I would advise leaning toward more combat than narration in terms of time spent unless you’re confident in your ability to do narration and keep your players engaged in what’s happening on stage for their characters. For the average player, it’s hard to go wrong with a strong challenging fight of some kind in terms of keeping their interest and getting them to invest in their character, the scene and your world.

Pacing -

Talking about how to split time between narrative and tactical brings us to pacing. Pacing is how you accomplish a couple of things. One of which is important to game and the other is important to your story. To-wit, keeping the players engaged and advancing your storyline in the process.

In general you’re going to want to flip between the two. You should give your players some action sequences when it looks like they’re starting to zone out or trying to hide yawns. If they’re yawning during the action sequences then perhaps you’re up too late or they’re not getting enough sleep. Or maybe you should just send in an extra wave or two of henchman armed with power armor and flame throwers.

After a particularly tense or brutal fight, bring it down a notch and give them a chance to rest up a bit, talk between themselves or with some NPC’s. You can have a random traveling merchant show up for some bartering (or mugging if they’re that kind of group). Or just a summons from one of their benefactors to answer some questions as to why they felt it necessary to ransack the Duke’s son’s keep out in the hinterlands. “Oh, you heard about that did you?”

Watch good action movies and you can see how the director builds to the big boss fight with some action scenes, some humor scenes and some just filler scenes to give the audience time to settle down so they can appreciate the next scene when fists fly and guns bark.

Voices -

If you can do voices for your NPC’s then I strongly encourage you to do so. I unfortunately do not have a great talent for it so my NPC’s tend to sound like… well me.

But voice and or mannerisms are a wonderful tool to give life to your NPC’s and make them unique in the player’s mind rather than npc_002 who sold them the canteens.

That’s not to say every NPC should have a lot of time invested in them from your perspective. The street vendor they buy coffee from who they’ll never see again, probably not a good place to spend a lot of time on flavor, color and descriptors.

When To Roll -

To be blunt, heroes shouldn’t have to make acrobatics rolls get on board a dragon sitting still that’s going to fly them somewhere. Don’t spend 20 minutes of game time making the heroes look like keystone cops when the dice roll badly as they fall off the dragon.

To take that sentiment to a more general conclusion, don’t make your heroes roll for minor obstacles. If they need to open a door to get out of a room, just narrate it out that they picked the lock or broke it down based on whatever actions they announce they’re trying to do. Don’t spend an hour on them trying to get out. In most cases that’s simply not going to be fun for anyone concerned.

And if you find it fun as they beat their heads against your narrative brick wall, then perhaps Directing isn’t the job for you.

It’s especially important in my opinion to not make them roll to get information that you’re going to have to give them anyway when no one makes the roll because otherwise they don’t have the information they need to continue. It defeats the purpose of rolling at all.

Giving information out is why the information system exists in LCA!. Primary information is a given, anyone and everyone gets it. Secondary information is almost a given, just needs someone to trigger it by having a stat or asking a question or narrating an action.

There’s a reason you have to get to tertiary information before a roll is required. It’s the stuff that has no importance to the storyline but rather making the roll would net the players a bit of color, flavor or a minor advantage or allow an informed choice to be made.

Difficulty -

My personal opinion is, a scene that doesn’t offer at least a moderate challenge, provide color/flavor to the world, have strong potential to be interesting or forward the story , then it should not be taken to Tactical game play but instead be narrated out or hand waved.

This is not a hard and fast rule just my personal style.

Part of my reasoning is, quite honestly, I simply have limited game time and spending part of it for a ‘trash mob fight’ to use an MMOG term is not a good utilization of it.

Another part is players get bored and disengage from such scenes because they know there’s no real risk after a short while. And then you have to work to engage them again for the next scene.

Risk -

Difficulty brings us to risk. I’m of the opinion that characters should be at risk. They should know that there is a chance they’re going to die or otherwise be removed from game play. I’ll admit to not feeling this way years back. When a player got down to very low health, for some strange reason the monsters started to hit less often, or dealt less damage or changed targets.

Over time, this lead to a very real lack of tension with the players, they knew what was going on and as a result would take risks that would be ill advised.

I’d urge you to make sure your players feel that risk. Yes, for a player it might sting to lose a character they’re really in tune with. But you know what? In recent years, the times it’s happened, that actions or luck or fate if you will have caused a PC to die, the players second character invariably was much more colorful and just flat out awesome.

Perhaps it’s coincidence, even probably? But knowing that they could die just like the NPC’s lent a definite nail biting to some encounters. And made victory all that much sweeter because they knew they’d earned it through their own skills and dice rolls and not me fudging the dice.

Fudging The Dice -

If you’re not familiar with the term it basically means the person directing the game, in this case the Director, is rolling dice for the NPC’s and other challenges and then ignoring the dice rolls when they would cause undue hardship or make things too easy for the players as they see it.

Frankly I’m not a fan of it. I’ve done it, some systems have the balance is so far off or so difficulty to achieve you can’t not do it or your players are either steam rolling over your encounters or they’re rolling up new characters every session.

But I don’t like it and I don’t like having to do it in order to balance a system from the outside as it were. I believe it cheapens the experience to a degree. If you’re only going to pay attention to the dice when they match what you want then why roll them in the first place? Just hand the players their ticket for the train and narrate the combat as you see fit.

Hopefully with LCA and the tips on scene and creature design you can create challenging encounters but ones that allow you to roll in the open just like the players and let the chips fall where they may.

Open rolling adds a certain element of tenseness for players, they know they don’t have that safety net of the Director changing a big hit into a small one or even a miss for them. They know that there’s a chance their character will go down and possible expire.

They also know the Director isn’t ‘cheating’ when a player gets hit for a bazillion damage or when the Villain misses four times in a row on a hero who’s just barely hanging on by a thread.

In my opinion these are good things to know from a player’s perspective. Your opinion of course may vary and if rolling behind a screen works better for you then by all means do so.

I’ll end this with the thought that your job as a Director is an order of magnitude harder than being a player. But the rewards when everything clicks and a group of people walk out going “OMG that was awesome!” is an order of magnitude greater.

Continue reading »]]> Cash And Carry

The carry mechanic also known as the how much phat l3wt can I carry out of the dungeon…

I’ll be honest since roughly 1980, I’ve abstracted weight and limits and capacities for my players to a ‘whatever seems reasonable’ limit. I remember once I had a new player join my DnD session around 1984 for the first time and while he was rolling up his character a wizard, I was filling him in on everything that had happened up until that point. It was a lot and yet I still ran out of stuff to say even going into anecdotes and stuff that was only sorta semi related.

Finally I asked, “So…uh… are you done?” and he replied, “Yeah, I can finish this last bit while we play. Here take a look.”

I took his character sheet and the two pages of notepaper he’d added where he’d broken down every single item he was carrying down by location and weight, down to the 3 ounces of bat guano stored in a twist of paper in the top left pocket on his main pack. Each spell had its components listed out and where they were located. Yes duplicating his inventory lists.

I studied the pages in silence for a few minutes, “Nice job! But uh. I kinda ignore components and hand wave them for spells. And…. as long as you don’t try to carry a canoe in your backpack, I kinda ignore that too.”

His eyes lit up and , “Oh… thank….god…! You wouldn’t believe my last DM!”

So obviously everyone has different ideas on what works for them and there are just as obviously two ends to the spectrum.

In LCA! I’m offering two options, well three if you count the “Just hand wave it all, use common sense and ignore the encumbrance rules” option.

I felt I kinda needed ‘something’. I’m of the school I’d much rather have mechanics in a system that I can ignore, than have missing mechanics that I have to come up with.

The first one called the PCU System, I define a character’s carry capacity by… PCU’s. An acronym for the working phrase, ‘Personal Carry Units’. (Yes there’s a Vehicle Carry Units as well for cars. It’s a riff on the damage magnitudes I have in place so I can use the same damage dice pools and mechanics for the pistol, the law rocket, the bunker buster and the orbital defense system)

A PCU is defined as roughly whatever would fit in the standard cargo pocket of a pair of BDU’s or about 3lbs. (Battle Dress Uniform). So a Pistol would be 1 PCU, a SMG would be 3 BDU’s, an two handed sword 4.

A character can carry 5+5*Strength which ranges from 1 to 5. So 10 to 30. Going over that limit up to double equals Encumbered which causes some penalties.

It seems, to me, like a way to have some measure of granularity without having to note down the 3 ounces of bat guano you have.

The other is a simplistic Slot System. This is the one that I personally would use if I didn’t just fall back to my standard hand wave system. Each character can carry 4 slots worth of ‘stuff’ without being encumbered and up to double that before they’re so loaded they’re inching along. A weapon, light or heavy occupies one slot. Armour? one slot. Shield? One slot. A backpack? One slot. Minor stuff is assumed to not be impacting.

In both cases you can ‘knack up’ to increase your limits, either by 5PCU’s or 1 Slot to move your encumbrance limit out a bit. You can by the Pack Mule knack a number of times equal to your Strength.

Anyway, that’s your ‘what Dennis spent his afternoon proofing and editing’ while watching progress bars on server builds.

A Wealthy Miser

This is an area, to be honest, I haven’t really addressed to a great extent.

For one reason it’s pretty setting specific. One man’s pound is another one’s dollar is another one’s golden orb.

I was considering ‘borrowing’ the Wealth or Resource roll that many systems use. Where when a character wants to buy something over and above a sandwich and a coke, the GM assigns a bonus or penalty to the roll and the character makes a Wealth roll. If they win they get the item. If they fail, they didn;’t get the item and can’t make a roll again until ‘something changes about their financial situation’.

I like it for the simplicity but it seems almost too simple? It’s not like I want to run Bankers and Accountants the RPG but I do like finding a bag of 138 gold from time to time.

And yes, thinking about these odd things is one of the many things I do for fun.

Continue reading »]]> Zombie Fiction

Autumn by +David Moody
Author Site: http://www.djmoody.co.uk/

Rating: An 8 out of 10 on my personal zombie scale.

How British zombie fiction differs from American zombie fiction -

This is a British author (I’m assuming) and book ergo if you’re familiar with the type, it has fewer pages than American publishers tend to put on the shelves. I’m not sure why that is, never bothered to look into it but it’s been something I’ve run across with many such publications. It’s not necessarily a bad thing, just an observation. But if you believe the intrinsic value of a book is based on how many pages it has you might be turned off by it. You’d be wrong of course.

Firstly is the word Zombie is never used. The walking dead corpses are just referred to as ‘bodies’ or ‘shells’.

Another thing that immediately will strike you if you’re familiar with zombie fiction (and why would you read this review if you weren’t) is the lack of guns in the work. The heroes aren’t saddled with Colt M1911 Long Slides shooting .45 calibre 230 grain ACP ammo out of extended capacity magazines they load through beveled magazine wells with hand stone polished trigger mechanisms.

American writers, at least that know or have done a bit of research love to throw those kinds of numbers out there. The other side of the American coin is the survivors just carry a ‘rifle’ or ‘shotgun’ and find ‘rilfe ammo’ and ‘shotgun ammo’ because they really don’t know anything about guns.

Weapons of anything other than a makeshift nature are completely absent in the story. Someone does find a ‘rifle’ and one shot is fired the entire novel but that’s it.

A much more subtle thing to note is that there is a distinct lack of assholeism in the survivors. They work together except where they wouldn’t due to real emotional and psychological trauma of such an event.

There are no scenes of rape, torture or sado-masochism by anyone. No packs of biker gangs or military gone rogue misogynistic male driven regimes, no religions fanatics turned sex communes.

If you happened to read my blog post here about my advice to budding zompoc writers those last two paragraphs nail several of my rules on how to write good zompoc.

There are no explicit sex scenes of any kind or actually sex of any kind or even implied. This is a good thing. If I want to read erotica, I’ll specifically read erotica, I don’t need it mixed into everything I read.

What the book is about

Essentially the emotional and psychological terror of what the survivors of a zombie apocalypse might undergo as they struggle to survive.

Like most zombie fiction the reason for the event is never explained, and in most cases rightly so. The lucky or unlucky bastard who lives past the first 24 hours is unlikely to ever find out. Who does he ask?

In Autumn, 1 in possibly a 50,000 (best guess based on the numbers mentioned) is immune to the virus. For those not immune it sounds like it’s a virus that sweeps across England in a kind of chain reaction or wave. As the wave hits a person’s soft tissues, specifically throat and lungs swell up and burst causing people to suffocate as they’re unable to breathe. Within a minute or two of the wave front rolling over a town, the entire town is dead where they were.

Leaving behind the 1 in 50,000. And there is no age preference to the virus. The 1 year old, the 5 year old, the 95 year old are all just as likely. So how many babies, kids and infirm managed to survive the virus and then die due to lack of care? Probably drops the realistic survivor ratio much lower.

The survivors typically bury their heads for a day or two, pulling the covers up and try to wish it all away. Eventually they get hungry or scared or curious enough to venture out and start to run into others.

And then something wakes up in the bodies. And they start to move, completely at random like some large scale Brownian system.

Odd but not much more odd than everyone dying across the country in minutes.

And then the bodies start to notice and be attracted by sounds. Okay, getting weirder.

And then the bodies start to come after the living. Now things are starting to reach a certain suck factor for the survivors that goes beyond the country dying.

[In an aside we never learn just how wide spread the event is. Again rightly, how do the people who's eyes we're experiencing it through find out? But based on the lack of response we can assume it's the whole country and quite likely the world.]

We witness this activity through the eyes of primarily two heroes, a man and woman who are part of a trio of survivors that split off from a larger group of 20 or so who were simply too frightened and shell shocked to be able to function in any faction.

A pretty realistic scenario and ratio in my opinion. The number of people who can handle such a thing is going to a small portion of any group. The rest will exist in denial.

We watch our trio as they try to find some place of safety as the bodies become more aware and more vicious and how they deal with it. And how the continued overwhelming impact of the event continues to work at them.

I think the author nailed it in this respect. Like I actually said in a post here, I’d hate to be grouped with the typical survivor of a zombie apocalypse.

Conclusion

I enjoyed the book, quite a bit especially for it’s refreshing viewpoint on the genre. If you’re a fan of the genre then you could do far worse, far far worse, trust me on this.

From a human factor realism standpoint I think the author nailed the likely reactions of a completely random group of survivors of an event that killed virtually everyone and left them alive in the aftermath.

His zombies or bodies in this case and their reactions to sound would tend to behave in the way described as he envisioned them. One zombie is close enough to hear something and moves toward it. That zombie draws other zombies which draws other zombies etc. in a natural migratory kind of way.

I like how it’s not a case of one bite and you’re dead and I like how the zombies became progressively less of a threat individually and then in small groups. But bunny rabbits are cute and fluffy and no threat but a 1000 bunny rabbits will strip you to the bone in seconds if they get it in their heads to do so.

What I disagreed with

I disagree with how long a dead body can continue to last in a way that allows it to function mechanically when left above ground at the mercy of wind, wave and wiggly. The bodies would have been crawling with maggots chewing through their flesh, destroying muscle tissue. The frequent rains and damp mentioned would have accelerated decay but this would be countered to a greater or less degree by the cold so that might be a wash.

I think in the event of a ‘real’ zombie invasion most corpses would be decomposed to the point where they would pose little threat to a healthy survivor after a month or so as the tissues liquefy. Bodies tend to become a bag of fluid and bone held together by the skin fairly quickly unless protected from air, humidity, insects in some fashion. Dirty Jobs with Mike Rowe and other Discovery type shows have edumacated me on that.

Decomp above ground exposed to bugs is the worst possible scenario for the zombie who’s trying to make it to their next birthday.

So when the zompoc happens, just remember, unless you live somewhere so cold it preserves the body (and keeps them frozen and unable to move) then you probably only need to survive a couple of months typically. Less in hotter humid climates.

Which is why a lot of zombie fiction makes a point to either nuke the zombies and kill the bacteria that’s destroying them with the fallout so they last and last or that ‘for some reason’ the decomposition is arrested after a certain point. Usually the point where the zombies are just nasty to look at but still mobile.

Embedded Link

David Moody
Official website of David Moody, author of HATER, DOG BLOOD and the AUTUMN zombie books.

Continue reading »]]> Based on comments from my group and other who I broached the question to, I’ve added a ‘semi-random’ skill up mechanic to LCA!.

The idea is to cater to the folks who enjoy a little bit of randomness in their character’s path choices as well as the ones who have a definite, “This is what I want, don’t screw with me.” path for their character.

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Raising Skills -

In LCA! I offer two potential mechanics for you to offer your players. One should be chosen and enforced for all players, I don’t advise mixing them although statistically a player that uses either one should have the same rough end result in terms of power outputs, but random can trump non-random on both sides of that coin. Mix them at your own peril.

In one method the player has full control over their skill gains. Their character grows exactly as they desire them to with no surprises. This is the Buy method.
The other method, known as the Semi-Random method, allows the player to influence the skills that are raised but there’s no guarantee they’ll get their first choice but odds are very high they’ll get ‘something’. This can lead to interesting developments in a character that are unforeseen by the player and add some color and definition rather than a plotted out growth chart.

With the Semi-Random method the character, for one character point, goes through the skill list in the preferred order until they raise one skill or fail to raise any skills. This has a minimal but real risk that they may not raise any skill. The odds are something like 1 in 2,000,000 so don’t worry you’re going to waste the point.

Which method you choose should be based on your own groups’ needs and playstyle or your own need for iron fisted control.

Buy Method -

For one point the character can pick up a new skill at Rank 0 or increase a Rank 0 skill to Rank 1.
To increase an existing Rank 1 or higher skill by one Rank costs one point as long as the skill’s Rank is currently below the associated attribute.
It costs 2 character points to increase a skill’s Rank if the new Rank would cause it be higher than its associated Attribute.
Example: Dave ‘dings’ and gets another character point. His Range skill is 3 and his Grace is three. Because raising his Range skill would take it higher than the associated attribute it’s going to cost 2 points to raise. Luckily Dave planned ahead and saved his last point and has two to spend and his Range skill increases to 4.
Scott who also has two character points decides to broaden his skill set a bit and adds Occult as a Trained skill for 1 point. His Range skill is only a 1 and his Grace is a 2 so he spends the other point to raise his Range skill to a 2.

Semi-Random Method -

For one character point the character tries to raise a skill using the semi-random method. This can be an existing trained skill or an untrained skill. Note that the new skill must be from the standard list and they can only attempt to learn a single Area of Expertise skill. The player can’t get an infinite list of skill raise attempts by trying AOE after AOE.
They then make a 2d20 roll against a TN of 20 plus the skill’s current Effective Value. The TN would include the Untrained penalty of -10 if the character is trying to raise an skill from Untrained to Trained.
If they succeed on the roll that skill raises by 1 point and the player is done with raising skills. If they have another character point and wish to they can start the process over.
If they skill raise roll fails the player can select a different skill and make the same roll against that skill’s effective value. They can repeat this process until they either raise one skill or have attempted to raise all skills once. If they fail on every skill the character point is lost.
Example: Dave just leveled up and earned a character point. He wants to raise his Ranged skill up by one. His current Effective Skill is 6, he has a Grace of 2 and a Ranged Rank of 4. His TN to meet or beat is 26 to raise this skill. He rolls 2d20, unmodified, and gets a 18. Not good enough.
He looks at his list of skills and decides to try to raise Burglary by 1. It’s Effective Value is 2 giving him a TN of 22. He rolls and succeeds getting a 25 on his roll. His Burglary goes up by 1.
If the Burglary had failed then he’d simply pick another skill to try to raise. He can keep doing this until he succeeds on something or there’s nothing left he has any interest in knowing.

Continue reading »]]> Using a Change Log

About version .7 or so of LCA! with the bulk of the rough mechanics was done I started a change log document. The changes were getting small enough that it was feasible to note them and as I was starting to forget that I’d changed things due to information glut it became informational to do so.

Over time I found it useful in many ways to occasionally go back and review how I’d changed mechanics or what updates I’d made.

I thought it might be interesting for someone who’s trying to design a game for the first time to see how a system might morph and warp over time when viewed through a change log history. If you start at the bottom and work your way up you can get some idea of how basic mechanics continued to evolve and change over time.

Note these are raw and uncut and definitely un-moderated. A single simple line might have been the work of several days like “Worked on zombie script.” and a paragraph of changes that took only 10 minutes.

There may be some bad words in them but hopefully used in a way that’s non-offensive.

At first I only upped the version number when there were significant changes in place, later on I started to up it every time I made any changes unless they were really minor.

I use Google Docs for my system authoring, breaking the system up into 5 sections due to speed limitations with Docs once the system hit the 200+ pages. Breaking it down into smaller sections is a lot better in terms of performance.

——————-

0.779
Clearing out my todo lists. Yay, the to do queue is finished.
Added the first draft of the Mental and Physical affliction chapter.

0.778
Added ability to change init order or interrupt with rewrites.
Update shotgun entry. There are no light shotguns.
Added Well Grounded as a general Knack which handicaps any energy power used for or against a character. They’re harder to hurt but also harder to buff and heal.
Change the innate toughness skills to Grit and Guts.
Spreadsheeted the character build formulas to see who badly things can get out of whack from the power gamer. Seems reasonable after playing with the numbers and the power game suffers from weakness in other areas and can become either a glass cannon or a nerf tank.

0.777
The quest to fix the documents to reflect the change in damage continues. Reminder – Never make a basic change to your damage/health/recover system if you can possibly avoid it.

0.776
Significant clean up of section 3
Change the actions back from standard and minor to just actions. So you can draw and shoot but it’s two actions costing you a -2 penalty on your draw. If you want to draw multiple weapons in one round then take Fast Draw. Modified Fast Draw and added Faster Draw.

More clean up in section 1.

0.775
Modified damage system yet again. Going to a single stress tracker for each type of stress, physical and mental.

Changed Shake It Off to Roll With The Punch.

0.774
Modified scatter system. Cleaner and simpler now but you can only get so simple with it before you just put in a rule “Drop a d20 from a 3″ height over the target square, where the die lands is where the thrown object lands.” and say to hell with it.

0.773
Work on the zompoc document.

0.772
Noted that bonus melee damage is only added to the first attack or the primary attack. This is for balance reasons.
Added Gun Show knack allowing strength to be added to secondary attack.

0.771
Using Full Auto or Cover Fire empties a weapon unless it has the Large Capacity Tweak. It requires an action to reload it afterwards.
Added LC tweak for ranged weapons.
Redid some of the flaws to be more punitive. Added new flaws – Cowardly and Shock Prone

0.770
Modified phrasing a bit on weights/carry
Added Bob and Weave and Flutterby Knacks.
Added in Toughness and Recovery as skills so that all rolls are now semi-universal although both do not suffer from the untrained penalty otherwise they’re forced choices.
Rewrote the dazed condition and recovery roll mechanic/results.
Updated tables and charts, fixed some typo’s and streamlined a few paragraphs for clarity.
Updated Rewrites, modified damage rewrite spending, updated some other stuff in the rewrite chapter.

0.769
Created Tables document
Cleaned up minor things with actions, standardized a few things to be in line with other actions.
Modified penalties on some actions.
Updated/cleaned up some knacks.

0.768
Updated phrasing/terminology on the movements.
Added Snapshot penalty, if you use a skill during a move action then you suffer a -3 penalty to the skill.
Minor fixes in various places.

0.767
Modified Dazed, updated grabbed condition and grabbing.
Adjusted a lot of boosts/handicaps in the stunts section
Changed some of the rewrite rules. Took out the ability to re-roll a roll. Instead you have to now decide before you roll whether or not to expend some resources on them roll. Either a +5 to the roll or count any damage die result of less than 3 as a 3.

0.766
Cleaned up the ‘how to build a monster’ section. Streamlined the recommendations and redid the examples using the new base stats.

0.765
Broke the zompoc out into its own document. Clean up and additions to the script.

0.764
Clean up in section 1. The foreword and what is LCA! are too similar and should be split out a bit.

0.763
Updated references to skill rolls to allow the addition of the base stat. This will need playtesting obviously. Power gaming is a big concern.
Dropped the total skill and attribute values to allow for room to grow.
Added skills for Fortitude and Resolve. Physical Strength

0.762
Script work
Minor clean up in various places.

0.761
sample script work.

0.760
Additional work on zompoc script.
Added noise/attraction system for zompoc.
Revamped the carry system/encumbrance system. It was way too detailed for my needs with too much math.

0.759
Additional work on zompoc script.

0.758
Increased critical failures to equal an unmodified 5 or less on the 2d20 dice. This equates to a 2.5% chance per dice roll. Frequent enough to come up once a session but not so frequently it fucks with people too badly.
And 5 or less ties in with the multiples of 5’s I use.

Simplified Improvised weapons. They deal the same damage as normal weapons so no confusion but their damage dice do not explode and they’re ruined if you roll a critical failure on the attack roll.

Unarmed damage I’m going to settle on it dealing 1d6 and 2d6 damage. You can Knack up to get skill at killing people with your bare hands but without a knack or a weapon you’re just not going to hurt people very easily.

0.757
More rewrites in section two.
Overhaul of boosts and handicaps.
Changed Evasion penalty from Armour to 2 for 1. With the change to 2d20 it’s necessary to balance out.
Extended human attribute range out to around 8. Might make it 10 for the pinnacle of human possibilities. Would need to extend supernatural creatures out to 20.
If that’s the case then will have to make Strength worth half damage. Still pending consideration.
Added Drifting as a drive/motivation actually an anti-drive motivation.
Lots of clean up in the Powers section.

0.756
Lots of rewrites in the various skill sections in sections 1 and 2 for clean up/streamlining purposes.
Wielding Heavy weapon one handed is changed to -5 after running the numbers through the combat sim.

0.755
Pass 2 through Section 1 started
Added Mini Powers to powers chapter secton 2
Play Examples to section 1.

0.754
Work on zombie script

0.753
Work on the Zombie Apocalypse script in preparation for playtesting.
Changed bonus/penalty to boost/handicap

0.752
Added synergy mechanic for skill checks to allow AOE’s to be used as bonuses for regular skill checks or vice versa.

0.751
Added the dive for cover out of blasts as it’s own section rather than mentioned in other locations.
Added to Section 5.

0.750
Working in section 4, extended challenges clean up.

0.749
Added magnitudes to damage and armour. 1-4. Shift in magnitude results in x5 or 1/5 damage applied.
Added entry for ammo tweaks but needs consideration as to how to balance it to keep it in there.
Started on Section 4.
Clean up on Section 4.

0.748
Some changes to Rushing and Sprinting. Changes to Dodge and Parry for clarification.

Lots of minor clean up to section 3 in various sections. Section 3 is now out of first draft and into second draft.

section 2 – resolved some overlap with Knacks dealing with Take a Knee.

0.747
Removed the limits of one critical failure per scene. Since it’s now a measly 1 in 100 chance if you manage to roll it three times in a single scene then more power to you, or against you or whatever.
Removing the limitation on double move as it allows for more cinematic scenes.
Clarified the movement actions sections a bit. Defined a players actions as 1 Move and 2 Standard. They can use a Standard action as a Move.
Rewrote Parry and Dodge to make them more active rather than passive. They still include penalties for taking them as a way to balance them.

0.746
Removed / modified some the rewrite options. Changed the flat + bonus to the roll to an add a 1d6E dice after you’ve rolled which can explode once just like damage die. Removed the guaranteed success option.

0.745
Started the process of changing all references from 1h/2h to LIght / Heavy designators which equate to the same thing just different feel. wielding heavy weapons one handed suffers a -10 penalty on the attack roll.

The old Heavy weapons have become Massive for lack of a more evocative term which also required changing the name of a couple of tweaks.

0.744

Big changes on the mechanics front – Switched from 3d8’s to 2d20’s. TN becomes 20. MAP 2 after changing combat sim to handle new numbers.
Dazed Bonus 5
Impaired -2
Str First Only
All Damage Dice Explode
Shield Bonus 4
Trauma -1

Evasion Ranges from 18 to 24 (28 with shield)
22 avera

PDR ranges from 4 to 10
6 average

0.743
Updates on section 3. Updating penalties and bonuses to -1, -3, -5 where appropriate.

0.742
More cleanup.

0.741
Modified athletics to include unarmed melee. Not sure I like that yet.
General skills polish.

0.740
Added armour tweaks.
Continue to work on fantasy module.

0.739
Continued work on fantasy module.

0.738
Adjusted some of the Trauma/Stress mechanics and added clarity for them, once again I’d left some stuff out that for me was so simple I didn’t realize I’d left it out.

0.737
Added considerably to the sample Fantasy module.

0.736
Split document up into sections to work around google docs issues.
Added Pulling Punches to damage. This lets you voluntarily reduce the number of damage dice you roll. Why you’d want to, I’m not sure. But options are good.
Added Massive tweak to 2H ranged weapons allowing the 4d6 cap to be raised to 5d6.

0.735
Added Insanities or the start of them anyway.
Added disease placeholder.

0.734
Added resting sections/descriptions, it’s a case of I knew what they mean and didn’t actually list it anywhere.
Changed some of the recovery wording
Changed Shaken to Impaired as being more descriptive.
Added a Poison Optional blurb.

0.733
Added the traps section and started the basics.

0.732
Lots of cleanup (duh)
Change Run to Sprint to better differentiate the two types of movement and make the effects of sprinting make more ‘sense’.
Added Family as a Drive and Motivation.

0.731
First draft of D&M chapter is finished.

0.730
Worked on D&M chapter, listed out several basic ones and started fleshing them out.

0.729 -
clean up (duh this is going to be in every update)
Added Drives and Motivations section in character creation, need to expand on that as an actual chapter.

0.728 -
Clean up / Rewording
Added the Simple Chase mechanic.

0.727 -
General clean up.
Modified some verbiage on flaws, knacks.
Went back to Standard Actions instead of Complex actions because it’s semi-standard terminology these days.
Worked some on the Classic Fantasy module.

0.726 -
Changed critical failures to be Rewritable and you can only suffer from the effects of a critical failure once per scene. A little suck factor can be memorable. Frequent suck factor is just that, suck.
General body text clean up.

0.725 -
Made Vitality a flat resource that’s used much like Healing Surges are in 4E rather than a tracker. You pay for healing with them, to active powered items, push yourself etc. If you’re out you can also take stress damage to ‘push’ yourself beyond your limits.
Modified Healing system somewhat, a little simpler.

0.724 -
Added Direct Damage – Chained Targets as a power.
Added new melee stunt – “Shields Down!”
Added new range stunt – “Flush them out.”
Modified slowed = 1/2 base movement.
Changed Shaky to Impaired, just works better for me as a word.
Modified the Raise Dead ritual.

0.723 -
Modified MOB to be a flat +1 bonus when attacking with melee against a target you have allies adjacent to.
Added There’s no I in Team – knack which lets you get a +2 (mob and flanking) when making melee attacks against a creature that another ally is attacking with the same knack.
Added another use for Rewrites – You can change one normal die in a dice roll to a Golden Ticket die.

0.722 -

The Golden Ticket – Changed explosions so that only a single golden dice can explode per roll. This dice is designated by color or if multiple colors are missing it’s the first dice rolled. Yes this is an homage to The Schwartz.
Added Golden Child knack which allows character to use Golden Ticket die on Untrained dice rolls.

0.721-
Added Levitate power.

0.720-
Added Summon power.
Minor touch ups.
Modified Prone significantly
Modified melee stunt tables.

0.719-
Set Vitality to be a 4/2 although it’s only a single tracker with 6 boxes just like Physical and Mental. Vitality is naturally lost during the work day as well as when ‘healing’.
Vitality now powers healing. Character’s use Vitality to recover excess damage between Scenes and it powers Healing.
Healing power rewritten so that all healing costs ‘someone’ vitality.
Updated signature Mastery

0.718 -
Added The Disabler Knack and Flashbangs to Equipment.
Added Grenade Like mechanics including Scatter System.
Added some glossary terms in various locations with the intent to clear up any head scratching by readers not familiar with the basic RGP concepts.
Some power layout cleanup.
Changed Mind Control to Domination for aesthetic reasons.
Added Reduce Metabolism option.
Added Dispel option to Debuff.
Added Joker’s Wild Knack.

0.717 -
Double Tap, Burst have been turned into Knacks.
Full Auto remains a combat maneuver.
Burst modified to use 2’s instead of 3’s.
Added the Weakened state which drops a character to a 0 strength. This is typically a condition of being sick or poisoned.

0.716 -
Double Tap Modified and marked for optionality. The double tap adds a little too much complexity for little return to me. Leaving it in as a optional.
Burst Fire modified. -3 to hit and +3 damage, make two attack rolls, take the higher one.

Continue reading »]]> Don’t Rest Your Head

Session 1 report – Part 2

You can find the first part of this session report here – http://www.keyourcars.com/?p=8083

Players: +Laura Dollins +Scott Stone +David Warren

Persons of Interest: +Temple Smith +L. Scott Rubin

Just to sum up, this was our first gaming session using DRYH. None of us have used such a light system before or one where the players control the narrative to such a degree so it does take some getting used to. It’s very much like everyone’s the GM.

In general the players had a good time and report the system was a win.

———————–

We pick up with Jimmy and Klaus both heading to the river although for different reasons. Klaus to dispose of the ground up remains of the guy his soon to be ex-wife ran off with. Jimmy to dump the stolen wind up police car (yes you read that correctly) that he stole after two cops showed up at his apartment to ask him questions.

Sophie is waiting under a streetlight in the freezing December air, standing in the large mound of snow the city created when it plowed the streets while new snow continues to fall. She fled there after a break-in at her apartment forced her to hit a guy with her baseball bat, twice. A man of certain strange qualities about him.

[Edit - D'oh. I completely forgot something, let me rewind Klaus's story a bit.]

flashback

As the the last of the meat dropped into the heavy waxen box, Klaus startled as the sound of his meat locker door closing sent a dull thud and click through the butcher shop.

He turned to see a man in a full three piece suit of a style that hadn’t been popular in decades walking toward him. In the man’s hand was a thick vellum card about the size of a business card, perhaps slightly larger.

“Who the hell are you?” Klaus asked, moving to cover what he was doing although at this point it would take a forensics team to tell what exactly was in the box.

“I am the Accountant. Please take this.” the man said, his voice smooth and cultured.

Klaus pulled the heavy .357 out of his apron pocket and pointed it at the man.

The man sighed in an exasperated way and shook his head slightly, more perturbed than afraid by far at the sight of the large weapon.

Klaus shivered a bit, blinking as the world seemed to whirl click around him. He was standing alone in his butcher shop, pointing his gun at nothing but between the fingers of his free hand was the business card. He jerked then whirled. The shop was empty except for him and his product.

The card was thick with a luxurious feel to it, nothing like the thin crappy cards that passed for business cards today. It was completely blank on both sides.

What was one more bit of strangeness on this strange night? A man that showed up and disapeared was fairly small potatoes compared to shooting your wife’s boyfriend in the back and then boning and grinding him up into sausage after all.

…And back into the normal timestream…

Jimmy climbed out the police car on the passengers side. The drivers side was pretty messed up where it had smashed into the two cops, sending them flying. The car was just… odd. Nothing was in the right spot, nothing major just off by enough to make it weird. And it was sterile, nothing in the glove compartment, nothing on the floors except a little snow melt, no papers, no wrappers, no empty salt packets or hot sauce containers.

“And what the hell is up with this key?” he muttered looking at the trunk. The huge wind up key was still turning although a lot slower than it had been while he was driving. He grabbed it and pulled and it popped free although not without some effort. There was a loud “ZZzzzzzzzuuuuuuuuurrrrrrrrrr” sound from inside the truck as if a giant coiled spring was unwinding all at once.

The key was heavy, easily seventy pounds if it was an ounce. As he struggled to hold it the light caught an inscription in very small text, “Property of Officer Tok – #369″

Jimmy staggered toward the bank of the river, it was faced with concrete blocking in this area and probably pretty deep he silently bet himself. The key made a nice ka-flump noise at his plunged into the icy waters.

The sound was oddly echoed from off to his right. Jimmy turned to look.

—————–

Klaus dumped the first box of meat into the river. “Good for fish food at least you bastard.” he snorted, an brief almost hysterical chuckle bursting from his lips.

As he let go of the box there was a heavy splash from off to his left. In the distance a figure stood staring at him next to the edge of the river. “Someone else having wife troubles?” he said with a laugh that didn’t touch his eyes.

He went back to his car and quickly picked up the second box and sent it to join the first, the whole time keeping an eye on the other person who just stood watching.

“Can he really see me? Perhaps his eyes are good or the light is more here. Perhaps I should go see.” some inner voice nudged Klaus. A voice with a razor edge and an echo of steel on flesh to it.

The weight of the 357 was a comfort but he found himself wishing for his tool belt for some reason.

And then a man stepped out of a strange looking police car parked near to the man that hadn’t really registered on Klaus till then.

“Was the man a cop?” he thought and that steel toned inner voice responded, “Does it matter? Fish need to eat…”

The new figure walked up to the other and even at this distance, in this light a white card shone in his hand. He stopped some feet away from the first and then there was that strange whirl click as if the universe had hitched in someway and the second man was gone.

The first looked around wildly, much like Klaus had done earlier in his shop. Somehow comforted by this strangeness, Klaus slipped back into his car and drove over.

From the first there was a sense of recognition between the two men, the mad recognizing the mad. Not of like or agreement, just two mad dogs knowing each other for what they were.

The man’s name was Jimmy and he shared a story that was strange and yet not strange to Klaus, at least not this strangest of nights.

Jimmy shivered and Klaus recommended they go find a coffee shop and perhaps talk further.

—————-

Sophia’s teeth were chattering and she couldn’t stop shivering. She called 911 again asking how much longer it would be. “Soon” the operator responded, citing road conditions as the source of the delay.

The door to the vacant warehouse behnd her opened and a man stepped out, dressed in a suit like in old movies. He carefully traversed the snow covered steps and moved toward her. A white card was in his outstretched hand. “Please take this.” he said.

She hefted the bat, “Stay the fuck back asshole.”

The man sighed, a world weary put upon sigh. Then she jerked as the world seemed to hitch in place around her. And the man was gone. But there was that card he’d been holding stuck between her cell phone and fingers.

With a crunching of snow under wheels, two police cars pulled up to the curb. Each had some strange key like thing sticking out of their trunk.

“Some radar trapping thing spewing radiation into the streets without any care for the citizens. And who can blame them, they should all die of poisoning.” she thought to herself as they stepped closer, their footfalls strangely heavy.

“We would like to ask you a few questions miss. Please come with us.”

Their voices were somehow wrong, an odd stilted quality to them that penetrated her cold borne misery. She started to back away.

A large vehicle was passing by and inside were two men that were staring in her direction, the passenger pointed at the police and seemed agitated about it.

The cops continued their slow inexorable advance toward her and she backed further almost stumbling in the lumpy snow pile.

The moving vehicle stopped and the door was flung open, “Get in!” shouted the passenger, the driver’s shout muffled but holding a same urgency to it.

Sophia hesitated only as long as it took the cops to close the distance another stride but she turned and in a stumbling run dove into the vehicle. The driver was already moving before she’d bounced off the cracked vinyl seats once and expertly nudged the gas to avoid spinning the tires and losing traction.

“Jimmy doesn’t like this, he doesn’t like this at all.” the passenger said staring out the rear view mirror. The two cops were moving back to their cars. “Jimmy thinks we should go faster.”

The driver, an older fellow, “Seriously son, stop with the third person bit.” He pressed a little harder on the pedal and the old vehicle picked up speed.

Behind them the two police cars picked up speed as well.

“Hi, my name is Jimmy.” the passenger said, “Your chauffeur for the evening is Klaus.”

“What the fuck is going on?!” Sophia half screamed.

“Jimmy’s not sure but he doesn’t think you want to get to know those particular cops any better. Klaus they’re getting closer by the way.”

Sophia glanced around, getting her bearings, “Turn left at the next corner, there’s some hills there. This thing is four wheel drive?”

Some minutes later the two police cars were left behind, one losing traction in a sharp turn and sliding sideways to hit the curb and fly up and over into a store front. The other hitting the back of a moving truck hard enough to almost fuse with it.

“Jimmy could go for some coffee, that’s for sure.” Jimmy said, “There a Duncan Doughnuts, pull through the drive through.”

As they waited for the attendent to bring them their bearclaws and coffee, Sophia observed, “Stupid place to put a door, anyone coming through it going to get creamed by a car.”

There was a door in the wall to the right of the drive through window. An ordinary looking door, scuffed and aged, chips in the utility grey paint revealing slightly rusted steel underneath.

Klaus pulled the car around and parked it in the parking lot, leaving the motor running for heat. The coffee and pastries passed around, they shared their evenings so far. He was quite careful to leave out the whole murder and butchering part though.

Each pulled out the business card they’d been given by the disappearing man. Jimmy held his up to the light from the street lamp, it was still blank on both sides.

“What was that?” the sullen angry girl in the back said.

“What was what?” Jimmy asked, turning to look at her.

“Do that again.”

“Do what again? Jimmy’s confused.”

“Oh for fucks sake.” The girl held her card up, glancing back toward the doughnut shop. She looked puzzled then rolled her window down and her hand out, holding the card.

Both men in the front seat noticed then what she had. As the card entered the light a soft glow appeared from around the building, the source hidden by the corner. As she pulled it back into the car out of the light, the glow vanished.

They all looked at each other in silence and then in unison they all got out and walked toward the corner. Ignoring the attendent who was nattering on about she couldn’t serve walkups, Sophia held her card up into the light and the door to the right of the drive through window glowed softly as if light by a dim spotlight.

Klaus stepped closer and then gripping the handle pulled it open. A veritable wall of sound, an almost physical impact to it blasted forth. Voices cried out, in languages familiar and not, people hawking wares and arguing about prices. Through the door came the light of a thousand sources, candles, lanterns, electric lights and some that were just dancing plasma. As far as they could see, which wasn’t far the lay stalls, tents, blankets, each piled or almost empty of things. And moving between them were people, throngs of people of all types and descriptions.

In near silence the three went through the door, Klaus, then Jimmy and although slowly Sophia.

—————

I’ll continue with Part 3 when I get a chance.

Embedded Link

Session Report – DRYH – Session 1 » Key Our Cars
Session Report. Don’t Rest Your Head. I ran my first for real session of DRYH or Dont’ Rest Your Head last night. It’s a strong narrative, light mechanics system set in a dark surreal land…

Continue reading »]]> Random skillups

Curious if anyone has an opinion on the pros/cons of a random skill up system.

Most systems I’m familiar with, skill gains are done either automatically as you level up or you get character points when you level that you can then spend to level up your skills as you see fit.

There are a number of systems though that this is random. When you level up or even at the end of every session, you make a roll versus your current skill, sometimes only for skills you actually used during the session. If you either roll under or over (depending on the way the system mechanics work) then you go up in skill.

I’m not necessarily a proponent of randomization in character power this way, it makes life harder for me as a GM to create encounters of the power level that I’m trying to achieve.

The whole if you used a skill then you can try to level it up is something I’m against though. It merely ensures that every player is going to find some way to use every skill they have. And I can either accept that or block it. In either case it’s more bookkeeping than I personally want to deal with.

But with that said, I’ve never actually GM’d or played in such a system, so maybe it works out well enough. If you have an opinion on the matter feel free to comment.

Continue reading »]]> Session Report

Don’t Rest Your Head

I ran my first for real session of DRYH or Dont’ Rest Your Head last night. It’s a strong narrative, light mechanics system set in a dark surreal land of horror and scary things that really do live under the bed, things that are all pointy bits and razor edges.

In attendance were +Laura Dollins (my lovely wife), +Scott Stone and +David Warren friends who I’ve shared gaming tables with for 20+ years. Two other players +Temple Smith and +L. Scott Rubin were unable to make it but hopefully next time.

Laura and Scott had already created their characters and we were able to go through Dave’s pretty quickly. The mechanics are easily explained and eventually learned. I’ve read a lot of game systems and the dice mechanic is unique in my experience.

Laura turns out to be a young woman named Sophia, a serious social misfit and introvert who’s secret hatred of people turns out to fuel her Madness Talent although it got little use last night. Her hatred of others is contagious and she can make them so hate themselves that they… well let’s just say you wouldn’t want to get on the bad side of this woman.

Scott is a mature man, a salesman by the name of Jimmy who can sell anything to anyone, even himself at times as he covers up his horrible self image with flashy material goods. The power to Forget his Madness talent, when pushed he can reach into the past and make a person forget to have locked a door and by pushing to the limit his Madness talent could literally do something like make gravity forget about him for a short instant while falling 40 stories to the ground.

Dave is a older fellow with a lot of suppressed rage. A german butcher by the name of Klaus from a long line of butchers it’s not surprising that in the end, his Madness talent is The Knife. It’s always there, in whatever form it needs to be and it knows even before he does when he’s going to need it. Push him too far and the Knife can sever the tie between your mind and body and leave you in a rather bad way.

Each character had their opening scene, based on their character questions and their What Just Happened answers.

These are the results of those opening encounters. I’ll follow up with the rest of the fallout later on this week as well as the player’s reactions.

Assuming the recording didn’t jack up, I’ll get the podcast cleaned up this week hopefully and posted for anyone that wants to listen.

————————-

The fated evening started quietly enough with a authoritative knocking at Jimmy’s door. Peering through the peephole he sees two policeman. Being all to familiar with debt collectors and eviction notices, Jimmy’s not too keen on opening the door.

“Who is it?” Jimmy calls.

“The police. We need to ask you a few questions sir. Please open the door.” The stilted way the one policeman was talking had images of James T. Kirk and a T-101 running through Jimmy’s mind.

“Jimmy doesn’t need anything officers.” he replies. His odd way of talking about hismsef in third person creeping in.

The the wierd way the the police have of talking and the high sheen on their skin was definitely freaking Jimmy out a bit.

He calls 911 and requests assistance but the police outside seem to have some urgency to talk with Jimmy and start to break the door down.

Jimmy attempts to block the door with furniture but in the end decides to flee, grabbing his new jacket ($399 custom fitted and brand new that day bought on the last of 10 credit cards that was still working) he flees through the window of his 8th floor condo. (“A decision I think I’m about to regret, after stating he lived on the 8th floor earlier”)

The two policemen give chase but they’re slow and Jimmy flees down the snow covered escape, breaking windows and arousing an outcry as he passes them. He ducks back in on the 5th floor and then takes the stairs down.

“Hi John, Mary, just passing through.” he says with a bright salesman’s smile as he crosses in front of the couple watching the latest reality television show. “He’s never going to win you know.”

Outside there’s a police car parked at the curb, an odd one, one more fit to be seen on the streets of London. And even odder, there’s a large, slowly turn wind up key sticking up out of the trunk which brings back childhood memories.

“That’s something you don’t see every day.” Jimmy says, bouncing from one foot to another, filled with nervous energy.

The few other cars (“No I’m currently in between cars.” Much like he’s in-between jobs…) on the street are snow bound and besides Jimmy isn’t a car thief. But that police car running at the curb, headlights on attracts his attention and as heavy footsteps each from inside the building he dives in and decides to head out. The two police come back and Jimmy, in an unusual fit of rage, throws the car in reverse and speeds back the way he’d just come, deftly flipping the wheel at the last minute to spin the car and catch both cops with the side of the car. Metal crushed and clanged and the cops went flying heavily through the air to burst through the front of a building.

With air leaking through the damage doors of his acquired cop car, Jimmy proceeds to head toward the river with the idea of ditching the car and catching a water taxi.

—–

Sophia on her way home spots something really odd in an alleyway, a man who appeared to be shoving his arm through another man’s chest. “Serves the bastard right I’m sure.” she mutters, hating him instantly for attracting her attention. Head down she trudges home in the heavy snow from her minimum wage job at Walmart. Oblivious to the figure that’s now ghosting along the dark streets of this run down section of town behind her, one that minutes earlier was doing… something to another man in an alley.

Her crappy apartment building, never warm enough to drive the chill of Boston’s December chill is waiting, empty and silent. Even with her employee discount TV, much less cable is out of her budget so after a quick raman noodle dinner she heads to her bedroom to try once again to make a futile effort to sleep while listening tot he radio. Her inability to sleep is perhaps what allowed her to hear the window in the living room roll up or perhaps it was the cold draft that whistled through the rooms.

Regardless the heavy maple baseball bat was a comfort as she moved to the door. She reached through the opening and flipped the lightswitch. Rising up from where he’d just crawled through her window is a man. Her second floor window although it didn’t occur to her to question that was a man in a dark floor length overcoat. His face was oddly hard to focus on, as if her eyes couldn’t… or wouldn’t… focus on it. His right arm is stained a deep crimson almost to the elbow.

“Oh that’s fucking it!” she swears and steps forward and brings the bat around in a blow that had every bit of force of her sinewy muscles in it. The deep cracking thud as it hits the man in the side of his head echoes through the apartment. His head snaps to side and his vertebrae crackle. He folds like a wet dishcloth and lands on the floor.

She looks for her phone, realizes it’s in the bedroom and heads to go get it. Hating that her night is going to screwed up dealing with this crap.

As her hand picks it up from night table, her bedroom door shuts. She turns and the man from the living room is standing there and takes two swift strides and grabs her by the shoulders.

Something inside her flowers and one handed she hammers his hands away and then brings it back and down on top of his head. The wooden thud is if anything louder than before and he staggers and falls.

She flees the apartment and into the cold air outside. Not really dressed for the outside now, she pushes through the piled snow to find a working street light three blocks away. Calling 911, she waits for someone to show up, hating the cold, the bastard who drove her out of her apartment and every son of bitch that conspired to have standing there shivering in the snow, bathed in the sickly yellow of the arc light above her head.

————-

“Godamn bitch, I should throw her in the locker and set this place on fire.” Klaus muttered as he drove his cleaver through the side of beef and hard enough to embed it a solid inch in the old butcher block table top. Another 16 hour day, one in a long series of them to try and make a better life for the two of them and then she up and runs off that creepy bastard and his gods be damned expensive cars and townhouse.

The little silver bell over the door rang out in the shop. The same bell his great grandfather had brought over from the old country and his butcher shop there.

“Closing up in 5 minutes friend.”

“No hurry Klaus, this won’t take a moment.”

Klaus recognized the voice immediately although he’d only heard in the background after talking his wife. He moved around behind his counter before turning, his right hand closing on the walnut hilt of the .357 magnum he kept by the cash register. He’d acquired it through a friend of friend after getting robbed twice and ironcially had never had a need for it afterwards.

Jack smiled at him in passing, his glance moving around the shop taking inventory, appraising it.

Something broke inside Klaus, the predatory way this son of a bitch was looking around was the straw. The straw that broke the dam holding his rage back. He pulled the gun up and centered the barrel directly over the man’s heart. “What do you want?”

The man smiled, seemed unperturbed in the slightest by the sight of the huge silver pistol. He carefully reached into his suit and pulled out some folded papers. “I just need you to sign these Klaus. Won’t take a minute of your time.”

“What are those?” Klaus said through clenched teeth.

“A bill of sale. For the shop. You see I need money and the money your wife brought wasn’t enough. Ergo I need your shop.”

Thoughts raced through his head, red thoughts, red broken glass and metal fragment thoughts. He nodded, “Fine, let’s go to my desk and I’ll look at them. It’s through there.”

Jack sighed in exasperation, “Fine, whatever.” He opened the indicated door and found himself staring at a meat cooler, heavy iron hooks suspended from the ceiling.

Klaus said, “The desk, back corner.”
Jack advanced into the cooler, “Odd place to keep a desk Klaus.”

Klaus followed him in, closing the heavy insulated door behind him.

Jack looked around then said in a musing voice, “Those look like they’d hold a lot. Your wife, she dresses out at what? 130lbs or so?”

Klaus barely heard the words, his concentration on his right index finger, feeling as if he was an outside observer as the finger continued it’s slow pressure and it came as no surprise at all when the revolver bucked like a kicking mule in his hand.

The heavy slug punched straight through Jack’s spine, expanded and then exploded out from the center of his chest to spray heart and lung tissue all over an side of beef. Jack toppled forward and his chin fell onto one of the hanging hooks and his body dangled there as blood ran out of his chest in a quick torrent of crimson.

Klaus looked at the body, then the pistol and then around. He stepped outside, no one appeared to have heard anything. He flpped the closed sign and locked the front door. A last glance out and the streets were still empty.

Swiftly, working on auto pilot from long practice he went into the cooler, strapping on his tool belt that held the various tools his trade. In the meat locker on the prep table he began to work. The meat was swiftly boned and then processed through the industrial grinder, the end product making a fine sausage like grind. It was as he was reaching for his spices that some level of sanity returned and he stopped.

Using waxed cardboard boxes and butcher paper he boxed Jack up and then moved him out to his car.

Heading to the river he drove slowly and carefully, the driving patters of a sedate middle aged man and so ingrained he couldn’t have hurried if he’d wanted to.

———————-

Continue reading »]]> My first player submission from +Scott Stone for my DRYH campaign tomorrow. My response to the player -

Oh but the future loooooves Jimmy. It’s been waiting in the shadows and alleys, biding its time, sharpening its claws for 37 long years, sharpening them to razor edges and needle points, just for this moment….

From the Player -

My Name Is:
Jimmy Keller

What’s Been Keeping You Awake?
Jimmy is deep in debt and can’t stop spending money. He just bought $3,000 worth of golf clubs on two credit cards, a cool survival knife, $300 in organic food, a nifty jacket…and they’re threatening to turn off the power.

What Just Happened To You?
Jimmy just saw something in the corner of his eye that looks like a pile of walking, bleeding warts with horns and fangs. Jimmy ran away from it, but was sure he saw its shadow later on. He thinks it lives in the alley near his apartment.

What’s on the Surface?
Jimmy likes to dress snappy. He’s got thousands of dollars of clothes and shoes and nice watches. Jimmy often speaks of himself in third person. He’s average height, 37 years old, dark red hair. He’s had ten jobs and three marriages the last decade. He is something of a health nut.

What Lies Beneath?
Jimmy is hiding his inadequacy. He spends money to make himself feel better, and is nearly an expert in going bankrupt. Jimmy likes to pretend he’s something he’s not – successful at business, a good family man, affluent. He doesn’t want anyone to know he’s failed at anything.

What’s Your Path?
Jimmy doesn’t know. He’d love to find out. His longterm goals have all given way to immediate goals and needs. Jimmy doesn’t like to think about the future.

What’s Your Exhaustion Talent?
Jimmy is a persuasive guy. He can sell corn to an Iowan. He can really get persuasive at extreme need.

What’s your Madness Talent?
Jimmy can make people (or things) forget. They forget to hurt him, or that he owes them money. They forget to do something that is in their own self interest, or to do something that is against Jimmy’s self interest.

Fight or Flight?
Jimmy doesn’t like pain. He runs. 2 flight, 1 fight.

Continue reading »]]> Don’t Rest Your Head

I’m going to be running my first DRYH (by +Fred Hicks ) session tomorrow, my first ‘for realz’ group session rather than playtesting that is. If you’re not familiar with the system, I highly recommend taking a look to see if it fits your gaming needs.

Barring technical difficulties it should go up as a podcast as well eventually. Assuming I don’t screw it up completely.

I have the following list of major movers and shakers in my take on the setting which includes some of the RAW nightmares because they fit for me – (many of the originals are just too punny for me as written and didn’t fit the flavor I’m going to be shooting for. )

———–

The Furies – (Note: That’s fuRies and not fuRRies, huge difference) These shadow figures answer to no one, not even the Board. They seek out the fallen Awaken and take them away and what they do with them when they succeed, no one knows but rumor abounds although the wise keep their ideas to themselves.

The Board – An anonymous power base who’s visible component is the Upright Man and their Flunkies. Their primary concern is to keep disruption in the Mad City to a minimal roar because disruption is bad for business. When a major nightmare needs to be put down, it’s the Board that sanctions it and the Upright Man who does the dirty work.

Officer Tock – And his Clockworks. Affiliated with the Board and primarily designed to keep chaos in check because chaos stops the flow of profit. The clockworks cannot be reasoned with, argued with and they will not sway from their assigned missions until ordered down or destroyed.

The Angel of Mercy – a capricious amoral sadistic solo power who believes that putting people out of their misery, even if they haven’t suffered yet is her task in life. Beyond crazy but too powerful for anyone to want to risk saying ‘Hey now, that’s enough of that.” Especially since she rarely goes after a mover and shaker.

King Wax – the closest thing to a underground resistance the city knows. King Wax is constantly striving to increase his power base and reclaim what he claims is his, nothing short of the entire city. His coins do provide the coin of the realm, each wax like disk, impervious to normal harm, holds an emotion, the most common petty anger or fear on up to the most rare, a coin said to hold the soul of an heavenly host. Coins though are for the plebeian and everyday transactions, the true form of wealth in the Mad City is how many favors you’re owed and by whom. These are kept straight by the Accountant.

The Accountant – The Account’s army of Paper Pushers are in charge of recording all transactions, whether you want them to or not. Just saying, “I owe you one.” to someone is enough to get written up in the all knowing ledgers of the Accountant. It is said that when those books are finally full, the existence of everything will be given a final Tally and stored away somewhere for safe keeping.

The Daily Oracle – The MC’s paper of choice and the only major published news as they make sure any competition is eliminated. The news that is printed invariably comes true and is reported by the Paper Boyz. (note the leet use of a z instead of an s to indicate I’m down with the kids today)

The Salvation Army – They’re going to save your soul. Whether you want them to or not. And the gods above and below forgive you if you pass one of their collection buckets without paying something to the cause.

Mother Not and the Little Sisters – The old hag and the eternally young girls that serve her. Mother Not is an old power in the city, some say she was let into the city long ago when the world’s most famous cat burglar managed to open a door during the 13th hour. And some say she’s just an old lady with massively scary powers. But they don’t say that to her face or they find themselves visited by the Little Sisters and then they don’t say anything anymore.

Red Rose – Runs or has ties to the high end bordellos. She services the movers and shakers and their guests.

The Flesh Pedller – Is the Sam Walton of whorehouses home of the $20 [bleep].

The Don – His army of Guidos run the crime side of things, fencing, gambling, theft and the link.

The Candy Man – He and his Mules handle the nose candy side of the city. *sniff* what do you need man? Smack, angel dust from a real angel, the burnt residue of a unicorn’s horn? I got it all baby and the first one’s free.

And an assortment of minor powers and organisations or solo powers important enough to mention -

The Mickey’s, The Spy Network, Hell’s Rejects, Fallen Angels, The Protos, Father Time, Lord of Flies, Hell Hath No Furies (not affliated), D’Spair, Puppetmaster, Necromonger, Rhapsody, The Dark Carnival, Shadowman, Mother Destiny, The A.I. Collective, The Furries (note the two r’s).

Continue reading »]]> Con games can be both tough and easy. How’s that for a little wish and wash?

Let me expand a bit. They’re tough for a couple of bigger reasons -

• You have a very finite time period to put on your show. You have a hard start and usually a hard end unless you’re the last game of the night and you’re sure they won’t kick you out at closing time. Your time is usually limited to 3 or 4 hours tops.
• You have players who are with rare exception unfamiliar to you and are unfamiliar with you. Are they roll players or role players? Do they want to hack and slash or sit and talk?

They’re also easy for a couple of reasons -

• You have a very finite time period. If things aren’t going well, at least the clock will eventually ring and bring a mercy killing to your game for you.
• You have players who with rare exception are there to play your game. They’re not there because they had nothing better to do on a Saturday night. They’re not there to bullshit and reminisce about their favorite shared scenes from old campaigns or talk about who’s playing who in the bowl game. They’re there to give you the opportunity to let them be awesome.

There are some things you can do that will make your con game go better, note I didn’t say great, just better. Great comes with practice or natural talent. Usually practice.

Be upfront about your game and what you intend to run in your games description in the listings. Don’t just say “Spirit of the Century game” for instance. Say “Trouble in the clouds! Rocket Apes of Mars Attack Zeppelin! News to follow! – A 40’s pulp adventure using the Spirit of the Century engine / a Fate based game.”

Have all your materials in hard copy and soft. Just in case you lose your briefcase you might still be able to find a printer somewhere and print new ones from the thumb drive on your key ring. If you lose both then maybe it just wasn’t meant to be.

Have pregens ready and plenty of them to give the players choices. Don’t force a player into a character they don’t feel comfortable with because you only brought 4 pre-gens for a 4 player game.

Lose the word um from your vocabulary at least temporarily. It’s very hard, we naturally want to fill dead air with some sign that we’re thinking about an answer but try to substitue actual words, “Let me see…” “Good question!” or simply, “Just a second…”

Know your materials, your scenes and your setting. This is a pretty important one. I hear it all the time where GM’s get stuck for answers because the players take things off the rails and they have to shift gears trying to figure out the ramifications of the new direction.

It’s a little ironic but prepare to improv. Players have a huge knack for turning anything into a sandbox. They can even turn a dungeon crawl into one, they’re extremely talented that way about breaking your carefully orchestrated sequence of events. So be prepared with side quests, a stack of NPC’s to talk to etc. Be able to look at a sheet of paper and grab an NPC and a small blip about his personality. Don’t just pretend to stare at a sheet of paper while you desperately try to come up with a name and some characteristics. Trust me you’ll end up duplicating NPC’s that way and get the “Oh is he related to that guy we met yesterday?” comments.

Play test your planned adventure multiple times, even if you have to do it solo. Going through the tactical bits a few times will give you a good idea of how long they’re going to take. Now double or even triple that time to have a very rough idea of how long it’ll take a group of people to do it.

Have a rough real time schedule of how long each scene should take so that you can reach the end of your planned session and keep your schedule and a clock in front of you. There’s nothing wrong with not reaching the end if everyone’s having a great time up to that point but having closure for the adventure that matches the closure of the session is better. Be prepared to skip scenes if necessary and have work-arounds for the things that should have happened in those skipped scenes to keep subsequent scenes on track. It’s better to skip the scenes than rush through them IMO.

Split your time between each player as equitably as you can. There are going to be players who are naturally outgoing and some who aren’t. Part of your task is to balance them out so that everyone has input and most importantly a little fun in the spot light.

Engage your players quickly. Remember you have limited time, you don’t have a lot of time for build up that you do in an ongoing campaign. Open your session with a bang. A car chase, a gun fight, spotting something dark with claws in the shadows, whatever fits, get them engaged quickly in what’s going on. If you spend 30 minutes in world and scene description you’re going to lose some players. They’ve got massive amounts of distractions all around them, other tables/games, the hot guy/girl over there, what restaurant they’re going to after your game, or what restaurant they just came from, do they remember how to get back to their hotel, when’s their flight leave etc. You’ve got to hook them hard and fast from the get go. Plan a Trinity against the Agents level of Whabam! to get them to forget all that other crap and focus on the awesomeness you have planned.

Speaking of wesomeness, let the players be Awesome. If they want to do something way over the top, let them. Remember this is a one shot, limited time frame session. No matter how much you let them bend or even break the rules in their quest to be Awesome, you don’t have to deal with it later. You don’t have to come back the next session and say, “Okay Bob, I know I let you do that double flip off the bar onto the piano and take three shots and kill 5 outlaws to impress Miss Dixie the hooker with a heart of gold last time but I’m gonna have to tone it down a bit going forward.” No matter how many +5 Holy Avengers you let them come across, you don’t have to deal with it again.

In the same vein, configure your tactical elements so that on average the players succeed 75-80% of the time. So lower your TN’s, your Obstacles, your DC’s, your AC’s. You don’t have the luxury of an on-going campaign to give your players multiple chances to be Awesome due to random dice rolls. And there’s nothing so un-Awesome as walking away from a game and the first thing they tell people is “Yeah I couldn’t hit for shit.” Throw mooks in with the bosses so the people who’s dice are sucktastic have something they can deal with.

As a follow up to that, something very key to player enjoyment is let them play. Don’t kill your players or take away their ability to act on their turn or strip them of their powers or equipement. Daze them, don’t Stun them. Impair them, don’t knock them out. Again, you don’t want their take-away from the game to be “I think I got to roll four times because I was either stunned or unconscious the whole game.”

Hand out the “What did you like and how could I do it better?” questionnaire at the end so you can get some direction on what’s working and what’s not working as well. And take the answers with a grain of salt because next game you’re going to have a completely new set of players who will bring their own likes and dislikes to your table.

Hopefully something in the preceding helps you to make a truly great game where the players walk away going “OMFG, I’m SO signing up for that GM’s next con game.”

Continue reading »]]> Sigh, nothing is more painfully annoying than making a drastic change to a mechanic as far spreading as damage health healing and having to go back and edit the changes everywhere it’s mentioned, every example, every sample character etc.

But as a result I as I was scrolling along I did some clean up in the Skills section, the end result is more for utter newbs to RPG mechanics but hopefully it would explain it in such a way my mother would understand. Eventually anyway. Maybe. Okay my kids would be able to figure it out.

Formatting lost in the translation to G+. It’s easier to read in the original.

Some clarification – a 0 attribute means you’re just average. A 0 skill means you’ve had minimal training just enough to negate the untrained penalty. Rewrites are my version of fate/hero/bennies/luck/drama points. It’s a movie theme, what can I say. I use Rewrites for fate chips, Take 5 for a short rest, Stressed Out for running out of health and similar type things.

———————

Making a Skill Roll -
Using any Skill counts as a Standard Action under most circumstances and taking more than one standard action on a turn incurs the standard multi-action handicap of -2 for all actions taken on that turn.

To use a skill you need to follow a few simple steps which can be summed up by this statement:

All skill and attribute rolls are based on rolling 2d20 and then adding handicaps or boosts to the roll to generate a final value and comparing the final value to a target number to determine success.

Many times a skill check will benefit from rolling higher than the minimum value needed to succeed at the check. This is called getting a Shift result and the Director will determine when this would apply.

A Step by Step -

1) Determine the best skill to use for whatever the task is at hand.

2) If the skill is untrained determine if it can be used untrained. If not then you fail. If yes then continue.

3) Determine your effective skill value by adding your skill Rank and the linked attribute. If the skill is untrained subtract 10 from the effective skill value.

4) Roll 2d20 and add your effective skill value and any situational boosts/handicaps to achieve a final skill roll.

5) Did you roll an unmodified 5 or less on the dice? If yes then you just critically failed and the Director will determine the results of your failure. If not then continue.

6) Compare the final skill roll against the Target Number (typically a 20). If the roll equals or beats the TN then you succeeded. Otherwise you simply did not succeed on this attempt.

7) For each 10 over the roll you get a Shift result which may (or may not) have impact on the end result of your success.

Apply the results as necessary.

Skill Use Examples:
Note this uses some mechanics that you may not have read yet, they’re included here for completeness -

The Scene:
Zoey is being swarmed by zombies. She’s fleeing down an alley and as part of the scene description, the Director mentions that there is a fire escape about 10’ off the ground as one potential option among others. Zoey states she’s going to make a running leap for it and if she makes it climb up and if not then keep on running.

The Director decrees this is going to be a test of her Athletics ability which covers jumping and uses the standard target number of 20 but gives her a situational boost of +3, she is getting chased by flesh eating zombies after all which is a pretty big incentive to get away.
Zoey checks her sheet and she has a Rank 1 Athletics and a Strength of 0 giving her an effective Athletics skill of 1. Now if she had no training in Athletics her effective skill would be a -10. Good thing she’s had the occasional Zumba class.

Let’s look at a few alternate results -

Result 1 – Basic skill test results in failure:
She makes a skill roll, 2d20+1+3 (base roll + effective skill + situational bonus) and gets a total of 14. She fails and keeps running. There is no other penalty for failure other than not succeeding.

Result 2 – Basic skill test results in Critical Failure:
She makes a skill roll, 2d20+1+3 and rolls an unmodified four on the dice. This is a Critical Failure. The Director narrates that she jumps and missed the ladder and lands in some slime on the ground. She slides and falls prone, her head hitting the ground and suffers one Stress which results in her being Dazed.

Result 3 – Basic skill test results in success:
She makes a skill roll, 2d20+1+3 and gets a final result of 23, a success. She easily jumps up grabs the ladder which slides down and she starts climbing. Unfortunately for her, these zombies can climb but they must do so single file and she can now pick them off easily from above while remaining safe out of harms way.
Manaical laugh: “Until the window next to her shatters as undead arms reach through…”

Result 4 – Basic skill test with a shift result:
She makes a skill roll, 2d20+1+3 and gets a final result of 30. She easily jumps up grabs the ladder and starts climbing. Because she nets a a Shift 2 on the result, one for meeting or beating the TN of 20 and another one for getting 10 over it the Director tells her not only does she make the leap but the ladder doesn’t slide down and the zombies are now reaching up fruitlessly for it.

Result 5 – Basic skill test with a Rewrite:
Zoey really really wants to make this roll. She spends a Rewrite and takes narrative control and describes, “There’s a short wooden crate that’s in a good spot to use to jump up from.”. She now makes a skill roll of 2d20+1+3+5. The +5 is for the Rewrite bonus which must be applied before the roll. She gets a 29 and easily makes the leap up. The rewrite wasn’t necessary in this instance but you never know.

Result 6 – Basic skill test with a Trait invocation:
Zoey takes the jump and rolls 2d20+1+3 and gets a 19. Just short of the ladder. She declares her survivor instincts kick in and she stretches that tiny bit more. She’s invoking one of her Traits, “Survive at any cost.” which lets her add a +3 after making the roll. The director agrees the trait is applicable in this situation and the Director gets a Rewrite that he can use against Zoey later on during the session or he can add a Minor Complication. Zoey now has a result of 22 and makes the leap. The Director elects to add a Complication and declares “You barely manage to catch the ladder with your right hand and your full weight crashes down on your shoulder at an awkward angle. You’ve picked up the Flaw – Socket Wrenched until after your next Take 5 rest period.

Hopefully these examples have given you some idea of how varied the outcome and results could be from a single fairly simple use of a Skill. The Director can help to determine the best skill to use for a situation and will determine any situational modifiers that would help or hinder your ability to gain a success with a given skill in a given situation.

Continue reading »]]> Charisma as a stat…. Do we really need it?

Climbing in the WABAC machine with Mister Peabody and Sherman and checking things out, charisma has been a mostly ignored stat from day one and yet always there. Its kind of like laws for lawmakers. It gets lip service but never really used.

Sure back in the day if you weren’t a shining example of beauty and poise and presence you couldn’t be a paladin. (17 Charisma requirement when 18 was the highest you could have for those who don’t have a WABAC machine.)

It was used in following game systems, primarily due to inertia really I think. ‘DND has it and players need a number to dictate how good looking they are don’t they?’

And yes I do I know, charisma isn’t just about looks but that’s how every player I’ve ever met treated it, not how much presence or leadership or whatever they had. It was always, woohoo a 17 charisma, I look maaaahvolus. And the inverse a 5 charisma, damn I’m Ernest Borgnine (who is a wonderfully charismatic individual)

It was the ultimate in dump stats since it just really never mattered in any situation mechanical or narration barring the one class that it was a requirement to have for some reason.

Then WotC made the sorcerer in 3.0 that got to base their power off their presence. So now it was mostly ignored for only most of the classes.

A good GM would somehow work in narrative elements for extreme charisma both good and bad but in general the vast spread of the bell curve was meaningless. “The orc tribes find your ugliness attractive and welcome you into the village.”

As a result for me, charisma has gone the way of the dodo bird, or more correct perhaps, the way of the appendix. It’s an unnecessary organ in the body of an RPG system.

In my system, a character’s physical appearance is exactly what the player says it is. There are situational pros and cons to being ugly, average and good looking and they tend to balance out to me. The non-physical portion of the gestalt charisma effect is determined by their skills and lack there-of. A person with a high empathy or social skill in a social situation? Pretty charismatic. A person with a high martial ability in a war situation? Pretty charismatic.

Someone who’s netting a -10 penalty because they don’t have any such skills? Pretty non-charismatic.

The mechanical portion though, for me, makes up only a portion for the average player, the rest is what the player has the character say, how they make them act and react and in general how they narrate their character. Sure if a player has no desire to, or confidence in their ability to ‘role play’, i.e. the player who sits there mumbling “When do we get to roll dice and kill things?” then the mechanics are the whole ball of wax. But in general most players can be engaged to some extent in non-dice rolling with a little encouragement and most importantly, some reward for doing so.

FYI, Players are like rats in a maze. If you don’t reward them with some cheese for reaching the center, they stop trying.

Anyway, so if you’re designing a game system, ask yourself if you really need a mechanical number to dictate how much charisma a player’s character has and if it wouldn’t be better to encourage them to be as charismatic as they want their character to be through actual dialogue and actions.

Who knows we might subtly influence the leanings of today’s societal behaviour as a result. In a good way that is.

Continue reading »]]> The active defense – To continue my previous post, I think it was my previous post, I’m going to stream of thought, putting things into letters helps solidify them for me.

Trivia note: LCA! has a strong tactical leaning. I’m trying to find a happy (for me) middle ground somewhere between Savage Worlds and DnD 4e. Savage worlds was too tactical light for my preferences and 4E combats took away too much game time to resolve even with the changes I made to them.

So in LCA! the amount of damage from any given attack that character can ignore is a secondary characteristic. It’s calculated based on other characteristics in a add and then divide and then add a base kind of system. Fairly straightfoward and used a lot.

Well perhaps not the way I’m computing it but one of my concerns is power gaming. Power gamers have screwed my experience as a GM and as a player too often and I’m getting my revenge by making it hard to power game in LCA! either on purpose or accident. Anyway it’s a combination of both the physical and mental abilities of the character. You can be physically tough as rock but if you don’t have the mental toughness to back it up, you’ll give up long before you reach your limits. And you can be tough as nails mentlaly but if you don’t have the physical toughness to back it up, you’re still at a disadvantage over someone who has both.

There’s a mental toughness as well which is also a computed stat but based on different characteristics for horror and fear type settings.

Another goal was to minimize the ‘dump stat’ syndrome as much as one can and still have a variety of stats. (I got rid of Charsima as a stat, your charisma is whatever you say it is physically and how you act socially in RP moments)

Okay I’m getting offtrack.

Anyway the ‘average’ character will have around a 6 as their physical toughness. This means they have to get hit for at least 6 points of damage for it to have an effect. And for 11 points for it to hurt. And for every 5 over that it hurt more. This break down is very similar to Savage Worlds damage system, for obvious reasons, I like it and it was SW that really got me started on a ‘how can I make this better for me?” that lead to 8 months of work and 250+ pages (so far) of game manual.

System notes: Weapons that are intended to be wielded one hand are small and deal 2d6 damage. Melee or range doesn’t matter. Weapons that are wielded two handed are large and deal 3d6 damage, again doesn’t matter the type. I don’t have 4 pages of weapons data, just 2 sizes and 3 types. large/small and melee/range/improvised. You can keyword your weapons to customize them by adding tweaks like a silencer, or laser sights or sharpening it or giving it reach. This puts the power in the player’s hands for narrative control of their gear.

The whole active defense is intriguing me though. I like how it played in +Chris Tregenza‘s 6d6 system (high recommend for you to take a look at if you need a clean light system). Every attack typically always had the chance that the damage would roll low or the defense would roll high and change the outcome outside the normal expectations. In essence it adds a bell curve to any given action that requires dice.

I like bell curves. My whole system is based on them from the attack rolls to the damage rolls. Bell curves give you a nice expected outcome and one where the highs and lows occur less frequently so they’re that much cooler when it happens. In DnD 4e for instance, every attack has a 5% chance to critical. Unless you’re an Avenger against your oath target or a ranger using Twin Strike and then it’s 10%.

And I get off track again. This is what happens when I just sit down and type.

So anyway, back to the actual topic, after only a page and a half or so. If the average person has a toughness of say 6. My thought now is to make that a 1d6+2, or possibly a 1d6+3 if I’m feeling generous. The average on a d6 is 3.5, round down to a 3 or up to a 4, your choice. Subtract that for the static value.

So instead of a 6 the player has a range of 3 to 8. On average they’re going to get close to their 6 but for some attacks they might just get hit on a sensitive spot, or an existing bruise or whatever and it’ll hurt more. Other times they might turn the blow a little or catch it on a less sensitive or vital part.

I would definitely make this something that only Heroes (both PC and NPC). The riff raff, the minion, henchman and lieutenant class monsters would remain flat values to cut down on the dice rolls.

I just really need either more time or more players. One or both.

Continue reading »]]> The active defense versus the passive defense. A recent look at the 6d6 core system has me thinking about the differences between active defense and passive defenses in RPG mechanics.

The passive defense is the most common in my experience. The attacker (or whatever) typically rolls dice or otherwise generates a random result. This is compared to a fixed number to beat (or equal/beat).

Note for some systems beating a number means rolling lower, not higher. This is common in percentile based systems.

The end result is that the defender or obstacle has no immediacy in their defense typically. It’s all determined in general or at least the majority of it is prior to the combat. For instance in a d20 game a character’s AC might be an 18 to use an arbitrary number. They might get temporary bonuses or additions to that number shifting it up or down but the 18 is fairly static.

In a percentile based game the defense rating might be 38% (again arbitrary) and rolling under (or over as dictated by the system) is again pretty static barring minor situation based shifts (I get +10% defense because I’m in light cover right?).

Note that it’s entirely possible to flip this mechanic and have the offensive value be fixed and the defender generates the random result. It’s an identical mechanic in terms of mechanical math only the person rolling the dice changes. I tried this with 4e but I can’t find the post on my blog among the bazillion 4e specific posts I had during my affair with it.

While I was looking at 6d6 though which uses an active defense it started me considering implementing something similar with LCA! the system I’m writing.

Active defense mechanics have a single fairly significant ‘pro’ to them, at least for me. To wit, it keeps the players engaged even when it’s not their turn doing something other than just subtracting hit points or the equivalent when they get hit. Player engagement when it’s not ‘their turn’ is the holy grail to me.

The downside, which may be minor or major depending on your point of view is it chews up game time. A GM can blitz through a bunch of attack rolls comparing them to flat numbers and get back to the players turns. Having to stop and ask each player to roll a defensive roll for each attack is unavoidably slower.

I’ve got way too much time invested in balancing the skill numbers for LCA! to want to eff with the values for the purposes of ‘hitting’ someone. But possibly breaking down the damage mitigation mechanic into a active roll is less complex and system breaking.

LCA! uses d6′s for damage dice for everything. Your naked hand is worth a max of 1d6 (assuming you’re not Knacked up to make it deadlier) and a 2H battle axe maxes out at 5d6.

Defenses against damage average in the single digits. LCA! has fairly deadly combat, in simulations the average fight between two offensive players (not specced for defense) takes 3.4 rounds over the course of 1,000,000 combats. Shortest is 1 rounds (duh), longest was what had to be the most boring fight in the universe at 18 rounds where I assume the two fighters couldn’t roll for crap.

I ‘could’ instead grant defenders 1d6 for each say 4 points of defense they have rounded down with some static bonus potential. so when they take damage they roll 1d6 or 2d6 (d6′s explode) and that value is compared to the incoming damage. Over time it would in theory balance out but each individual attack would have some variation.

Anyway it’s something I’m thinking about and these have been your random game design thoughts on a Friday afternoon.

Continue reading »]]> Just wanted to point that including sequences of ‘actual play’ (and note the s on the word sequence) goes a long way toward making your system understandable.

Your potential audience hasn’t spent the last year working on your system and know it like the back of their hands. What’s blatantly obvious to you is rife with potential for mistakes at the basic level for the new initiate into your system. And while there’s no 100% right way to use any system, there are some wrong ways to use it if they break the basic mechanics because the’re done wrong.

A few pages devoted to he said, she said dialogue complete with the narrative and the mechanics for each participant in the scene, in my opinion, are highly desirable for several reasons (with a con or two) -

1) It very quickly outlines the general order of play and basic mechanics to get the new participants off the ground and running.

2) Examples are key to making those one or two line descriptions of the mechanics in the rules make sense when the rule hits the table.

3) It very quickly lets the reader have some idea if the system is going to work for them. A page or three of table interaction is your ‘elevator pitch’ for your system. It can hook the GM / Player into giving your system a chance for table time.

4) It’s fun to read. (okay that last one is probably more personal than general)

The con is of course, you’re influencing how the group will play your system to some degree and possibly limiting how far they might look. But the advantages far away outweigh that possibility in my opinion.

So please, add in those bits at the front of a system where actual play is described even if it’s hokey or feels silly.

Continue reading »]]> [Warning, I'm rambling as I tend to do. If I come off as an asshat, that's not my intention. ]

With player engagement a big part of why I wrote (am writing) LCA! my own RPG system I find myself listening to podcasts by other groups and literally shaking my head going no, you’re doing it ‘wrong’, you’ve already lost them at this point.

I think it’s easier to hear player disengagement as a third party than the GM sitting at the table can even though they’re there and have so many other cues to go on.

Primarily because the GM has sooo much on their plate. Trying to keep their planned story straight, trying to juggle the numbers and plans and tactics of the endless lists of bad guys, weaving plot lines together, all the while trying to keep the players entertained. If you’ve never sat in the GM’s chair then take some time out to be nice to one. If you have GM’d then you know what I’m talking about and should already be doing it to someone who’s willing to GM for you and put up with your crap as you surf the web looking at football scores while they’re trying to run an adventure or playing doodle jump on your phone.

Anyway, I’m currently listening to a podcast by a group at a con and I keep waiting for the GM to grab these people by the throat and send them on a wild roller coaster of emotional highs and lows given the subject matter and it keeps just kind of fizzling.

I think our player groups of today, even though a whole lot of us are the same people that were playing 20-30 years ago, we’re simply not the same players we were 20-30 years ago but I keep listening to GM’s doing the same style of gaming.

We, the old timers and the new players, are more comfortable with shorter sessions but packed with more flavor. The really pointless encounters that have no bearing on anything should be minimized. Both sides know the players are going to win them. It’s only a question of how many healing potions, spells, surges, cure light wound wand charges are going to have to expended at the end.

Just hand wave them, if the encounter is nothing but combat? By that I mean it offers no background, no information/clues, no quest items,no phat lewt etc, it’s just combat for the sake of filling session time. Then I recommend don’t having that encounter at a tactical level, just narrate it out.

[Disclaimer: If a pure dungeon crawl is the point of the session then of course by all means have encounter after encounter, just be sure to make them hard or you'll lose your players through most of them. "My turn again? Okay who did what?"]

For today’s players you really really have to have a big opener, a Trinity against the Agents or the Expendables on the ship encounter. Something with bombs, guns, kung fu, either literally or figuratively to get your players attention. Then you can slow it down with some filler, background, color and backstory before you heat things up again with another explosive encounter.

If you’re going to strand some people from a plane wreck in the amazon, then open with the storm that takes down their plane and the big crash and dash as they struggle to recover enough gear as it slowly sinks in the swamps and go straight into a fight in the jungle with the natives as the rains lash around them and lightning flares in the skies.

If your’e going to plan a jewel heist then the first scene should have U.S. Marshals or the Feebies breaking downthe door to the building the group is planning their strategy out in and have the group have to disengage and get away while sub machine gun fire Brrrrraaaaps through the air.

We’re a different bunch than we used to be, tailored that way with the movies we watch and the books we read.

Watch movies from 20 years ago, or 30 or 40 and you can see the stark contrast in the way the popular moves of each decade have changed.

To get back to the point, (You have one Dennis?) I find myself telling the GM I’m listening to, Dude, you’re at a con, you have at most 4 hours and probably less than 3 to engage these people and show them a good time. Don’t blow the first 30 minutes on the ride just to get to where the action might eventually start. Specifically in this instance I was all “Man, throw some scary ass shit at them now, throw a silver eyed clown at them peering through a sewer grate, or a black shadow with razor sharp talons and red glowing eyes briefly glimpsed out the corner of their eyes. Have the guy in charge shimmer revealing a creature of such unimaginable horrific visage that everyone who glimpses it has to make a fear check or huddle in the corner for an hour.

And then mellow their shit out with descriptions of how idyllic the place they’re going to appears and how serene it is on the surface even as the stench of evil and decay and danger wafts over the french vanilla of the air freshener fastened on the rear view mirror.

And if you made it this far in this post then you have a lot of stamina or mroe than a bit of a masochistic streak.

Continue reading »]]> 6d6 core system by http://6d6rpg.com

Disclaimer – This first glance is based on the open source core ruleset as presented on the wiki by the developer/publisher located here http://6d6rpg.com/wiki/doku.php?id=open:mechanics:core:start

As a result I won’t/can’t make any comments as to the layout, index, ToC, graphics etc of the system given my source.

I have no personal or financial affiliation with the developer or publisher.

Random thought – I wonder why 6d6 fireball when if memory serves wizards got fireball at level 5 making their first fireball a 5d6. Perhaps just the symmetry of two 6’s.

Initial thoughts (pre-playtesting)

My initial thought was it’s a CCG RPG but it’s not really. It does have an air about it of the MtG if you’ve played that game. Your character is very similar to a CCG deck where you put together the best mix of cards for your particular design goals. In this case to build your character’s skills, abilities and equipment.

The basic mechanic -

At any given time the typical character can have a ‘hand’ of four cards that you adjust as needed from your deck of cards and in addition you have another pool of cards, specifically those with the Static keyword that are always available to you until they’re used.

If you read that you’re probably going, WTH? A CCG mechanic? Well yes and no is my answer so far. Yes it’s kind of like having a hand and a deck in any given CCG. I should probably expand that for the 1 person who may not be familiar with the term, it means Collectible Card Game of which Magic the Gathering by Wizards of the Coast is quite possible the most well known in the U.S.

But it’s more a similar but different thing. The cards simply represent all the stats and values that would normally be on a character sheet in an RPG but with the pretty cool feature that you as the player get to literally build your ‘powers’ on the fly by combining them in different ways as long as they make sense. Perhaps you want to use a combination of Speed, Brawn and Sword as a charge across the tavern? As long as it makes sense then it would be allowed.

And by make sense, it’s pretty much anything that the majority of group agrees makes sense, the Game Leader is more an arbitrator or tie breaker for these kinds of things and simply provides a final sanity check on those times when a player tries to combine Reflexes and Diplomacy when they’re trying to bribe a guard to let them pass. Although I suppose one could argue that some sleight of hand and magic tricks might be useful to garner some favor with a bored guard.

On your turn you can play none, some, or all of the cards in your two pools, the dynamic (4 card hand) and the static (any cards that have the Static keyword) assuming they’re applicable to your action. Each card adds some value to your overall action dice roll, from a small +2 to a basic 1d6 and on up to a massive 1d6+6 or even higher. You compare your roll to a target number which might be a flat value or Resistance (aka Target Number or Difficulty Number) as determined by the Game Leader (aka Gamemaster, Dungeon Master, Storyteller, Keeper, Loremaster, Director) or it might be an opposed dice roll.

Oddly there are no recommendations for suitable static Resistance values in the document that I could find, only an example where a book was given a 10 Resistance for the purposes of deciphering it. We can assume perhaps that in most situations a character can bring 3 1d6 cards to bear on a problem on average and thus assume a 10.5 as the average and round down to 10 giving the player a slightly better than even odds of success. But the lack of a chart of any kind does mean you’re going to be winging it you try to use just the core system as outlined in the wiki. The pay to play version or the settings rulesets may include these charts.

Obviously some cards work for a given situation and some just wouldn’t. Let’s suppose you’re a warrior in a fantasy setting about to whack a goblin with your sword. You can add say your Brawn (1d6) + Short Sword (1d6+1) + Sword Expertise (1d6) and roll those dice and total them up. The Roll With the Punches (1d6) card also in his pool is probably not applicable to an offensive attack.

(Please note that I’m making several of the cards up off the top of my head and they’re not necessarily indicative of actual cards that might be published.)

The goblin is going to try to resist getting hit and might select from his pool to use Small (1d6)+Shifty Bastard (1d6+1)+Leather Armour (1d6) and roll the those and add them up.

This isn’t to say that you always use 3 cards, you can use none to the limit of cards you have in play but there’s a catch to that of course.

All the cards used (simplified) get tapped or sent back to the character’s deck of cards. This comes into play in the next round. In this case the sword being a physical object is just tapped and the expertise being a innate ability is also just tapped but the Brawn is moved back to the deck. Tapped cards untap at the start of the warriors next turn and they can spend ‘flow’ to move cards from their deck back into their hand.

So the Catch is – Cards that are in the player’s deck or tapped can’t be used until they’re returned to the player’s hand or untapped. A character can at most return or Flow two cards from their deck to their hand on their turn and to do that they must give up their ability to move on the field as Flow also provides movement. This certainly can add a tactical element to choices, do you use several cards trying to go for the knock out blow or reserve some to use in your own defense in case you don’t manage to take the creature out.

The goblin’s Small and Leather Armour are both persistent advantages and neither tap or move to his deck but his Shifty Bastard trait does.

For the attack to succeed the instigator, in this case the warrior, has to beat the goblin’s roll, ties go to the defendant.

Let’s say the warrior hit and beat the Resistance roll by 10 points. The goblin now has to discard 10 points worth of life cards. If he’s out of life cards, then you can guess what happens next. Note that if the goblin had say 3 life cards worth 4 points each, obviously worth 12 points or 2 higher than he needs to discard, he still loses them all, you don’t get ‘change’ from spending life cards.

Action continues in this way until someone’s out of life cards or the conflict is otherwise ended.

This same mechanic is used everywhere you’d normally make a skill roll in any RPG. Want to bribe a toady to get an audience with the CEO? Then use your Bribery+Wealthy Backer+Persuasion cards against him.

Or say your character is caught in an earthquake and about to go on a journey deep down below and needs to do some white water rafting? The GL could just assign a flat resistence that you have to beat.

Or a little more cooler, the GL could treat the white water just like a creature and assign a pool of cards, perhaps cards for Swift Currents (1d6), Boulders (1d6+2), Submerged Tree Trunk (1d6), Water Spray(1d6), Whirlpool (1d6+2), Large Drop (1d6+4), Waterfall (1d6+6) and give it a pool size of 3 and flow of 1.

The player in the raft would then ‘fight’ the white water by using purely as an example their Reflexes, Brawn, Driving – Rafts, Awareness, Sharp Eyes and Lucky Bastard or whatever they have that’s appropriate.

If the player wins the ‘fight’ then he sails out at the end of the section of white water alive, if the river wins, he sails out at the end of the section of white water a corpse.

Which anyone has to admit is a pretty damn cool way to do what would be a flat skill challenge in other systems.

As you can see there’s definitely a flavor of the fairly common Traits mechanic from say Spirit of the Century / Fate derivatives to the system although the mechanic is different enough to be it’s own unique thing.

The system is fairly inclusive in provide rules for the most typical needs in a generic setting, the setting rulesets would expand as needed for specific rules covering things like detailed Magic or Cybernetics etc.

Movement, Damage, Healing, Weapons, Social interactions, Skills etc are all handled in a pretty straightforward manner and should be pretty clear to anyone. The only complex part that I came across is when dealing with range modifications to dice rolls when the target is resisting it or when there’s cover involved on one side.

I was able to, I believe anyway, pick up the general gist of it with a single read through and although I’d have to go back and look up various specifics to actually play it, that shouldn’t be necessary more than once or twice. And not even that much if you happen to have a better memory than myself, I’ve got rules for over 200 core game mechanics rattling around in my head, colliding, merging and juxtapositioning with each other until that section of my brain is just a chaotic mess.

The Pros -

The pool and flow mechanic is fairly elegant and self balancing so that character’s tend to be level across the board in terms of power. A very huge thing for me in a game system, I dislike systems that allow some players by accident or design (i.e. power gaming) to be significantly more powerful/useful than others.

Character creation also seems reasonably balanced and pretty simple and straight forward.

The concept that everything costs in some fashion is a good one because it provides the players with discrete choices that have impact.

The card mechanic lends itself nicely to having interesting creatures for the GL to engage the players with, much like DnD 4E did, with creatures combining their cards in nifty ways. Additionally it can work very well with adding flavor and color to challenge sequences like the white water rafting I mentioned above that in many systems would be a dull series of dice rolls until success or failure was achieved. “I roll my nature skill, yay I got a success, how many more do we need?”

There are a few one-shot adventures for free to anyone that can be played along with the openly available core ruleset to give anyone who wishes to try the system out, the chance to do so.

Additionally there are some example rulesets that provide, well examples I guess, of how the system can be extended to add things like a Shadowrun feel with body augmentations.

The Cons -

Note while the con section is longer in word count, overall I’m still highly in favor of the system as of right now.

The core rule system is fairly bare bones but really what do you expect for free? I’d be curious to see how much more information the paid versions have. Perhaps if a playtest shows promise with my players I’ll indulge myself.

In terms of dealing with the core rules and card design might start to get unbalanced for cards that have multiple keywords or advanced keywords. The designer states that designing cards is an art which I can understand.

Personally I prefer a more hard system in that respect or at least a few pointers. And again the paid for version may have all this.. One of the reasons I enjoy 4E for example is the creation system simply works from the DM’s viewpoint. Previous editions did require experience, the more the better, in designing content for the players to engage. 4E made it simple(r) for anyone to pick up the DM hat and go to work.

I’d like to see some general guidelines on how much keywords that add/subtract/impact Flow are ‘worth’. It’s well and good to say it’s an art and I think after 30 years of using RPG’s I could do a reasonable job, someone with less experience might end up floundering a bit.

I think personally I’d start with each advanced keyword adding a 50% cost to the card with some unique keywords costing double for instance Persistent which as I read it means that card never taps or returns to your deck and thus is usable over and over. Obviously Persistent would be mostly restricted to things like Armour.

The Rotate keyword that lets you tap a card but otherwise leave it in your pool for use on your next turn, thus not costing you any flow to return it from your deck is fairly powerful as is the ability to use flow to untap it on your turn and use it again. So a character could for instance, again as I interpret the rules as presented, have a Sword card with the Rotate keyword and attack with it, spend one Flow to untap it, attack again, spend one flow to untap, attack again.

Granted the character is giving up their ability to move, but once combat is engaged, how much movement do you typically do? And while they probably don’t have a lot of cards to combine with each attack, neither will the defender have a lot of cards to try and resist each attack. And remember if you beat the target’s Resistance roll by even 1 point, they have to burn a full life card to cover the damage.

As written/read the Rotate ability is pretty powerful stuff. As intended the mechanic might be different, perhaps you can only use a card once on your turn and being able to spend flow to untap it (un rotate it) is just designed to let you use that card defensively when you’re getting attacked. It’s not written that way though and as written as best as I can determine a character could attack up to four times on their turn assuming they have two weapons with the Rotate ability, either use both and untap each one once or use both and untap one twice. Personally that seems a little over the top and is a huge advantage to whoever wins initiative. I believe I’d simply use my own rule from my system and say in general any given item/skill can be used once on any given turn as a house rule.

The gun/ranged weapons as listed lack any modernization and have a strong old west or even further back leaning to them such as having to load bullets one at a time and the ranges are extremely short. A modern ruleset may resolve that minor issue and of course it’s an easy fix to bump the ranges up and adding the concept of magazines to the reload mechanic for firearms.

Final Verdict -

The system is definitely something I’m going to work into our rotation. I believe the card mechanic can simply work for a lot of gamers and the ability to combine the cards to perform actions as well as the costs involved give the players some really cool decision points.

I think there are a few minor places where I’d personally house rule some things but really who doesn’t end HR’ing stuff?

This is a system I definitelyrecommend checking out, especially given the price of admission to see what it’s about.

Continue reading »]]> I’ve been going through the 6d6 core system available from the wiki for said system. I actually cut and pasted the wiki pages into a google document as I have difficulty absorbing information when it’s separated into small bits and pieces like that.

LInk below to the wiki -

I’ll post a more detailed reaction, after I get it written up but in short it’s primarily favorable. My biggest nit picks so far are the lack of a weighting/cost to add keywords to powers, my gut reaction is increase the cost by 50% to a cards cost for each keyword added that impacts flow spending as a rough rule of thumb after a cursory read through.

And that the ranges on the weapons given the granularity of the system are on the low side But then along with the multitude of interests I have one of them is a long time associated with firearms so saying that a pistol has a range increment of 2 and rifle of 4 is a bit low for my personal tastes in mechanics. It makes it practically impossible to hit anything at range and personally I can hit a 2×2 target about 9 times out of 10 with iron sights at 100 yards. Much less 50′.

But those are things easily house ruled and overall I really want to give the system some table time.

In other news of a more personal nature and a stunning display of cliche-ity, I certainly do not feel as old as the guy in the mirror at the barber shop looked today. I don’t know who the hell that guy is but he certainly epitomizes why mirrors have so often been gateways to horrible things.

Embedded Link

6d6 Online Tools – 6d6 Core
6d6 Core. Introduction. The Golden Rule. Groups. Leaders. The Character Deck. Life Cards. Ability Cards. Equipment Cards. Path Cards. Effect Cards. Circumstance Cards. Game Mechanic Cards. Understandi…

Continue reading »]]> The Red Queen Mechanic -

In the upcoming zompoc play test I’m going to be running it’s possible that some of the heroes may be immune to the Z virus. I’m going with ‘rage’ zombies, at least at first…

Anyway, I’m going to pull out 8 misc cards and then add the two red queens to the mix. (assuming a hero group of 4). Then shuffle well and each player will draw a card without looking at it.

Their card will go by their initiative tracker face down. The first time they take Trauma damage I’ll look at the card, secretly of course. If that player pulled a red queen then they’re immune to the disease and won’t turn. If they don’t have a red queen they they’ll turn of course.

Non-heroes, aka Extras, I’ll draw one card from a full deck as they take the damage. If they get a red queen, they’re also immune (1 in 27 chance since I use jokers).

The time it’ll take to turn varies based on how much trauma they took from a single attack and is generated randomly and ranges from a few minutes to a few days. Multiple bites cut the time in half for each subsequent bite.

Immune or not, an hero who’s bitten still gets sick and will be weakened. But the other heroes won’t know for sure if they’re going to turn until they either get better or turn homicidal and attack. Other than a natural immunity there is no cure for anyone bitten by a stage 1 zombie.

The object of the Red Queen mechanic is multi-fold. One to drive home that getting bitten is a very bad idea and thus discretion is always the better part of valor in a zombie apocalypse where the first slip up or lapse in attention and judgement means you’re facing a horde of infected. And meta-game wise, being on the business end of 30 sets of chomping teeth means that the odds of at least one of them succeeding on the attack and then dealing beau-coup damage, enough to break the skin is pretty good. So when the cry of the horde goes up, you don’t ask run or shoot, the question is, do you shoot while you’re running. Cause noise attracts attention…

The second purpose is to add a pucker factor once someone is bitten. Will they turn? Should the others immobilize them somehow until they know for sure, which of course weakens the group by taking one fighter out of the mix. Or do they turn them out, just assuming that they’re going to turn. Or do they just keep an eye on them…

If a hero is bitten for a single trauma, at their choice they can try to hide the fact from the others which would be a Deception vs Perception roll. More serious wounds are harder to hide unless the hero happens to be alone at the time.

In the Zombie Run campaign I ran using Savage Worlds, when one of the heroes got separated from the herd at night, the other heroes did not attempt to go save him. They just hoped he was okay and stayed safe in their high rise apartment. While the single hero spent the night trapped in a stairwell hoping that no zombie sniffed him out. It was pretty entertaining. And then there was the time they tried to escape in a car which was way overloaded and one of the characters started knifing people and pushing them off to lighten the load.

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Continue reading »]]> Don’t you hate having ideas about your game mechanics/designs when you dont’ have any easy way to record them? And hours later when you can get to a computer all you can remember is you had this really great idea on how to fix…. something about your design.

Too much aluminum or something because I have these episodes in the car on the way to and from work and it’s only a half hour drive most days and I still manage to forget them by time I get to work/home.

Continue reading »]]> Find the online chat option when attempting to get support for a residential PC. You may have to google (for HP for instance) to find the link since it won’t be on their pages anywhere.

But as an example, the ATI video card in my tablet died. I did all the things you’re supposed to do when that happens and decided to call them. We were gaming so no big deal sitting on hold to me.

But after the game was over I went and google the chat link, got online, explained the problem in one paragraph, what I’d done to resolve it and immediately got a “I see it’s failed, let’s send you a box so you can get that fixed.”

All the while I was still on hold with the phone support.

Benefits of online chat support – much faster, not language barrier, easier to explain your problem (see language barrier) and for the manufacturer, one guy can typically handle several chat windows. On the phone they can half assed handle one, assuming both sides can understand each other.

On the plus side, the video card (probably killed by playing Skyrimm) died two days before the warranty ran out.

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Continue reading »]]> The Snap Shot -

In LCA! each character has X spaces of movement that they can scatter at will during their turn. They can move three spaces, shoot a gun, taunt a bad guy, open a door etc. And then move 1 more space and shoot their other gun.

I want movement to be fluid and interspersed with action and not an before I take an action or after I take an action.

But… I also don’t want “Whack-A-Mole” to be the order of the day. i.e. player moves to doorway, shoots, ducks back out of sight.

To help with that I’ve added the Snap Shot which regardless of the name applies to the use of an skill that’s rolled during a string of movement. i.e. not at the start of all movement or at the end of all movement (A common game system mechanic) You’re doing whatever it is, in a rush to help simulate cinematic action. Where the hero charges across the room and as he passed one guy on the left he shoots him and then passes the guy on the right and shoots him.

Picture certain fight scenes in Wanted such as the later scene in the mill or Shoot’em Up in practically every scene with guns.

The end result is on a snap shot you incur a -3 handicap on your skill roll. Which isn’t a punitive as it might sound. That’s roughly the equivalent to a -1.5 for a d20 game or a -1 for something like Savage Worlds. Enough to ‘feel’ like a burden but not so much it’s a game changer.

To combat the snapshot, whackamole effect, characters can defer their action and try to interrupt another character’s action with a success opposed test. So player steps out to shoot someone, deferring character beats them to the punch and is ready for them and puts a arrow into their skull.

Anyway, just random game design ramblings.

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Continue reading »]]> Ever picked up a game system and simply could not read because of the layout and typography? It was simply too hard to read physically?

I bring this up because I just did. Sure it was only $5 for the PDF but the massive crumpled paper texture under ALL the text and the way too frequent use of an almost balloon like text in white with a black outline where the serifs are so bloated they’re virtually unreadable. And not as headers but as blocks of text. I tried to read it, I did, $5 is $5 after all. But I quit after 3 pages.

I know there are a lot of game designers out there. Please please don’t put textures under your body text of any kind, much less horribly exaggerated ruined/old/ancient paper ones. We read game manuals for information, not because we like to pretend we just found in them in a moldy old treasure chest or that they were just scribbled out by some mad genius in an attic on whatever paper he could salvage as the hordes searched the town for him.

Continue reading »]]> Spend the weekend reading a lot, mostly, okay exclusively zombie fiction. I’d like to air a few gripes for anyone contemplating writing in the genre -

Guns do not knock people flying.

Guns do not put holes in people you can put your fist through without touching the sides.

Guns do not use generic ‘rifle’ or ‘shotgun’ ammo.

Guns are cool and all but they’re incredibly effing loud. Using a firearm would draw zombies for blocks around. Quit ignoring that.

If you’re going to give your survivors guns, don’t take them away four pages later. Throw the poor people a bone.

If you’re going to use numbers in relations to guns, please do some research on said numbers and don’t just pull them out of your butt.

If you’re not going to come up with a reason the zombies don’t rot away, then people just have to wait a few weeks tops before the zombies are at a point where they can’t function.

The human body requires a certain level of cohesiveness in order to function. Please do not try to have zombies that are nothing but 50% bone still function.

10 years after a zombie apocalypse tea is not going to be readily available. There’s a reason America imports 99.9999% of its tea. It doesn’t grow well here or at all in most places.

Gasoline remains functional for up to a year. Anyone who’s mowed grass knows this. It doesn’t destabilize in weeks.

Please can we just once avoid the biker gang/convict gang and their apparent inevitable behavior? Regular people can also be worthless scum in a crisis, it doesn’t take a prison record.

Please can we just once not have religious asshattery? You know the vast majority of religious people are quite nice and pleasant to get along with. They’re not all psychopatchic sadists just waiting for a chance to form a cult.

Can we just once have a group of survivors that don’t include the asshat? In my group of survivors, asshattedness would get you thrown out the door with a dinner bell around your neck.

Give your zombies special senses, soft tissues like the eyes, nose and ears are going to decay quickly, there’s no way they’ll be able to sense people otherwise and come after them.

That’s all I got so far.

Continue reading »]]> This is the Noise Rule which is a setting specific rule for the zombie apocalypse sample script that will be in LCA.

Firearms / Loud Noises -
At the start of any scene set aside 0 to 10 d6 dice or note the number down somewhere. These are the scene’s Infected dice. The exact number is dependent on how dangerous the area is determined by how many Infected there are in the general vicinity.

In each scene’s Setup section will be a recommended value based on a full Hero group being present. You may need to adjust this up or down if there are fewer or more Heroes/Allies present than normal.

Any round that a firearm is discharged or there is a loud noise of any kind make a basic roll. If there were significant noises, i.e. multiple gun shots, then boost the roll by 5. If any of the firearms were shotguns then boost the roll by 5 for each Shotgun round used. If the weapons have been suppressed with make shift materials then handicap the roll by 10. If the weapons have commercial grade suppressors then handicap the roll by 20. Note: All weapons used must be suppressed and you cannot suppress a heavy range weapon enough with makeshift materials to matter.

With a success and for each Shift on the result roll that many of the Infected dice you set aside or noted down. The total on the d6’s are the number of Infected are drawn toward the scene of the noise and will arrive at the end of the next round. If you’re feeling mean then allow the dice to Explode. (On any 6 result roll the dice a second time and add the second roll to the first.) Discard the dice after using, do not return them to the Infected pool.

Once you have used up the Infected dice pool the general area is empty and will remain that way for at least a few minutes (3d6) up to a few hours (2d6) before more Infected will start to migrate into the area.

This doesn’t mean that the Infected automatically know where the heroes are, just that they’re moving into the area. Of course continued noise will allow them to narrow in pretty easily.

Example: The heroes are looting a corner grocery store. They discover some Infected inside and Bob panics when one lunges out of the shadows and grabs his leg and the teeth snap shut inches from his face. He shoves his 870 under the thing’s jaw and yanks the trigger. The other heroes use their Melee weapons for this round.

The Director at the end of this round rolls a basic roll and adds 5 (for the use of a Shotgun) to the result for a 32. That’s a Shift 1 result so he takes 2 of his infected dice, one for the success and one for the Shift and rolls them for a result of 8. At the end of the next round an additional 8 Infected will enter the area from various directions.

Director: “As the shotgun blast echoes out, you hear the moaning hunger of the infected start to go up in the distance.”

Continue reading »]]> This is a quick demo interplay using the Don’t Rest Your Head gaming system in a play by post format, some of it was typed on a phone so the quality can be hit or miss…

It’s a highly narrative but with dice system that allows for very freeform gameplay.

*Opening Scene – *

As mentioned, you haven’t been sleeping lately, at all. Sleep terrifies and you’ve been living on whatever it takes to keep from falling asleep. You’re starting to get worried though that the lack of sleep is starting to affect you mentally.

On the way home from work you saw a building you’ve never noticed before, an alleyway that you don’t remember, an intersection that had two manhole covers where you only remember it having one. You’re debating which is worse, going crazy or dying of fright in your sleep.

Your house thankfully looks like it always has and you make dinner, well put it in the microwave at least and go eat it in front of the TV, watching re-runs. As you flip through the guide you spot a new channel but it’s blank at the moment and idly wonder if they’re going to raise your cable bill to pay for it.

Eventually you make your way to the rest of the house but stop as your bedroom door comes into view. What the hell? There’s a section of a sheet from a newspaper stuck on it with masking tape. Flipping on the hall light to get a better view the headlines read “Satan Slasher Nabbed!”

Below that is a picture of you, face contorted in anger, a picture you simply do not recognize. It’s a tight shot, showing you being shoved into the back of what can only be a police car. Someone’s playing a prank on you surely, one of your so called friends is being a prime asshat.

You go over and read the article which looks like someone spent some time manufacturing, it reads like a real article. Describes how the alleged [your name] was arrested at the scene of another slasher attack, lists the history of the slasher [13 young women found so far, more assumed.]

But the date on the paper is for tomorrow and the name of the paper is the local one like you’d of thought for a joke but is for some paper called the Daily Oracle.

Ripping the sheet down, angry, you stop short as a bloody hand print hidden under the newsprint comes into view. The blood [surely it's fake] still fresh and red. You touch it, its tacky and it ‘feels’ like blood.

You push your bedroom door open. One of those cheap Walmart flex neck lamps is next to the bed, the light bent around so it illuminates the sheets. You’ve never seen that lamp before. [Or have you? whispers some frightened back part of your mind.]

Sprawled out on your bed is a body, naked although most of the flesh is covered in red. Long slash marks criss cross over the body, forming symbols although most ones you don’t recognize but there’s no mistaking the pentagram carved into the chest. The sheets are soaked with blood, the edges of the wounds glisten.

And protruding from the center of the chest is your best chef’s knife, the one with the ceramic blade you spent your whole bonus on this year. And on white texture handle is a bloody handprint that somehow you know matches the one on the door. And somehow you fear

You’re not sure how long you stare, brain clouded with shock when there’s a loud pounding from the front room, a heavy fist on your door. An authoritative sound, one heavy with meaning.

A stilted voice, barely muffled by the solid door echoes through your house, “This.is.the.police.. Open.the.door.”

Player -

Oh crap. Do I run out the back door or window? Do I try to overrun the cops? I didn’t hear a siren. That’s not good.

I gotta run. There’s no way in hell letting the cops take me will be good for me.I’m heading into the bedroom, try to lock the door, block it with a chair. Then I’m going to wrap the chef’s knife with a t-shirt, pocket it, and head for the window. My goal is to get away. ASAP.

Narrator -
[Notes: The player won a conflict roll but Pain dominated causing him to lose the knife.]

“You quickly but trying to be quiet close the bedroom door and drag a chair over and shove it under the door knob. A t-shirt is ripped free from a hanger and with no small amount of squeamishness you pluck the knife free, the metal grates on the bones of the rib cage, sticking.

For a terrible instant you think it’s not going to come free but the sound of your front door being smashed open gives you encouragement to yank it out hard. It slips from your tshirt covered hand and slides across your floor leaving a streak of red. The sound of footsteps storming in has you scrambling and you lunge toward the window as your bedroom door thuds and the wood of the chair creaks.

Player C-

Realizing I don’t have time to return for the knife, I open the window, duck out, and close the window behind me (hey, it might confuse the cop if he’s a dumbass). The fire escape gets me down to the ground and I’m off at a run. To quote Umberto Eco, “if you’re running from the police, head for an alley. No police force can cover them all.” I do not want to be picked up. I’m kind of pissed at myself for dropping the knife; a key piece of evidence and a handy weapon. I have a sinking suspicion it has my finger prints on it. And that’s got me a bit worried. Crap, and I forgot the damn newspaper, too. I’m going to toss the bloody tshirt in a dumpster somewhere along my escape route. hopefully, my uncanny intuition [cause-effect power] will help me run away from the cops and not into them. “Trust your feelings Luke,” was probably never meant to cover escaping from a murder, but hey desperate times and all that.

Narrator -
[Player won conflict again which reduced the obstacle he was facing down to a single cop at the moment]
As your feet speed over the concrete you hear the sounds of a whistle split the air behind you. It’s echoed instants later, once, twice from the direction of your house.

You glance back and see a cop lurch into view right before you disappear into the dark mouth of an alley. Did he see you? Then just what you saw registers. The cop had a large key sticking out of his back. Slowly turning. A wind up key.

You pound down the alleyway. It seems dark. Darker than it should be. The air is filled with foul odors and you stumble and are at risk of falling.

A whistle blast echoes and reverberates down the alley. Behind you! You spin and outlined against the street lights is a dark form running in a jerky gait but one scary. A pair if red glows, they can only be the cops eye gleam at you as he runs after you.

Player C-

Glowing red eyes and clockwork keys are not a good thing. The gamer in me has lots of ideas on how to react. The character however wouldn’t be so analytical. Flight or fight here. If the alley is narrowing, dead-ending, or etc. then I’ll have to face the thing and try to disable it. Somehow. The key being the obvious, um, well, key to disabling it. If the Alley continues, then I’m going to keep trying to lose it. Knocking down trash cans, etc. to try to make pursuit more difficult. It’s gait is jerky. That implies that this thing isn’t graceful or highly mobile; time to start looking for a third dimension to my escape: going up and over obstacles rather than just pounding the side walk left or right, forward or back.

Narrator -

“The alleyway walls seem to close in, perhaps it’s the darkness, perhaps it’s actually getting narrower. Two red eyes are drawing closer and far in the distance you can see two more pairs of them, mere pinpricks. That’s when it hits you, this alleyway has gone on for a very long time with only the occasional door on the brick walls and the occasional fire escape, rusted and decrepit hanging down.”

Player C-

I use it’s lack of speed and fine motor control against it instead of treating it like a human. I grab a trashcan lid and throw it at the thing’s face. While it jerks to react to that, I duck behind it and twist the key out of it’s back. Sadly, this doesn’t turn the damn thing off like I’d hoped. But it does seem to slow it’s reactions; maybe it’s winding down without the key? I don’t have time to figure it out. Instead, I shove the thing into the wall, hard. It slumps down awkwardly off balance. As it starts trying to right itself, I take off back the way I came. Shit. The alley has gotten longer since I ran in. Righto. Time to find a door that’s not locked and try my luck along that path!

Narrator -
[Player won the conflict roll again but again Pain dominated the interaction which is blended into the narration]

“With the key removed there’s a viscious ZZzzzzzzzziiiipppppppwwwhhhrrrrrr sound, as if a giant coiled spring was unwinding all at once. The cop who at all appearances aside from the red eyes appears to be otherwise normal starts spasming, his limbs moving at lightning speed, flailing around.

You can’t pull back in time and one arm smashes into your side and you go flying sideways to smash into the wall. The cop spins and twitches like a man caught in a lightning storm for several seconds, the length of time it takes you recover and sit up, gasping for air. Chips of brick fly up pelting the walls as it smashes them and then quickly it starts to spin down.”

“You climb to your feet, only then aware you still hold onto the big silver key. Inscribed across its face is a 6 digit number, 815631 and the words “Property of Officer Tokk”.

You start to head back the way you’d just run, but spastic footfalls echo faintly in the distance and there in the far distance you can see two angry red glows, two pairs of angry red glows.

There’s a click, much louder than it should be from a little way down the alley and a door opens up and a man steps through. He’s dressed in a wrinkled suit although expensive and carrying a briefcase in his hand. He looks around, spots you. In his other hand is a piece of paper and you can see a photograph on it along with blocks of text. Light streams from the through the doorway along with massive crowd babble and noise.

He looks at it and then at you and nods to himself and then checks his watch. He drops the page and it falls neatly into his suddenly open briefcase which snaps shut with a disquieting organic sound Mmmmm.

He gives you a nod and then steps back through the doorway which starts to slowly shut behind him.

Your ribs flare in pain and the jerky sound of footfalls grows closer.

Player C-

Keep the key. Follow the man through the door.

Narrator -

A blast of exotic odors assails your senses as you step through the door, lights flare and scream for your attention, voices call out to come see their wares, cajoling, insulting, calm or excited, whatever the seller thinks will work.

You’ve emerged into the middle of a teeming crowd of people, all kinds of people, it’s like a madman’s nightmare of an ancient persian bazaar that cuts across centuries.

To your left a ancient old hag who hasn’t seen 100 in years leans forward, “2000 for 5 years dearie! You won’t find a better offer! What’s five years of your life, you’re still young, 5 years will only make you more mature! Okay 2100, final offer!”

On your right a suave ivory skinned man, literally the color of old ivory, stands naked except for a necklace and an obvious display of excitement. His face is rather dreamy and vacant and he smiles, his under lit by the the rainbow colored glow of the necklace. He catches your eye, “Pleasure necklaces, finest in the bazaar. You won’t need seek out companionship every again. All for the mere cost of a few memories sir. Come, avoid frustration and disappointment in seeking solace in others. He opens a case on the counter before him, the case bears a tri-part symbol in yellow and black on it. Lifting out a necklace similar to his own he beckons you, “A 60 second trial, guaranteed to be the best 60 seconds of pleasure you’ve every experienced. All for the worthless cost of the memory of your first kiss.”

Suddenly something hits you in the back and your ribs feel like molten metal charged with lightning as the pain flares.

“Well well, lookie here boys. Fresh meat.”

Behind you are three biker types although their flesh is pierced all over, chains, nails bent in rings, spikes protrude from everywhere. Their heavy leather clothing has bones attached to it, finger bones or even larger and each wears a necklace of teeth, human teeth and things like look like pieces of dried fruit, things you find yourself avoiding looking at too closely.

“And what do we do with fresh meat?” the one in the middle asks.

And in sync the other two growl, “We eat it up yum!” and flash smiles filled with teeth filed to needle points and razor edges.

Player C-

Yeah, this is going to go badly.

“Hello boys! How’s business? Everything going well these days? No run-ins with Officer Tokk, I hope?” While I’m spinning that inane prattle, I reach out to the leader and whichever of the other two goons looks biggest. I find the most strategically placed piercing — the one that seems to be tapped into the most nerve bundles. And as I say Tokk, I grab those two piercings and I pull down as hard as I fucking can. Then I run through the Bazaar. After the man I was following, if I can see him in the crowd.

Narrator -
[Player invokes his Madness talent which allows him to see cause and effect in detail.]
“Something flares inside you and your field of vision is filled with numbers, percentages, forces, vectors and links between everything you can see. The world is frozen for an instant but it’s way more time than you need and you’re ready when everything snaps into motion again, almost bored by that time.

You punch out with the key directly into a piercing on the goon to the left and then drag it sideways into a bundle of metal located near the collarbone of the leader. The first one is just reacting as the pain reaches his brain and he screams and spins. The leader drops to his knees just in time to catch the jagged shiv held by the first in the throat. A spray of arterial blood blasts out drenching the face of the third.

He screams and staggers back, crashing into the old hags counter and smashing it flat. She screams in anger and clamps her hands on his head and you see him visibly age as she grows younger almost too fast to see. The first completes his spin in time to stab it into the thigh of a heavily armed passer by who without pausing pulls semi automatic 12 gauge pistol and there’s a huge boom and when the smoke clears the headless corpse of the first goon topples backwards.”

Player C-

The fight seems to have been fun while it lasted… but I’m going with flight. This shit is too freaky to hang around waving my privates in the air.

Narrator -

“Lost by the sudden massive violence you’ve been subjected to, from finding a body in your bed to fleeing from wind up cops to opening doors into other worlds by all appearances to being able to with two single light touches cause the deaths of three people, you find yourself suddenly in the center of an empty space with bodies bleeding out while a crowd gathers to watch. You hear murmurs, “that’s a key, a cop key.” and as that whisper races like lightning through the crowd they start to look around, raising up on their tip toes and as if on cue you hear a whirring clicking noise in the distance and the jerky thuds of feet pounding the pavement.

You put your head down and push your way through the crowd, they split before you like the red sea before noah or perhaps more correctly, like an ancient mariner who killed a albatross…. You run until your lungs are gasping and you’re coughing up blood and still you run until you find yourself in a dank, run down section of urbanism. Strange graffiti mars the walls, layer upon layer of it. Some of it glows with an unhealthy purple hue. Mold covers the walls and the air is damp and you just know it’s unhealthy to breath. But at least you appear to be alone, perhaps there’s safety in being alone. ”

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Continue reading »]]> And as if there’s any chance the human race isn’t going to go over the cliff and then it’ll start to worry about parachutes. And then when it hits the ground, worry about what it can do to save the patient. Rather than just putting on the brakes. -

“Science tells us that we are driving in a fog headed toward a cliff but are unsure just how far away it is,” said Mandia.”Given this warning, it is quite foolish to be stepping on the accelerator.”http://news.yahoo.com/biggest-spike-ever-global-warming-gases-us-013716231.html

Embedded Link

Biggest spike ever in global warming gases: US
Harmful carbon emissions from burning fossil fuels made their biggest ever annual jump in 2010, according to the US Department of Energy’s latest world data released this week.

Continue reading »]]> DRYH characters have two talents, one Exhaustion and one Madness.

The Exhaustion talent is something any normal person can do, it’s just for that character as they get more tired, the more Exhaustion dice they have in play, they can do it better. To pick an Exhaustion talent if you think of any standard Skill in any given RPG, you’ll be in the ballpark. So your Exhaustion talent might be Diplomacy or Mechanics or Melee or Shooting or Persuasion or Perception etc and so one. As you add Exhaustion dice to your roll, the better you can talk people into buying snake oil or ice boxes, or the better you can see and hear until eventually you can hear a fly stumble in mid-flight or read the fine print of a contract with Satan.

The Madness talent is more uber. It can be something as mundane as Flight or Teleportation if you’re really stuck for creativity. Just pick a power out of any super hero rpg and go with it. The problem with those is they end up very unitasking. If you were to take say Energy Blast as your MT, it’s not going to be much use for you when you’re trying to sneak into the Daily Oracle to try to stop the presses before the evening edition with the headlines of your death are printed. And the Oracle only prints true news stories.

But if you’re feeling a little more creative I’ve outlined examples of Talents below and the various effects you might get by burning Madness on them.

Madness Talent 1 -

Flavor:

“No matter where she went, the clicking of nails soon followed, echoing down alleyways, around corners in halls,always out of sight but never out of mind. In the distance were always the sounds of yips, barks and growls, playful, neutral and aggressive and everything in between. And the odd thing was the sounds mimicked her own emotional state.”

Use your Madness:

1-2 dice – canines are friendly to you, regardless of their training or instructions. They show up as you need them, a bloodhound if you need to trail someone, an attack dog if you have concerns for your physical being, a golden doodle if you’re feeling down.

3-4 dice – packs of dogs stream from just off camera to your aid, your own senses sharpen and your teeth extend and sharpen, you can run fast and forever and if you wish assume the classic half man/half wolf shape.

5-6 dice – Cerebus and Fenris are yanked to your location in an instant to deal with your problems, you can assume the shape of any canine, command any creature with any relationship to dogs who is instantly submissive to you

What you are becoming:

If you use your power too long and too hard your humanity begins to fade, you spend more time in dog form, around dogs and less time among humans. In the end you become The Den Mother (or if you’re male, The Alpha Dog)

Madness Talent 2 -

Flavor:
“All your life nothing’s gone right for you in the little ways and the big. Your tv breaks the week after the warranty expires. Your cars are always lemons. If someone finds a pie, you find an empty plate. But lately things have taken a turn for change and the shoe is on the other foot.”

Use your Madness:

1-2 dice – Minor things go wrong in your favor. The cop’s radar gun fritzs as you go past at 100mph. Traffic lights get hung on green. The systems go down at work just when you needed a day off. The mugger’s gun misfires blowing his hand off.”

3-4 dice – The welds give out in a lamp post just as you’re accosted by three gang bangers and it falls critically wounding them. Your bosses pace maker shorts out right before he was about to fire you. A computer glitch causes an ATM to spew itself empty as you try to take out $20. A fire breaks out in the apartment due to faulty wiring of the man who stole your woman killing him allong with everyone else.

5-6 dice – Everything that can go wrong, does in a city block. Utter chaos ensues yet leaving you untouched.

What you are becoming:

As bad luck surrounds you it starts to stick to you, forming an every larger bubble of bad luck. Little things go wrong to those around, friend and foe alike without your control until eventually you become a pariah, unwanted and unloved by anyone. You have become, The Murphy.

Continue reading »]]> In between working on LCA! and planning a DRYH sesson I’ve been toying with a light mechanic system taking inspiration from DRYH’s dice pool mechanics and twisting it to my own needs for a slightly more tactical optioned system.

For lack of a better term it’s called the H.E.R.O. system in my head Hero, Exhaustion, Resource, Obstacle. Of course Steve Long and his lawyers would probably be as quick to sue me for using that kind of name as Bethesda was to sue Markus Persson for using the word Scrolls.

Because you know you should be able to copyright a single word in a langauge. I wonder if Prior Art can be used to protect words since obviously we’ve been using the word scrolls for quite some time. Yet I digress.

Balancing a light system is I believe difficult to impossible and it becomes almost purely subjective as to what constitutes balance but I’ll give it a shot in the tiny slivers of time that I have that aren’t accounted for by other sources.

So many interests so little time.

Continue reading »]]> Notes: This is Terri’s first actual Scene in the game after going through the intro story (see previous posts Chapter 1 and Chapter 2 ) and it’s here that we delve into the actual game play mechanics of DRYH which are deceptively simple but allow for a lot of tension in the players as they choose what resources to throw at a problem and the repercussions of doing so. The scene is based on what Terri put down as her answer for What Just Happened? which is what the narrator uses to invest the player into the world.

Narrator - “Terri, the street is almost empty and you note it as odd given it’s lunch time. You get a sense that people for some reasons they can’t quite put a finger on have found it expedient to not be here at this time. Behind you the coffee shop is still a swirl of pure white as the confetti continues to swarm inside but stops at the edge of the door in a razor sharp line. Inside you can hear the voices of the two customers and the counter girl although muffled and you can’t make out what they’re saying but they seem rather excitable.”

Terri – “Do I see the Little Sister? If she’s not in sight then I’ll follow where this guy leads for now. He seems to know what he’s doing. I still don’t know his name right? I’m going to ask him, “Hey! Suit! What the hell is going on?”

Suit – He’s spinning in place at the moment, his eyes flicking all over. “Suits as good a name as any. There’s power in names. Shit! Duck!”

Terri – “I dive forward without even thinking about it.”

Narrator – “A Little Sister has appeared directly behind you and that nasty looking knife slashes through the air above your head. As you scramble to your feet you spot another one of them standing a few feet away from Suit. Her terrible mouth opens in a large shark tooth filled smile and the dark sockets of her eyes seem to gleam with a horrible intelligence. Suit yells at you, “Lock one down with your eyes! Don’t let them move!”

Terri – “Oh this is so not good! I stare at the one I’m looking at now and yell, “Now what?!””

Suit – “Unleash your Madness! It’s our only chance! We just need to get away so we can slip through a gate, it’s almost 13 o’clock and the Ways close then.” and you hear the snaps of his briefcase locks opening.

Narrator – “At his words the burning and motion under your skin increases ten fold and your mind makes whatever dark horrible connections it needs to with the madness latent in your body and you start to realize the power you have and get some idea of what you can do with it. The knowledge sickens you but leaves you feeling empowered, perhaps for the first time in your life. There are a small number of Little Sisters in this conflict, between the two of you, you can lock down two of them but that leaves any remaining free to move about with those wickedly sharp knife. They weren’t expecting the Suit though for what its worth. I’m bringing a Pain 6 to this conflict.”

Terri – “Okay let me get this straight now, I get my 3 discipline dice right? I can add 1 Exhaustion to the roll and as many Madness as I like up to 6?”

Narrator: “Right but there are draw backs. The pool with the highest string of numbers dominates the results so if Exhaustion dominates then you get another exhaustion die added to your character semi-permanently leaving you with 2. Because once you bring out the exhaustion, it takes effort to get rid of it. But with Exhaustion in play you can invoke minor or major uses of it and guarantee some successes. If Madness dominates then you have to use up one your Responses, either Fight or Flight for the resolution narration. If Discipline dominates then you get to get rid of one Exhaustion or un-check one Response. And if you hit 6 Exhaustion or run out of Responses then you’ll Crash or Snap.”

Terri – “What about Suit, how does he play into this?”

Narrator – “I’ll control his actions primarily but you can definitely suggest things. For this conflict you’ll probably end up each facing a single Sister due to the way the scene is playing out. In other conflicts it might be a “One character does the heavy lifting and another does the assisting.” kind of resolution.

Terri – “Okay I’m going to add 3 Madness and 1 Exhaustion to my 3 Discipline and roll that.”

Narrator – “Cool, and because you’re bringing out the Exhaustion die you can invoke it as a Major use and that means you get a guaranteed 1 success for each Exhaustion and on top of that you get any successes you actually roll on those dice.”

Terri – “_rolls dice_ Okay I’ve got… ugh, only 2 successes, my highest string is Discipline with a 5-4-4.”

Narrator – “I’ve only got 2 as well so players win ties but just barely so it’s going to be a close call. My pain is a 6 so Pain dominates and I get one Despair coin. Now tell me what just happened.”

Terri – “I scream and then bite my right wrist open where the scars are. The pain is horrible but I bend my wrist like spiderman and a stream of spiders flows out and flies through the air to land on the crazy no eyed butcher knife slasher pre-teen bitch child in front of me and they immediately start biting her, injecting her with venom and spinning strands of silk on her body causing her arms and legs to get bound.”

Narrator – “Awesome and great use of the Pain domination! The Little Sister screams, loudly and pain rips through your ears and you can hear glass breaking around you as she’s covered in neo-spiders. Narrator rolls some dice for the Suit There’s a strange fast fluttering noise behind you and you turn and look to see Suit holding his briefcase open and a stream of paper is flying out of it and bathing another Little Sister. Her skin is instantly flayed as thousands of tiny slices appear in it, growing deeper and deeper as more pages hit her. The screaming stops and you turn to see the spider covered Little Sister gone. There’s gasping for breath from the Suit and you see he looks tired, almost swaying, papers are fluttering down to land on the empty street and you look to see that the other Sister is gone too.”

Suit – “That looks like its…”

Narrator – “*gasp, gurgle, ouch* and he chokes as the tip of a butcher knife emerges out of his chest, the smiling blank eyed face of a Sister peers around his body at you. “Run! he screams at you, the subway station around the corner, there’s a gate there the maintenance door in the lobby!” and blood sprays out of his mouth as the knife is ripped free, pulling bits of organs with it. The Sister licks the blade as you watch in horror.”

Terri – “I freak! I take off running, heading for this subway entrance.”

Narrator – “Behind you as you race off come wet thudding noises and horrible chewing sounds. The pain in your wrist is bad but not so bad it distracts you. In fact as you glance at the wound you see it’s been woven shut with silk and the bleeding has stopped. You sprint down the street and find the entrance to the subway station and stumble down the steps, from behind you hear the high pitched giggling laughter of a young girl, and it’s getting closer.”

Terri – “Aeeeiieeee! I do a baseball slide under the turnstile and spring up again to try to spot the door he mentioned!”

Narrator – “You have no trouble finding it, it’s the only spot of color, it’s decrepit green paint job shining in your vision.”

Terri – “I hope it’s not locked! I charge over at it and rip it open!”

Narrator – “It pulls open and there’s a odd click in your head and through the doorway you see a busy street but it’s night and the people are… odd, nay freakish looking. And everything is in color, almost everything anyway and some part of you is relieved to finally see the world in color again. Behind you the slow light footfalls are almost drowned out by the scraping of metal on concrete, as if someone was running a wickedly sharp knife along the wall of the stairwell leading down into the subway.”

Terri – “I jump through and slam the door shut!”

Narrator – “As you do that, you notice the door is grey in color and you hear the bonging of a great clock, once, twice, and again. There’s a thud on the door and the knob starts to turn in your hand with irresistible force. In the back of your mind you’ve been counting the chimes of the clock and as the 13th chime strikes the door knob stops moving and the door becomes colorized, a dirty greenish brown. Around you the denizens of the Mad City ignore you, except for those that don’t, as they go about their business of survival.”

Terri – “Well crap, now what?…”

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Continue reading »]]> Chapter 1 can be found here.

Continue reading »]]> Don’t Rest Your Head Opener -

Note: Ever since reading the Don’t Rest Your Head game system the possibilities have been simmering in the back of my head and this short little story is my first thoughts on how I’d start a DRYH plotline.

——————-
Chapter 1

The itching was especially bad that morning and from the deep red scratches on her arms when she roused from her, not quite sleep but not quite consciousness that passed for sleep for her for so long, it was safe to say that it had been bad all night long as well.

The stench of old urine and some not so old if truth be told filled the air as Terri sluggishly kicked back the threadbare blanket and struggled to her feet.  The smell of rancid bacon and burnt bread struggled to overcome the smell of mildew, piss and vomit and failed miserably.

As halfway houses went, this one was pretty far down the list, one of the last refuges for those who proved that recidivism was a a way of life for the hardcore addict.

But while it wasn’t straight at least she wasn’t hitting the sidewalk.  Her right knee was still scabbed over from her… missteps a few days earlier.

A splotch of color caught her eye and she slowed to a stop.  Something was wrong, so wrong.  She’d thought, hoped that she was finally clearing up but what she saw proved that she had a long way to go.  

She’d passed this way several times, a row of buildings, nondescript, run down and somehow faded, each offering some service from pizza to tattoos but now one stood transformed.  The building shone with deep rust red splotches in the greyness of her world and as she stared, the shrubs in the lawn faded, grew translucent and in their place were piles of sticks. No, not sticks, bones, broken, glowing yellow and white, bright spots among the grey.

Old bones and some so fresh they had gobbets of flesh on them. Bones with teeth marks, cracked open and the insides cleaned out.  Long bones and small, rib cages bigger than her own and some so small she refused to see them lest she scream as her mind unraveled.

He could use a shave, several days past one by all appearances.  His eyes though drew her own, there was something about them, something that she saw in her own each time she dared look in the mirror, an infinite pain and sadness in them that echoed her own but an aliveness that she didn’t see in other people.  And he seemed… solid, somehow more There than the rest of the world.

“Thanks.” he said in a normal volume and dropped the pages into his case.  He stared at her arms for a moment and she thought she saw him shudder a tiny bit before he turned away.

He took a moment to arrange the insides of the case, balancing it in his left hand or so it appeared but his voice pitched low and soft filled her ears.  “You know the Starbucks at 12th and Newton.” It wasn’t a question but how he knew was another thing that didn’t occur to her to wonder about till later.  “Noon. I’ll be there till 12:15.  Don’t be late if you want to survive long enough to get some answers.”

Continue reading »]]> 200gb of cloud storage for free. You just have to donate 300gb of your unused space. The basic premise is it's Bit Torrent for data storage. You're seeding other people's data and they're seeding yours. Portions of your data are stored on up to tens of thousands of other people's computers and portions of some of those tens of thousands of other people's data is stored on your computer. Given it's stored with encryption and they only have portions of your files in theory it should prove impossible for them to be able to access any of it in any recoverable fashion. But I"ve seen some pretty impossible things done by people in the computer arena so take their claims with a grain or three of salt. http://www.symform.com/pricing.aspx

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Continue reading »]]> I listen to podcasts, so called actual play gaming podcasts, for a variety of reasons which aren't all that important to this observation.

Some interesting things (to me) are starting to fall out as I continue to expand my library to more and more groups.

This is probably a 'duh' moment for some but I found it interesting as to what it says about vision and visual cues in social gatherings.

1) People who game over VOiP have significantly more silences and longer silences than people who game in person. My assumption is that without the visual cues, conscious and subconscious that we pick up when we can see other people that indicate they're about to talk, people tend to wait significantly longer before trying to speak when they can't see the other people. I find that interesting. They also tend to be ruder to each other.

The games the thing? Or is it?

2) Newer groups actually 'play' more than older groups. By this I mean if the players are new(er) to each other then they tend to actively play the games significantly more than if the players are long time acquaintances. Groups who've known each other trend toward the game is an excuse to hangout and socialize rather than the game is the reason they're there. Or that's how it comes off.

I still believe the gold standard in RPG actual play podcasts are the Penny Arcade podcasts. They're what I personally prefer to hear when I listen to an actual play podcast. Actual playing.

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Continue reading »]]> Summation – F'ing Brilliant

DRYH, which sounds like something that Head and Shoulders would fix stands head and shoulders above so many systems I've read and or used.

It's a highly narrative gaming system rather than simulationist, there are no tables of charts, no multi-page character sheets filled with numbers.

Let me be frank and say that narrative isn't my preferred, I likes me some captain crunch in my gaming systems so the fact that this system is still extremely appealing should give you some idea of how good I think it is.

The setting is horror-noir and is reminiscent of "They Live" (the Rowdy Roddy Piper cult classic film, a short story that I can't remember the title or author where as I remember it smokers were able to see horrible creatures walking among people that others couldn't [Edit: The Ten o'clock People by Stephen King reminder courtesy of +Chuk Goodin ] and yet another short story where people 'woke' up or broke their programming and no one else could see them because they were outside the loop.

It deals with what happens when human beings go so long without sleep that it's no longer necessary and the dark horrifying madness in the world that is opened to their eyes as a result.

It has a extremely unique and innovative dice mechanic to resolve conflict that works wonderfully well in this particular setting. And I'm not a fan of dice pool systems but I so wish I'd of thought of this.

When a hero tries to resolve a conflict and it's really that broad, it's not "I roll to hit." it's "I roll to deal with the Paper Boys chasing me." they roll a dice pool of d6's that include their Discipline stat and optionally their Exhaustion value, either current or added for this roll and any Madness dice, again either current permanent or added for this roll.

The GM simply rolls their Pain dice pool. They use as many dice as they feel would be Painful to overcome. Of the various pools, Discipline, Exhaustion, Madness or Pain, the pool with the highest single value (or subsequent values as needed to resolve ties) dominates the result, i.e. is the basis of the narrative flavor of the conflict. Each side also counts up how many of their dice or below a 4 and those are successes.

So a hero may win the conflict but if the GM's Pain pool has the highest dice they certainly win in a way that's less than satisfactory.

The players then determine if they resolved the conflict by Fight or Flight which as they use those options up leaves them with just the one option. A hero who burns through his Fight responses inevitably ends having had enough and running for it while a hero who runs away is eventually going to get stuck fighting for their lives or more to the point their sanity.

There is also a Despair and Hope mechanic, similar to Fate and Hero points, Bennies, Rewrites, etc, that allow the players and GM to tactically alter the dice outcomes but they trade hands. When Pain dominated a conflict the GM gains a Despair token that can use to flavor future conflicts. But when they use Despair on the heroes, the Despair turns into future Hope.

The setting is filled with flavor and highly evocative to me of the Nightside series by Simon R. Green. Which is a good thing.

The heros have access to super human abilities known as Madness talents that give them an ability beyond that of normal man. There are also Exhaustion talents that give you benefits but at the cost increasing your exhaustion. And exhaustion leads to Sleeping.

As the heroes go about their uphill battles dealing with this new world that's open to their eyes they can rack up exhaustion and madness that builds and builds until they sleep or go insane.

And sleep has suddenly become the most dangerous thing a hero can do, death may be the preferred option. While sleeping a hero is open to the Nightmares and they are utterly defenseless against them.

When the Nightmares come, one best hope that one has a stalwart companion for protection.

Speaking of companions I really see DRYH as highly suitable for small groups, even a single hero with a lacky to guard their sleep when the inevitable exhaustion forces them down. It should allow for highly focused stories for 1 to 3 players with none of the "Okay we need a fighter, a cleric, a wizard and a thief. Oh and a ranger would be good."

The heroes tend to be very gray, I would think, and very little is going to be black and white but shades of grey so close that it's hard to tell good from evil, pain from joy and the heroes from the villains.
The rule system is light, less than 80 pages when you take out the fluff pages at the start and end. Which includes a Index?! That's right a 70+ page rules light game manual includes a detailed index. Would that every publisher saw fit to follow that.

The mechanics take up roughly half of that including character and scene building leaving the remaining half for setting information such as locations, organizations and bosses.

This isn't really a game system aimed at the newbs although they can certainly understand it. But I think it would work best for a group with at least one or two experience gamers to lead the way, especially gamers experienced with narrative game styles. A group of games say with only Pathfinder or Hero system experience could end up a little lost. "There's no place to put my attack bonus on this sheet and it doesn't show how much a damage a dagger does."

It has a strong narrative basis which in my opinion does require more creativity to let it bloom to its fullest potential. Anyone can run a set piece module dungeon crawl where E1 leads to E2 leads to E3 filled with stats and descriptions and tables and charts. It takes more creativity to deal when the hero is simply trying to track down his lost child who was stolen by a Monster Under the Bed.

But the lightness of the setting does require any extended story line to go outside the book to come up with material. Luckily there's a wealth of material out there in the horror setting in movies, fiction and other gaming systems that can be adapted for this due to its easy mechanics. You don't need to know the stats on a Shoggoth to use it in DRYH, you just need to know "It was a terrible, indescribable thing vaster than any subway train—a shapeless congeries of protoplasmic bubbles, faintly self-luminous, and with myriads of temporary eyes forming and un-forming as pustules of greenish light all over the tunnel-filling front that bore down upon us, crushing the frantic penguins and slithering over the glistening floor that it and its kind had swept so evilly free of all litter." to use it in Don't Rest Your Head.

I don't necessarily see this as something you're going to be using to run a year long campaign with, you could but I'm not seeing it personally. But for a short 4-8 session storyline? Or even a one shot? This is a extremely highly recommended.

And the best part? You can get it for less than a latte and danish. ($5)

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Continue reading »]]> Touch table has been wired and four shark approved lasers are currently dangling on their wires. I thought we were gaming tonight so I stopped in the middle so I could put the table topper on as a gaming surface. Old school. As it turned out we didn't game.

I've got four protective corner pieces cut and glued drying so I can sand and paint. Theyre slotted to fit over the rim ofbthe table and will keep.certain people from screwing with the lasers. Ill probably have to notch them.slightly to fit over the lasers.

As it turns out I had the line generating lens in backwards on them. So the changing amplitude of the output is now explained. D'oh

The home brew mounts are working well. I'm happy with them.

Ill have to notch the topper now for the corners. It seems like its always something.

But hopefully by tomorrow ill have a touch table powered by frickin lasers.

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Continue reading »]]> I've been trying various mounts, some brackets, some wood and then realized, WTH dumbass. You have a plasma cutter, a drill press, a mig welder, tap and dies and plenty of scraps of angle and flat iron. Why are you screwing around with bolts, brackets and wood.So the afternoon later I have very black soles on my feet (yes I cut and weld metal barefoot) and 4 laser mounts that are adjustable for pitch and yaw and we simply rotate the laser itself for roll at the 'gross' level and adjust the feet on the mount at the 'fine' level. It's very simple, a piece of 1/2" L angle iron welded as a V on top of two small pieces of 1/2" at 90 degrees to the V. The small pieces are drilled and tapped for 10/32 bolts. A 3/4" bolt goes through them. By changing the depth of each bolt I can change the pitch and angle of the laser far greater than I need to get it level and at the right height. I'd post a picture but they're in the garage drying from a couple of coats of black rustoleum (sp?) spray paint, mainly for rust protection. Tomorrow I'll wire the table for laser'hood, I've already wired up my safety switch complete with pink LED to indicate the lasers are hot so I don't accidentally leave them on for long periods. A little soldering, a little heat shrink tubing and I'll have a touch table with freakin' lasers on its head.

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Continue reading »]]> Man, mounting a laser (all dirty jokes aside) in a secure fashion that allows for pitch, roll and yaw adjustment when you don't have a lot of room or a mount to do that with is proving to be troublesome.

I think I need more power tools, even if ithey don't solve the problem, they'll make me feel better about it.

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Continue reading »]]> My 10mw lasers came in and I was able to power them up last night and surprise, lasers are very bright. I'm using 850nm IR lasers with a 120 degree line generators and they lit up my fingertips like small suns to my IR camera when I aimed the plane over my table top. The blobs were, to make a bad pun, night and day different from the Rear Diffused Illumination set up I was using before using LED modules.

I spent the evening routing out pockets in the corners of my table to hold a aiming mechanism, still to be built, that will allow me to adjust the lasers so they create a flat plane of IR light just a hair above the table top. Any object intersecting that plane will get 'lit up' and reflect the IR light down into the camera which will pick it up and then turn that touch into a control mechanism for software. i.e. I'll have a 55" diagonal touch computer. Assuming it all comes together but it's looking very promising.

The 10mw lasers are more than ample to reach the other side, I could have gone with the 5mw lasers but the 10's were only $4 more so why not?

LLP or laser light plane systems also require no pressure to work unlike the other typical types of methods to use IR for a touch surface. On the downside you don't get to use fiducials or pattern recognition. But who knows maybe I can combine the two somehow or at least generate enough ambient IR inside the box to light up the fiducial patterns.

There are some downsides, occulsion can be an issue but I'm going to get 2 more lasers and put in the other two corners, I only picked up 2 for proof of concept.

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Continue reading »]]> It's interesting how self relevant or interesting I find other people's streams depending on how tired I am or what mood I'm in. Self psychoanalysis for the day.

In other news my frickin' lazers, yes I said that with the appropriate Dr. Evil air quotes, might show up today. First thing I'm going to do is strap them to my arms and walk around pretending to cut stuff in half. Don't try and tell me you haven't wanted to do that since the first time you saw a light sabre.

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Continue reading »]]> They're postponing their big unveiling of the new uber phones and android mobile OS out of respect for Steve Job's funeral and don't feel a celebration and a "in your face Steve!" event is appropriate. +1 for them. So if you had your heart set on the new Nexus sporting Ice Cream Sandwich (who comes up with these names?!) you're going to have to wait a little while longer.

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Continue reading »]]> I'm giving up on using IR LED's with a rear diffused lighting setup for my touch table. It's simply too big for that kind of lighting.

Instead I'm going to try switching to IR Lasers and create a LLP system or laser light plane.

The gist of it is you use a thingie to turn a laser, just like the one you screw with the dog with into a flat line like the ones you use to hang pictures. Only it emits Infrared light instead of red light.

You then angle that line of IR light so it lays flat just above surface. Then when something touches that surface it reflects the IR light down and out which is picked up by an IR camera below. Through the magic of software this is turned into mouse pointers for a computer which is projecting up onto that surface.

The end result is you have a ginormous touch enabled computer the size of a dining table.

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Continue reading »]]> Just wanted to throw this out there because the information was costly.   Chrylser Town and Country mini-vans specifically the 2003 model (but possibly not limited to that year) have an issue with the wiring harness that feeds the fuel injectors.   It can short or burn out.

Disclaimer: I am not a mechanic, I’m mechanically inclined and fairly smart or so I tell myself, but I’m not a mechanic or even a gear head.  The only engines I’ve worked on used honest to god distributors, coils, and were never sideways.   As long as the engine worked I was fine with it.  If something broke I figured out how to replace it.  I didn’t tinker with them.  So the below is what worked for me.  It make not work for you and this is provided for entertainment value.  If you blow yourself or your car up then the blame is on yourself.   If you’re not a cheap bastard like myself then do yourself a favor and go by the Haynes or Chiltons manual for your car and pick up some decent engine tear down books. 

The symptons are similar to a bad ignition coil (replaced $50), a bad fuel injector (replaced $60), polluted gas, dirty plugs, bad plug wires, bad ECM.

i.e. stalling when you add gas, stuttering ignition, runs better when it’s hot, burns gas like crazy, very rich mixture, smell of gasoline when your using the vehicle, slamming transmission at high speeds, oscillating rpms.

Tried to boost the gas without any results.

Replaced the ignition coil although it’s not really an ignition ‘coil’ in a modern engine.   No luck.

Replaced the ‘bad’ fuel injector at the advice of the person who pulled the error codes.  No help

FYI: To replace the fuel injector in a Chrysler T&C follow these steps -

The engine MUST BE COOL!!!  Not only for your own safety but so that the gas that’s going to come out and spray the engine doesn’t ignite.

You SHOULD have a CO2 or Powder Based fire extinguisher handy and it should be charged.  With the engine on fire is not a good time to find out your extinguisher has no pressure.  I wouldn’t recommend a water based one as it could spray flaming gas around before it puts it out.

Loosen the hose clamp holding the air intake to the manifold (the top of the engine) and pop the two clamps holding the intake to the air filter box and shove it out of the way.

Disconnect the various vacumn hoses and eletrictal plugs from the manifold (top of the engine) most have a small red tab that you have to slid out so they’re visible to unlock the connector.   They all only fit in one spot so its difficult to put them back wrong but if you’re worried take a picture or mark them.

Disconnect the power steering resovoir, two bolts on the right side of the engine and move it to the side. (this is also so you can get to the wiring harness)

Remove the 8 bolts holding the intake manifold on the top of the engine, four in the front, easy to do, four in the back the typical tight space issue.   the manifold will pop off with a little help.

remove the bolts holding the fuel bar, there are 4.  the fuel bar has all your injectors attached to it and runs lengthwise with the engine a long steel squarish thing.

Use a flat bladed screwdriver to gently pry under the four mounting brackets that you just removed the screws from and you’ll ease the injectors out of their sockets.  They have rubber o rings on them so they can be a little stubborn.

With the fuel bar and injectors out you can disconnect the wire cable and  slide the metal clamp holding the injectors to the fuel bar off.  It just slides in one direction and comes off completely.

FYI the system is under pressure.  I tried the various tricks of relieving the pressure and still got a big spray of gas when I pulled the injector out.  Swaddle it in a couple of shop rags to absorb most of it.

Dip the new injector in some of that gasoline that’s now sitting on top of your engine to lube it and then press it into the gas ramp and put the clip and electrical back on it.

Once you’ve replaced all the injectors you’re going to, carefully position the assembly and line up all the injectors on their holes and then slowly work your way up and down pressing the injectors in.  You don’t want to nick a gasket or break one here or you’re going to get an engine full of gas when you start it up.

Now put all the other parts back on, torque the fuel bar to 16f/lbs on the bolts if you have a torque wrench.

But before you do that, now would be a great time to trace all your wiring from the injectors back to the plug buried near the firewall and see if any of them are shorted or running with high resistance.   If you found this post because you’re having the aforementioned issues then odds are very high based on personal and anecdotal evidence that this harness has bad wires in it.  Mine personally didn’t have any actual melted wiring but plenty of people have reported that.

Using an ohm meter you can test for shorts and high resistance wires in the various harnesses and replace them as necessary or you can just say fuck it and buy a new harness and replace it all.   Depends on what your time is worth to you.

Continue reading »]]> Just thought this was rather interesting and wanted to share.  This is a screenshot of just Askimet’s ability to catch spam which is a long way from 99%.  Installing AVH First Defense Against Spam and setting it up to compare commenter IP’s versus known spammers was the only way I could get the spam back under control such that it didn’t fill my queues.

Obviously ‘something’ happened in January, some started using chinese gold farmers or whatever their equivalent is for spamming or they came up with one frack of a good scripting bot system.

Either way, if you’re being bombarded by spam and are running a wordpress site then make sure you’ve got the default Askimet set up and consider installing AVH and getting the API keys to enable the multiple databases it compares again.

Continue reading »]]> After a lot of consideration I picked up a Nook Color this weekend.  I had it rooted roughly 30 minutes after actually using it for the first time, and 20 of that was to check out the stock OS on the device.

A stock Nook Color is funcitonal if you want it to read books and browse the web (except for Flash).  It’s oddly disjointed in usage.  For example Pinch Zoom, the much beloved functionality doesn’t work for Books or the Browser but it does work for pictures.  WTH?  It’s like the Book, Browser, Pictures, Magazines app writers weren’t quite on board with what should be available or what the other guys were doing.   As another example, to read a book in ereader format you touch the sides of the screen to page forward and back.  With a .pdf you drag upwards and downwards.  WTH? again.

For the money a stock Nook Color is worthwhile, if you have the money without impacting important things in life.  It serves okay as a book reader (the e-ink of the Nook and Kindle are better for this in general, things like reading outside, battery life, eye strain).  The inclusion of very functional (except for Flash of course) web browsing, a magazine reader make it ‘just’ worth the price of admission.

It’s only when you Root or take control of the device and put a fully functional copy of Android on it that it really really starts to shine.

Using AutoNooter to root the device is painfully simple.  Your risk of ‘bricking’ the device is very low and you can restore it to default stock by the simple process of powering it off during the boot process 8 times in a row, this makes the nook think it’s broken and it’ll restore itself to factory fresh leaving no sign it was ever rooted.

There’s also a way to run Android Froyo off a SD memory card and thus you can go stock by simply taking the card out or go ‘pro’ by putting the card in.  This makes it almost impossible to break the Nook by rooting it.  You’d literally have to drop it on the floor and physically crack it wide open while putting in the SD card for this to go wrong.

So anyway, I got it rooted, this took roughly 60 seconds start to finish, I first tried Froyo on the SD card but it was a laggy, I was on a slow speed SD and I didn’t know about having to power of the screen after a reboot to make it not laggy.  I’ve got a quality Class 10 SD ordered and will revisit that process then.

After rooting using AutoNooter which puts on the Google apps including the oh so important Marketplace I went and installed a better browser Dolphin HD, Angry Birds (why I’m not sure myself), pdf readers, .lit readers, cbr readers, .epub readers, .rtf readers,  I have 1000′s of books in various formats and the Nook directly only reads a few of those.  Now I can read all the Walking Dead comics I have in .cbr format without having to manually convert them to pdf’s.

I added ‘cool’ launchers with themes and graphic skins, widgets to forecast the weather for me, winamp to play my music, video players, video streaming players, file server access apps, gmail, google chat, exchange mail, the list goes on.  All freely available, legally, through the Android Marketplace.

I’ve got it stuffed with game manuals and books so I can refer to them anywhere without having physical copies handy, apps and utilities to make my life easier and in general make it what I really wish my iphone was.  With a 7″ screen.  There are ‘atmospheric’ apps I could use for a little background noise or just use Winamp or Pandora or something else to have a little setting music going on.

Essentially using free, legal software I’ve turned this little e-reader into a fully functional tablet computer that makes it crazy attractive for the cost.

So I give it 5 thumbs up, assuming I had 5 arms, if you go the extra step and root it.  3 thumbs up stock standard.

Continue reading »]]> My comment spam or Spammenters (I just coined that phrase but you can use it if you like) has surged in the last 24 hours.   The amount that’s getting through the basic captcha system I’m using has drastically increased as well.  But luckily for you dear reader no comment goes up on this site without my express interactive approval so you don’t get to see the links for a multitude of products you really don’t want to know exist.  Trust me.

Either spammenters have picked up some new bot nets and captcha bypass systems or I’ve popped up on a master list somewhere that I wasn’t on before.

But it gives me a warm fuzzy being able to say “[bleep] you you slimy [bleepers]!!!” even if it’s by simple proxy of not allowing them to post here.

Continue reading »]]> As you can see if you’ve ever been here before, I’ve shifted the site theme a bit.  I felt it was time for aun update, I’ve been using the previous theme for maybe 3 years but the fact of the matter is I simply liked it and don’t like most other themes and am way too lazy to design my own.

Functionality hasn’t changed any, just the look.

Continue reading »]]> Just wanted to post this as it took me a bit to find.  If you happen to have a Jailbroken Iphone 3GS (other models may also be affected but it seems to be the 3GS) and its only 3.1.2 or higher or you used limerain or greenpoison (I forget the l33t spelling for those and too lazy to look it up) and JB a 4.x then you’ve probably broken your TV Out function.

I found this out because I use Air Player to stream videos from my media server while I use my treadmill but as the iphone screen is, let’s face it, pretty damn small for video watching especially while running, I picked up a TV to mount in front of the treadmill.  Then found out I couldn’t get any video out of the phone. Research lead me down a lot of avenues “3gs not supported, a big lot of bad cables out of china, bad settings, broken updates” before I finally found some valid information.

The root cause appears to be something the Cydia app does called ‘stashing’ where it moves some files out of the private data area.   Obviously this only affects Jailbroken phones.  If you have a problem and you don’t have a jailbroken phone and you’re using the overpriced Apple able then you have a different problem.   I should mention also that with iOS 3.1.2 Apple changed the firmware to require an Apple cable only to get working TV Out, there’s a chip in the cable that the phone can check.  No chip, no TV output.  When third party cables can be had for 1/5th price, it seems like another typical Apple policy.

The symptons is you get sound out from your iphone AV out (composite and component) cable but the video is blank.  It outputs a video signal but it’s blank.

The Resupported4 app available through cydia MAY fix it.  For me it just caused every app that normally does TV out, Photo’s iPod to lock the phone requireing a hard reset.  YMMV of course but as it’s a pay to play app, I’d avoid it.   I mention it here only because some people said it worked.

What did work perfectly is TVOut2.  This is a free app available through Cydia and not only fixes the TV Out function or replaces it or whatever (it just works which is all I care about) but it can be used to output everything through the TV Out cable which for some unknown but undoubtedly stupid reason Apple doesn’t want you doing.

Anyway there you go.

Continue reading »]]> As I get asked from time to time I thought I’d post this here.  After a lot of trial and error, mostly error I’ve come up with a listenable quality on the podcast recordings.

I use a Blue Snowball USB mic which is mounted in the ceiling facing down at our gaming table centered roughly.  I use the default cardoid pattern, number 1, which works fairly well.  I feed the mic to a laptop running Windows XP and into Audacity to do the recording with Mic levels set at 1.0 (max).

Once the recording is done I export it as a wav file, typically about about 2gbs for 6 hours of recording give or take.   The wav I bring into Adobe Soundbooth.  I run three passes on the audio file.  The first is I use the Lower Peaks under Volume effects to drop the spikes down.  I then boost the audio by 30% and 0.5 db using the boost volume effect although I’ve modified it from the preset.   Next I run it through the Remove Noise filter with a 30/30 setting, sliders 1/3 of the way over from the left on both aggressiveness and loudness.   These could probably be tweaked better but they give what is to me an acceptable quality.

This is then exported as a wav, opened in Goldwave and saved without making any changes.  The problem is Soundbooth does ‘something’ to wav files that causes Audacity to break when it tries to open them.  And I like using Audacity for post editing rather than soundbooth.  Sometimes simple is far better.

Once it’s back in Audacity I save it as a project and then simply listen to it and cut out the non-gaming bits and any significant stretches of silence.  Because frankly I list to gaming podcasts to hear the gaming stuff and I’m assuming most other people do too.   This clean up can easily cut an hour or even two for really sidetracked sessions that the listeners don’t want to hear (per a poll I ran here a long while back when I first started) as a general rule.

Once it’s cleaned up, I export the final cleaned up recording as another wav file and then back into Soundbooth where I stick on the opening monologue and music and then export as a mp3 using 48kbs and Stereo.

And that’s essentially the process of creating the audio file.  It’s taken a lot of crappy recordings, FWIW I do have the raw source files for all but one podcast so I could try to clean them all up this way but at this point that’s roughly somewhere between 150 and 200 hours of raw listening that would be needed, add at least another 2 hours per session for the clean up process in terms of processing and saving and transfering and well, it’s not going to happen.  You’re stuck with crappy earlier recordings.

Continue reading »]]> I just downloaded a series of podcasts of a group of gamers. And at this point I am dumbfounded, appalled and literally amazed at this strange thing I’ve come across.

Frankly I cannot for the life of me understand how this GM has ANY players much less the same people coming back.  The sessions are done over VoIP so it seems unlikely that the players are actual RL friends with the guy which is the only thing I can even remotely come up with as a reason they continue.  That they were long time friends.  But then typically someone wouldn’t treat their friends this badly or one typically doesn’t have any friends.

I simply do not understand how someone can act that way toward even strangers or people you don’t like.  Honestly it was that bad. And to act that way to your players?  Appalling.

The sad thing it’s a singular podcast series about a system I’m interested in but even though I forced myelf several times not to delete them during their the character creation session, I could do so no longer after a mere 15 minutes of their first actual session.

I will at this time offer this heartfelt sentiment to the players putting up with this behavior, “People seriously there are GM’s out there who appreciate their players, or at least don’t constantly belittle and denigrate them.  Best of luck in finding one of them.”

Continue reading »]]> Just thought I’d note in passing I’ve hit 400,000 unique visits to the site this morning since the site went live on April 07.   Not bad for something that’s pretty niche focused.  I do get some killer Google rankings though for a lot of generic search terms that are typical of this content.

The First Post

Continue reading »]]> This is a little off site topic but I thought I’d post it as I had trouble tracking down the information.   The condenser fan motor on my AC unit went out.  THe sympton was the fan that sits at the top of the outside unit wasn’t spinning but the compressor was on.  With the AC off the fan was hard to spin by hand, or rather a stick, I value my fingers.   These fans should be freely spinning and free of friction under normal off conditions.

Obviously it needed to be replaced.

First a disclaimer for our sue-happy society -

WARNING!!!  This information is for informational purposes only.  Serious harm or death could result if you attempt to perform these repairs without proper training, preperation and equipment.

Okay with that said I didn’t find it all that difficult to replace the motor.  Google was my friend when I ran into situations like the wires were different colors, there were more of them than I started with and the old fan was sharing a capacitor with the compressor.

I undid the sheet metal screws holding the top of the unit, the part that the fan is attached to and lifted it up and checked the data plate on the fan, writing down all the information, horsepower, voltage, amperage, speed, everything.  Going online I found that these fans (mine was 1/4 HP, 1100RPM) typically run $70, the most recommended brand was AO Smith.    Oddly enough the slower speed 850 RPM quieter fans cost considerably more.

Quotes to have a HVAC professional come out and replace it run from $400 to $1000 and research online seemed to bear those prices out based on people asking, “They only replaced a little fan and it took a few minutes, did I get screwed for $500?”

Given that little difference in price this became a no brainer to try myself.  Let me state I have no experience with HVAC equipment at all.

I had my lovely wife pick up a replacement motor from Grainger.  They’re not supposed to sell to the public but the counter man asked her where she worked and as it turns out her employer has an account there so they were able to sell it to her.  There was some *wink wink* going on as in the guy knew he wasn’t really supposed to sell to her but a sale is a sale so he did.

She was also my Tool Monkey and emergency standby to call 911 if I managed to electrocute myself.  Highly recommended to not try these things by yourself in case you accidently brush up against the hot lead on a capacitor with a sweaty arm.

WARNING!!! Remember to pull the fuses!  Mine were located right next to the units and there are also circuit breakers you trip.

Fan in hand along with the necessary capacitor I removed the old fan, clipping the wires to get it out easier.  The old fan had three wires, Black, Yellow and Brown, (Current, Current, Capacitor).   I removed the fan blade, it was easy just loosen a set screw in the hub where the blades attach and slide it off.

Next I disassembled the side of the unit, the big non-finned side, taking out the outer cover piece I was then able to open the actual junction box.

Inside I found the old fan’s black and yellow wires going to the junction bar attached with spade connectors.  I removed those, noting where they were attached.

WARNING!!! Capacitors can hold a charge, in fact that’s what they’re supposed to do.  These things can still shock the everloving crap out of you and even kill you.  I only had the crap shocked out of me obviously as I’m still alive to write this.   Treat this thing with utmost respect, use rubber gloves and don’t touch it if you don’t have to.

The existing capacitor was a big one and handled both the fan and the compressor.  It’s what is called a Split Capacitor I think.  It had one ‘hot’ or yellow lead leading to the power strip (the big junction bar where the live current comes in from the house and gets split up among the various leads).   It had one blue cable leading down to the compressor and a brown wire leading to the fan.

Since the new motor has 5 wires, its own capacitor I pulled the brown wire from the old capacitor and tossed it.   You have to leave the yellow and blue (or whatever colors you might have) attached so your compressor will continue to work.  The one for the fan is actually marked Fan on the capacitor by the way.

Unfortunately the new motor fan leads were too short to reach so I ended up using wire nuts to splice the old fan’s black and yellow power leads to the new fans black and purple power leads.   I then plugged those back to their original locations on the junction bar.

The two brown leads from the new fan went to the new capacitor, one on each side.  It makes no difference apparently which one goes where but remember I’m not a trained HVAC person and maybe I just got lucky, I had a 50/50 shot of getting them right regardless.

I then zip tied the new capacitor into the unit so it couldn’t accidently shift around and short out.   Obviously some metal clamp and screw mount would have been better but I had no such thing.

Next came to mounting the fan.  The replacement fan has screws so that it can be mounted either face up or face down depending on your preference.  I needed it face down and I would bet that most of them do.  These were way too long and I had to use a hacksaw to come them in half so the acorn nuts that hold it to the fan mount would screw all the way down.

The ones on the bottom were also way too long and I used a pair of vice grips to crush them off as near to the motor as I could.  Vice grips were faster than hacksawing and I didn’t need to save the threads at all.

The ground wire that came with the new fan was short and there was only one place that I could see to put it.  Over one of the fan mounting screws so it would be grounded against the unit’s case.  I removed the paint to make sure it had a good solid connection.

I then tested the conditioner to make sure it worked and voila it did.   Except it was running backwards.  But luckily they thought of that and there was a little white plastic plug thing on the motor that you can pull apart, spin 180 degrees and plug back together to reverse the motor.   This accomplished and voila, it was working 100% correctly.

Then I screwed everything back together and it’s worked since.  And I saved a minimum of $340 dollars and spent an hour of my life.

Now that I know what needs to be done I don’t see this taking more than 20-30 minutes.  I had to stop and research the changes in coloring on the wires and sealed it up once and then decided to go ahead and shorten the underside screws as much as possible.  Technically I sealed it up twice and forgot to put the side piece in first which you can’t attach after you put the top back on.  So I wasted a lot of time unnecessarily.

WARNING!!!  Attempting the above yourself may result in you killing yourself.  Please use utmost caution when playing with electricity.

Continue reading »]]> Firefox may not be winning the war for the world but I’m happy to see that it’s winning the war among my visitors, at least among those that were able to be deciphered.  From a security standpoint it’s mo’ betta’.  And if you want even more security IMO you’ll switch to Google Chrome.  There’s just something about a browser that if one tab dies it doesn’t take all the other tabs down with it and if a plugin dies on the tab it doesn’t take the tab down with it that I have to like.

My visitor stats for the last couple of months -

April 1 2010 – May 31 2010
Basis:  88795 results from 167829 unique visits of which 79034 unknown/could not be evaluated.

Continue reading »]]> Well after quite a while I finally got around to ripping out the carpet (original) in my 67 Mustang. And as you might expect it’s rusted through.  Ford never intended the mustang to last more than 5 years, 10 tops and as a result when they built they didn’t really pay much attention to things like primer and sealer and anti-rust etc.  Not that the industry paid a lot of attention to those things then anyway.  But with the mustang they were put together with quite a bit of bare metal on the internals.

It looks like both sides will need new floor pans, full length and a firewall patch on the drivers side at least.

Luckily they’re not very expensive, they’re just stamped sheet metal and $100 should get all the pieces.  It would in theory be possible to go scavage some sheet metal from an ‘you pull it’ place I’m sure for someone with mad auto body skills and do it for free but that person isn’t me.

Personally I’d like to replace the entire floor pan including the tranny hump but that’s like $500 and if you don’t know what you’re doing (*raises hand*) then you run a very real risk of throwing the body out of true.  Not to mention you have to take the engine and tranny out or you risk folding the car in half since the floor pans provide a lot of the strength of the car.  The wonders of unibody construction.

On the plus side it doesn’t look like the cowls are rusted through yet. But as the most likely source of issues it’ll need to ripped open and repaired.

Also the floor support and frame bits through the holes looks in good condition. Floor pans I’m willing to tackle. Replacing major structural pieces would worry me.

Ah well my plan is to have it ready for Ryan to be the coolest kid in school driving up in a muscle car that’s as old as his father and having the 289 hi-po reverberating the windows. That gives me 8 years more.

FYI the image isn’t my specific car although it’s what mine looks like, down to the lack of insignia and emblems.  I just don’t have a image of mine handy and it’s up on jack stands and the doors are off of it waiting new window regulators.  Sadly the previous owner had it painted black.  The original color was Ivy Gold.

Continue reading »]]> Had some left over chicken and rooasted potatoes in the fridge so I made soup.  We had a curry coconut soup at a so-so ‘asian fusion’ place yesterday and it wasn’t much of a leap of deduction to go “I could do better than this with leftovers.”

So, since I had chicken and potatoes already cooked and waiting their turn in the leftover plate I came up with the following -

Dennis’ Chicken Potato Coconut Curry Soup

Melt 1 tablespoon of butter in a saucepan.

Add 2 tablespoons of flour and stir make a roux. Â  Let it cook a minute or two to cut the raw flour taste.

Pour in one can of chicken broth and whisk smooth.

Add one tablespoon of -

• Chopped Garlic
• Minced Ginger

Add in 1/4 to a 1/2 teaspoon of -

• Ground Cardomon
• Tumeric
• Curry Powder
• Red Pepper (ground or flakes)
• Onion Powder

Pour in 1 can of Coconut Milk, whisk smooth.

Add in 1.5 grilled chicken breast

Add in 1 cup roasted potatoes

Simmer till slow boil stirring to rotate the potatoes on top to the bottom and cut back the heat and simmer as long as you can stand the smell and not eating it.  About 30 minutes for me.

Salt to taste and spoon up in a bowl as a thick soup (my preference) or ladle over steamed white rice (Laura’s choice). Â  Top with a dash of red pepper flakes and spoon a dollop of coconut yogurt in the middle.

Try it, if you don’t like it then you’re just weird.

Continue reading »]]> Just a quick note to say I’m voting with my wallet on this one and refusing to buy Bioshock 2.  Three different DRM systems are installed to get this thing to work properly.  I’m appalled. Until I get the stupidity to set up a game machine that’s JUST a game machine that I can reghost after every game to start over clean I’m not installing something that loads down my WORKING machine with this much crap.

In a year or so if they remove the DRM (and the price drops subsequently) I may consider it.

I have a ‘friend’ who bought Bioshock Uno and didn’t even unwrap it and instead downloaded a cracked version to avoid this bullshit.  My ‘friend’ refuses now to continue to support and pander to this kind of thinking.

<rant off>

Continue reading »]]> Just a reminder, 12/20/2012 is less than two years away.  Is your pantry loaded?

I really don’t have much to say in regards to another year down and another year in the future.  I’ve had better years and worse years than the proceeding one and I’m sure this cycle will continue to repeat.  Without the downs there are no ups; you just have a flat line.  And flat-lined is generally not a great place to be.  A little cardiac failure humor there.

But I do wish for you a better year regardless of how good the past year was.  Or good it was not.  Just try to remember that People as a ‘whole’ generally suck although a Person can be the best thing about and in your life.  And Life really is out to get you.  And it’s going to get you in the end, the best you can do is fight a delaying action and hold onto it as long as you can.  Anything good that comes to you in spite of that should be that much more enjoyable as a result.

Anyway, best of luck to your and yours in the upcoming months -

“All good that a person does to another returns three fold in this life; harm is also returned three fold.”

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> I’ve added mobile phone formatting to the site so if you hit it with your mobile (palm, windows, htc, iphone etc) you’ll get a pretty sweet way to view it. I’m using WPTouch which is braindead simple to installed.  Just upload the plug in and activate and voila, you have a way nice auto format when someone hit’s your WP site with something other than a PC. (And before someone brings it up, Mac’s are PC’s in the strict and original sense of the word before it became the shorthand for IBM based PC running Windows).

If you run into any problems let me know.

Continue reading »]]> Just wanted to post a quick review of the SnowBall microphone by Blue.  You can find them on Amazon or Newegg if you’re interested. Â  Right now it’s cheaper at Amazon.

It’s a USB mic so you’ll need a PC of some kind to use it and you won’t be able to feed the input through a mixer or anything like that.

Previously I was using the mic on a Logitech Pro 9000 webcam as my mic.  If you’ve listened to the podcast you can tell the quality isn’t all that and that’s after extensive cleanup and tweaking.

I think you’ll find the next podcast release to be significantly better in quality with everyone audible and without overload.  Probably doesn’t hurt that I parked the mic in front of me on the gaming table and put Temple at the far end of the table.

I’m not an audiophile, I don’t really know cardioid patterns or impedance or pickup sensitivity.  I do know that the recording with this mic is very acceptable to me and although I cringe at the price, its worth it IMO.

D

Continue reading »]]> I just monitored page hits and my Contact Me page gets flooded with hack attempts.  I’ve made it password protected, using KOC as the password.  Or you can simply view any post individually and use the contact link at the bottom of it.  I hate spammers, they f*ck up stats, consume huge amounts of bandwidth and in general cause the internet to be a craptastic experience.

Honestly, the only reason it works for them is the fraction of a fraction of a fraction of a percent that wonder about the benefits of \/1@grA and would rather risk their money, credit card information, identity with someone who needs to send a billion spam emails touting their security and confidentiality than use their common sense.  It costs them $0 to send the emails.  If even a single person gives them money?  It’s a huge profit deal for them.

So think of the children trying to surf Nickelodean the next time you start to click a link to some chinese web site to get a little blue pill or some russian site that’s going to guarantee your high pagerank on google and just remove your hand from the mouse.

That is all.

Continue reading »]]> I’m going to be making some dice towers in the next week or so and will probably have a couple of spares.  If there’s interest I could make these available for purchase.

As they’re ‘alpha’ bare bones basic designs I’m thinking $25+shipping ($5 to $10 depending on zip for USPS) for them, its roughly $12 for materials counting waste and the rest is for my time which works out to well below minimum wage on an hourly basis FYI.  You’d need to have a Paypal account in order to pay for them as that’s the simplest and least risky for me and it’s strictly as supply is available on a first paid for, first served basis.

If the $12 seems high for materials well you try cutting 3/16″ slots in 2′ boards that are straight and uniform using nothing but a circular saw and see how much waste material you end up that’s good for nothing but template spacers.

The tower will include a catch tray that will be of a size that tower will nest into it when you’re not using it.  You could line it with cork, rubber, foam or felt to reduce the clatter noise but I’ve found personally that the noise isn’t too bad and anything but hard polished wood just causes the squarish (d6′s, d8′s, d4′s) dice to tend to pile up at the mouth of the exit hole.

They may be unstained or stained with black walnut or golden oak depending on what I want to try and will be coated with two coats of polyurethane (either gloss or semi-gloss depending on my on hand supply of poly).  The plexiglass will probably be left clear although I’m going to try a frosted look using an orbital sander on the inside portion and see how that looks.

If you contact me while I still have unfinished towers then you can try requesting specific finishes and stains. Â  As mentioned the only stains I have on hand are black walnut and golden oak (I might have a honey oak somewhere) and for finishes I have semi-gloss and gloss in polyurethane and I might have a  semi-gloss in crystal coat which adds very little coloring to wood unlike poly which has a tinge of yellow.  Really on matters for unstained wood in either case.

If you’d simply like a more detailed photo log of  the process I use to make them so you can build your own I’ll be happy to post that if there’s any interest pending me getting more raw materials as all the material I had on hand I cut already over the weekend.

Use the contact form to send me an email or you can send it to my anti-spam account which is spam at armsnake dot com.

Continue reading »]]> Upgraded to WP 2.8 and lots of issues.  Bear with me.  Of course if you’re getting the 500 internal server error then you won’t see this so it might not help much.

UPDATE – I think the worst of the bugs from the upgrade are taken care of.  I need to figure out why the RSS feed from Wizards is fubarring my CSS but other than that I think we’re okay.

Continue reading »]]> Just some screen shots of the double decker gaming table topper (DDGTT?).  This is after painting although the top needs another coat or two but unfortunately I ran out of green paint.  I only had one can and that was a fluke that I’d bought for another project several months back. Â  Otherwise it would be solid white.  But since I’m going to be puting a big sheet of plexiglass on top of it I thought I’d use the green since it could be slimy dungeon floor or a grassy meadow or something else that’s green in color.

That’s one of my sons, one of the twins actually, in the background on his bike.  Ignore the mess, my garage is always in a state of semi organization.  I can usually find what I’m looking for so it’s not as haphazard as it looks.  The black car doors my son is in front of belong to my mustang, 1967 coupe, that I took off an embarrassingly long time ago to rework the innards of and haven’t put back on as of yet as I’m going to strip the interior to replace the dash and wiring etc. Some day.

Anyway, I didn’t have much else going on that I’m willing to share but I thought people might be interested in the status of the new gaming table.  Well the top to it.

Continue reading »]]> Just a quick pic (poor quality due to using my blackberry as a camera) of the double deck addition to the gaming table. That’s my wife holding the light in place for the picture purposes as it all needs to be actually assembled and finished before I can screw that down.

It’s constructed of two sheets of 1/2 ‘smooth one side’ or rought craft grade plywood.  I went cheap here for a couple of reasons, one they didn’t have 1/2 oak or birch plywood at the store, I’d of had to order it special and I didn’t want 3/4″ as it was too thick. Â  Two, the top piece is going to be covered in something with a plexiglass mapping sheet on top of that so good wood would have been wasted. Â  The bottom piece I’m going to paint white for light reflecting purposes so again we’re wasting good wood under paint.

Now the center piece that separates the two pieces of plywood I did make out of oak, primarily for strength and just because I was able to get precut pieces that are perfectly square which makes the parts go together stronger.

The two sheets of plywood are exactly 35″ by 64-3/4″ and fit inside the well in my gaming table with about a 1/16″ gap on all sides to allow for expansion and easy removal.

I’ll be screwing the center divider down onto the lower piece of plywood.  The top will be attached to the divider by a peg and wedge system so that I can take it off easily just in case.  I’ll attach some 2x blocks of oak to the underside of the top that will fit inside the divider snuggly and then drill a hole through the divider and into the blocks and use pegs to affix them to each other.

The reason I want to be able to take it apart is I’ll be mounting a power strip inside the divider and running the wiring into it so there’s only one cord coming out of everything to power the lights.

The light is a cheap little 24″ flo I got at Lowe’s for $9-$10 as a test to see if it works well enough.  It’s not actually that ‘hot’ a light, the picture just contrasts it that way but still I’m not sure if I’ll be adding one to each location or one to each side.  (4 lights versus 6).  6 would work ‘best’ but not sure if it’s necessary until after I get the wood painted white and see how it all reflects.

Anyway, that’s what I’ve been doing with my evenings the last couple.  Working with wood is a slow process as you’re always waiting for glue or stain or poly/varnish to dry before you can continue working and those generally run into the 24 hour blocks for best results.

Continue reading »]]> Okay after experimentation with some scrap and taking some measures and the like I’ve simplified the map topper for the table.  This is the second iteration.

The topper will be constructed of 1/2 plywood probably oak but maybe birch.  One piece will fit into the existing playing field indent to bring it level with the rim of the table. Â  I may leave it ‘unfinished’ i.e. just sanded, stained and then a few coats of poly on it to protect it or I might use some poker ‘speed’ cloth on it since it doesn’t pill up.

The bottom will be screwed and glued to the stand which will be 8″ high.  The stand will be cross braced and corner braced (I hate fragile things) on the interior.  This will then have another sheet of plywood screwed and glued on top of that.  I’ll then cover that most likely with green felt that I have left over from another project that will wrap around the edges.  The stand and underside portions I’ll sand and prime and then paint a bright white for light reflecting purposes.

For lighting I’ll put in a 40″ (ish) inch florescent fixture on the sides and a 16″ (ish) fixture on each end and mount these under the edge.

And that should give me the functionaly I’m looking for.

Continue reading »]]> In the interests of not throwing out the work I did on my current gaming table I’m thinking of making an addition to it, see the image in this post.  It’ll be an insert that fits into the existing playing surface that adds a map deck about 10″ or so above and then is inset a bit in the bracing so that there is more room for the players to put their character sheets, power cards, etc.

Right now there’s just too much contention for map space from player’s paperwork for any encounter room of significant size. This gets their items off the actual map field and if nothing else adding lighting directly over their bits and pieces makes them easier to read. Â  And it’ll give them a creature’s eye view of the battlefield which might be interesting.

It’s going to be damn heavy though.  I build things tough so there’ll be something like three sheets of hardwood plywood there.  1/2 inch minimum.  I want it to be removable you see so it has to be tough enough to handle being taken off and put back for when I want to use the table as a board game table or card games etc.

Anyway, just thought I’d share.

Continue reading »]]> I have to say that Facebook is not very intuitive and this from a 20 year IT professional with more flipping acronyms at the end of his name and experience at the lowest and highest tiers of support and implementation than you can shake a stick at.

In the paraphrased immortal words of Loomis – “Please god! I need a feedtool!  One lousy fuckin’ feedtool!”

But I persevere.

Continue reading »]]> My wife and children are out of town for Spring Break with the kids grandparents and for that and other reasons I’m trying to keep busy around the house.

One of the things that’s bugged me about our house is the the cabinet doors and drawer fronts are all this heavy old world solid oak, literally an inch thick with a lot of recessed areas.  I’m sure it was ungodly expensive when the house was built back in the late 70′s, the story is our house was the development owners house and I do tend to believe it, it’s got a lot of high end woods in it and is the biggest house in the development in terms of rooms and square footage (3200) but still it’s not very attractive to my eyes.  The 30 year old vanish/lacquer is not in the best shape in the lower cabinets/drawers in the kitchen from water splashes over the decades and general bumps and bruises.

Longer story short I’ve started taking off the doors and drawers and I’m using a fine grit pad on an orbital and hand sanding on the convulations to get the top layer off and then restaining it with golden oak stain.  I wasn’t really sure what it would do, the first one was an experiement as I really want to replace them all anyway.  But to my surprise they ‘healed’ right up very well.  The stain recolored the wood where the old coating had worn away and you literally cannot tell the difference.

I’m also going to be painting one of the downstairs bathrooms, the ‘public one’, which still has the old texture paint from the prior owner.  Her idea of painting was heavy faux finish done really badly.  I can only guess that she did this bathroom last because it was only ugly, not OMFG THAT’S HORRIBLE LOOKING!!!?! ugly.

When we moved in I repainted everything except that one bathroom.  By the time I’d gotten to it I was just too tired to care and it didn’t look so bad after painting 4 bedrooms, kitching, dining, two living rooms, halls and a playroom as well as multiple ceilings which as far as I can tell have the original %R@)*%!*& popcorn from 1978 and coat of paint.

Anyway, I’ve fixed the horrible job of patching they or someone did in covering up screwholes for towelracks that had been yanked out of the wall and taped all the edges off and hope to put a coat o’ primer on tonight and a nice Misty Lake tinted premium which is a pale foggy green aka greenish grey.

DnD news has been pretty light of late.  I guess everyone’s just doing their thing rather than talking about it.  I still don’t have a copy of the Players Handbook 2 but the Avenger class that Wheaton aka Al played in the Penny Arcade Podcast sounds interesting and worth a look.

It’s just rather disheartening to see the power creep that keeps on edging in.  But I guess it’s inevitable.

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> I’ve implemented a Widget Cacher to the site here, that along with WP-Cache significantly reduced the page creation size.  It’s typically sub 1 second to create the page now and there’s only around 20′ish SQL queries per page hit which is pretty good.

What does this mean?  Nothing much, it’s a geek thing but for the end users (you and your brethren) this means the page will load faster.  Of course you still have to pull in all the images which if this is your first time here can be costly.  1&1, my host, recently screwed up something and now my thumbnail generation doesn’t work so all the images for the last few posts are resized full size images rather than actual thumbs.  This isn’t the first time they’ve screwed this up.  We’ll see how long they take to fix it…

Image Credits

Continue reading »]]> Sorry about that, the comments weren’t working properly. I was thinking I was simply getting empty spam comments but after awhile I thought, huh, those are all empty. WTH? So I tried to post one and it was empty as well. Long story made shorter it’s fixed and both the comments and the email comment option should now be working properly where appropriate and visible to the end user (that’s you). Sorry about that.

In other news which I’ll go into more detail later, ran my module.  We got through 4 combat encounters and a couple of non-combat encounters in about 4 hours.  That includes children interuptions, unfamiliarity with their powers and such.  I’m pretty happy with that right now.  With experience that should easily drop to 3 hours even with the multiple bad guy encounters.

Continue reading »]]> If you’re using Word Press and are having problems with HTTP or Internal Server Error 500 errors when you upload an image then try putting the below in your .htaccess file in the root of your WordPress install folder.

AddType x-mapp-php5 .php
AddHandler x-mapp-php5 .php

This forces your server to use php 5 rather than defaulting to php 4 when it does the image upload/resize/thumbnail create.

Continue reading »]]> Well I’ve got nothing to offer you other than random musings and ramblings. Â  The forums have dried up on me, there’s very little activity on Enworld and very few posts worth reading on Gleemax (official forums) much less actually recording for posterity here.

One thing that some people are doing is ‘speeding’ up game play.  This has taken a slim variety of paths but it seems to fall into the allowing players to use their encounter powers more than once per encounter and their dailies more than once per day.  Getting rid of or altering healing surges is another prime candidate for change or using them as currency to allow more frequent usage of their powers.

One thing that struck me as interesting is one group’s removing the long rest and instead make their powers ‘episodic’.  You get what you get at the start of the gaming session and you don’t get more until the start of the next one.  BUT they’re also doing average damage (end result is the same but it does remove a great source of low and high points to me) and they’re making Dailies once per encounter, Encounters at-will. Â  They seem to be having fun with it but the DM admits his group is a bit on the power gamey side.

I think, now that I bother to think about it, that most of the people for whom ‘spamming the same two attacks at-will) is lame, lame, lame are the ones who’s idea of RPG’s are MMOG’s.  Anyone brought up old school where every combat round was, except for the mage and to very lesser extent the cleric, *roll d20 and see if I hit* and just repeat that for however many attacks they got.  The cleric was typically, roll a d20 to hit maybe, run around and cast Cure [blank] Wounds primarily. Â  To us actually having two different attacks on top of the basic attack which is all anyone ever used to get triples our options.

If you’re a fan of Zombies, computer games and first person shooters then Left 4 Dead can’t be recommended enough.  And you can get it from Amazon right now for only $46 which is a small bargain with free shipping.  Of course you could get it from Steam for $49 and not have to pay shipping either or taxes or wait for it to show up in the mail.

If you have a friend or two then I’d recommend getting your own dedicated server.  They’re $12 a month most places and you’re gaurenteed low latency, availability and the like.  Split that 4 ways and you’re only paying $3 a month each.  Unless you have a horse of a machine and a lot of outbound bandwidth trying to run a listen server on your desktop while you play is going to suck for anyone trying to connect, not to mention going to the trouble of getting the right ports forwarded through your router and unblocked at  your local firewall etc.  Heck for $12 I’d rent my own personal server if we didn’t already have a group one.

I’ve been working on hacking L4D mapping out while we wait, impatiently, for the real mapping tools to be released and have working maps but they’re not quite ‘there’ yet.  The navigation tools aren’t working so you can’t build your navigation areas quite properly.

Any maps/campaigns I do I’ll post here for your bemusement as well.

The car picture is an example of the 67 mustang I’ve got and working on restoring.  It’s a slow process, I’m spreading out the expenses of parts over the long haul and the waterfall costs never seem to stop.  To run a set of air tools and possibly repaint the car back to it’s original color is going to need a good sized air compressor.  That’s going to require a 220 volt circuit in the garage.  That’s going to require a new sub panel off the main panel and wire run from pretty much as far a point in the house as you can get.  The panel is on the diagonally opposite side of the house from where the outlets would be needed. Â  Of course a 220 would also be needed for a decent mig welder.  So it’s always one thing after another.

Continue reading »]]> Found a freebie poster printer that might be useful for printing big maps that you can then cut out and tape together to play on to give your battlemap a bit of a visual uplift rather than jagged lines draw with a swipe of a vis a vis marker.

It looks quite useable and if you have something like CutePDF installed you can could just print it to a PDF and have it printed out at your local print shop and save your ink cartridges.  Remove any copyright notices though as some places can be a pain in the arse about that.

The official forums are down so the usual chain reaction of servers going down is going on so there’s not any news not that there seemed to be a lot when I was able to glance through them.  Things are slowing up definitely as people get more familiar with the rules, the initial flux of “Oh this is missing, I have to add it.” content folks have gotten what they wanted made and in general things are just a little slower.

I’ve got Adobe InDesign installed, the company has extra licenses actually and they didn’t have a problem with me using one with the caveat that if they ever need it back I give it up.  Being in such a large company you can sometimes get perks like that but you also have a lot more stringent policies on licensing.  And as I’m one of the ones that has to enforce things like that among other things I really shouldn’t be one of the ones breaking the rules.

I mention this because it’s so ungodly nice using a real page layout program.  I was getting just so incredibly frustrated with Word since I’ve been a casual user of Quark and Pagemaker among other layout programs.  I started with an awesome layout program back in 85/86 or so on a Commodore Amiga that put the current iteration of Pagemaker at the time to shame.  It could print high res output on a flipping dot matrix printer.  Although it did use up a ribbon pretty quickly.

So now I’ve transferred my labor of painful effort on Word 03 and 07 to InDesign and am working on a premie module.

Continue reading »]]> For lack of anything of any importance to post here that I’ve found I’m putting up this old saw that you should read through and have your BBEG try to pay attention to.  They key one is having a sexy daughter that turns on you after becoming infatuated with the sexy hero.  Remember Solitaire from Live and Let Die?

Obviously you’re not going to be giving the intraweb to your employees anytime soon in a DnD world, well I suppose if you steampunked it or it was Eberron *lip curl* then you might but typically the internet isn’t going to be available.

But anyway here you go (NOTE: I didn’t write this although I’d change a couple if I had an I haven’t a clue as the originator of the original is thanks to Mdonle for pointing this out if your interested in the origins of this list):

Image Credits

The Top 100 Things I’d Do
If I Ever Became An Evil Overlord

1. My Legions of Terror will have helmets with clear plexiglass visors, not face-concealing ones.

   
   

2. My ventilation ducts will be too small to crawl through.

   
   

3. My noble half-brother whose throne I usurped will be killed, not kept anonymously imprisoned in a forgotten cell of my dungeon.

4. Shooting is not too good for my enemies.

   
   

5. The artifact which is the source of my power will not be kept on the Mountain of Despair beyond the River of Fire guarded by the Dragons of Eternity. It will be in my safe-deposit box. The same applies to the object which is my one weakness.

   
   

6. I will not gloat over my enemies’ predicament before killing them.

   
   

7. When I’ve captured my adversary and he says, “Look, before you kill me, will you at least tell me what this is all about?” I’ll say, “No.” and shoot him. No, on second thought I’ll shoot him then say “No.”

   
   

8. After I kidnap the beautiful princess, we will be married immediately in a quiet civil ceremony, not a lavish spectacle in three weeks’ time during which the final phase of my plan will be carried out.

   
   

9. I will not include a self-destruct mechanism unless absolutely necessary. If it is necessary, it will not be a large red button labelled “Danger: Do Not Push”. The big red button marked “Do Not Push” will instead trigger a spray of bullets on anyone stupid enough to disregard it. Similarly, the ON/OFF switch will not clearly be labelled as such.

   
   

10. I will not interrogate my enemies in the inner sanctum — a small hotel well outside my borders will work just as well.

    
    

11. I will be secure in my superiority. Therefore, I will feel no need to prove it by leaving clues in the form of riddles or leaving my weaker enemies alive to show they pose no threat.

    
    

12. One of my advisors will be an average five-year-old child. Any flaws in my plan that he is able to spot will be corrected before implementation.

    
    

13. All slain enemies will be cremated, or at least have several rounds of ammunition emptied into them, not left for dead at the bottom of the cliff. The announcement of their deaths, as well as any accompanying celebration, will be deferred until after the aforementioned disposal.

    
    

14. The hero is not entitled to a last kiss, a last cigarette, or any other form of last request.

    
    

15. I will never employ any device with a digital countdown. If I find that such a device is absolutely unavoidable, I will set it to activate when the counter reaches 117 and the hero is just putting his plan into operation.

    
    

16. I will never utter the sentence “But before I kill you, there’s just one thing I want to know.”

    
    

17. When I employ people as advisors, I will occasionally listen to their advice.

    
    

18. I will not have a son. Although his laughably under-planned attempt to usurp power would easily fail, it would provide a fatal distraction at a crucial point in time.

    
    

19. I will not have a daughter. She would be as beautiful as she was evil, but one look at the hero’s rugged countenance and she’d betray her own father.

    
    

20. Despite its proven stress-relieving effect, I will not indulge in maniacal laughter. When so occupied, it’s too easy to miss unexpected developments that a more attentive individual could adjust to accordingly.

    
    

21. I will hire a talented fashion designer to create original uniforms for my Legions of Terror, as opposed to some cheap knock-offs that make them look like Nazi stormtroopers, Roman footsoldiers, or savage Mongol hordes. All were eventually defeated and I want my troops to have a more positive mind-set.

    
    

22. No matter how tempted I am with the prospect of unlimited power, I will not consume any energy field bigger than my head.

    
    

23. I will keep a special cache of low-tech weapons and train my troops in their use. That way — even if the heroes manage to neutralize my power generator and/or render the standard-issue energy weapons useless — my troops will not be overrun by a handful of savages armed with spears and rocks.

    
    

24. I will maintain a realistic assessment of my strengths and weaknesses. Even though this takes some of the fun out of the job, at least I will never utter the line “No, this cannot be! I AM INVINCIBLE!!!” (After that, death is usually instantaneous.)

    
    

25. No matter how well it would perform, I will never construct any sort of machinery which is completely indestructible except for one small and virtually inaccessible vulnerable spot.

    
    

26. No matter how attractive certain members of the rebellion are, there is probably someone just as attractive who is not desperate to kill me. Therefore, I will think twice before ordering a prisoner sent to my bedchamber.

    
    

27. I will never build only one of anything important. All important systems will have redundant control panels and power supplies. For the same reason I will always carry at least two fully loaded weapons at all times.

    
    

28. My pet monster will be kept in a secure cage from which it cannot escape and into which I could not accidentally stumble.

    
    

29. I will dress in bright and cheery colors, and so throw my enemies into confusion.

    
    

30. All bumbling conjurers, clumsy squires, no-talent bards, and cowardly thieves in the land will be preemptively put to death. My foes will surely give up and abandon their quest if they have no source of comic relief.

    
    

31. All naive, busty tavern wenches in my realm will be replaced with surly, world-weary waitresses who will provide no unexpected reinforcement and/or romantic subplot for the hero or his sidekick.

    
    

32. I will not fly into a rage and kill a messenger who brings me bad news just to illustrate how evil I really am. Good messengers are hard to come by.

    
    

33. I won’t require high-ranking female members of my organization to wear a stainless-steel bustier. Morale is better with a more casual dress-code. Similarly, outfits made entirely from black leather will be reserved for formal occasions.

    
    

34. I will not turn into a snake. It never helps.

    
    

35. I will not grow a goatee. In the old days they made you look diabolic. Now they just make you look like a disaffected member of Generation X.

    
    

36. I will not imprison members of the same party in the same cell block, let alone the same cell. If they are important prisoners, I will keep the only key to the cell door on my person instead of handing out copies to every bottom-rung guard in the prison.

    
    

37. If my trusted lieutenant tells me my Legions of Terror are losing a battle, I will believe him. After all, he’s my trusted lieutenant.

    
    

38. If an enemy I have just killed has a younger sibling or offspring anywhere, I will find them and have them killed immediately, instead of waiting for them to grow up harboring feelings of vengeance towards me in my old age.

    
    

39. If I absolutely must ride into battle, I will certainly not ride at the forefront of my Legions of Terror, nor will I seek out my opposite number among his army.

    
    

40. I will be neither chivalrous nor sporting. If I have an unstoppable superweapon, I will use it as early and as often as possible instead of keeping it in reserve.

    
    

41. Once my power is secure, I will destroy all those pesky time-travel devices.

    
    

42. When I capture the hero, I will make sure I also get his dog, monkey, ferret, or whatever sickeningly cute little animal capable of untying ropes and filching keys happens to follow him around.

    
    

43. I will maintain a healthy amount of skepticism when I capture the beautiful rebel and she claims she is attracted to my power and good looks and will gladly betray her companions if I just let her in on my plans.

    
    

44. I will only employ bounty hunters who work for money. Those who work for the pleasure of the hunt tend to do dumb things like even the odds to give the other guy a sporting chance.

    
    

45. I will make sure I have a clear understanding of who is responsible for what in my organization. For example, if my general screws up I will not draw my weapon, point it at him, say “And here is the price for failure,” then suddenly turn and kill some random underling.

    
    

46. If an advisor says to me “My liege, he is but one man. What can one man possibly do?”, I will reply “This.” and kill the advisor.

    
    

47. If I learn that a callow youth has begun a quest to destroy me, I will slay him while he is still a callow youth instead of waiting for him to mature.

    
    

48. I will treat any beast which I control through magic or technology with respect and kindness. Thus if the control is ever broken, it will not immediately come after me for revenge.

    
    

49. If I learn the whereabouts of the one artifact which can destroy me, I will not send all my troops out to seize it. Instead I will send them out to seize something else and quietly put a Want-Ad in the local paper.

    
    

50. My main computers will have their own special operating system that will be completely incompatible with standard IBM and Macintosh powerbooks.

    
    

51. If one of my dungeon guards begins expressing concern over the conditions in the beautiful princess’ cell, I will immediately transfer him to a less people-oriented position.

    
    

52. I will hire a team of board-certified architects and surveyors to examine my castle and inform me of any secret passages and abandoned tunnels that I might not know about.

    
    

53. If the beautiful princess that I capture says “I’ll never marry you! Never, do you hear me, NEVER!!!”, I will say “Oh well” and kill her.

    
    

54. I will not strike a bargain with a demonic being then attempt to double-cross it simply because I feel like being contrary.

    
    

55. The deformed mutants and odd-ball psychotics will have their place in my Legions of Terror. However before I send them out on important covert missions that require tact and subtlety, I will first see if there is anyone else equally qualified who would attract less attention.

    
    

56. My Legions of Terror will be trained in basic marksmanship. Any who cannot learn to hit a man-sized target at 10 meters will be used for target practice.

    
    

57. Before employing any captured artifacts or machinery, I will carefully read the owner’s manual.

    
    

58. If it becomes necessary to escape, I will never stop to pose dramatically and toss off a one-liner.

    
    

59. I will never build a sentient computer smarter than I am.

    
    

60. My five-year-old child advisor will also be asked to decipher any code I am thinking of using. If he breaks the code in under 30 seconds, it will not be used. Note: this also applies to passwords.

    
    

61. If my advisors ask “Why are you risking everything on such a mad scheme?”, I will not proceed until I have a response that satisfies them.

    
    

62. I will design fortress hallways with no alcoves or protruding structural supports which intruders could use for cover in a firefight.

    
    

63. Bulk trash will be disposed of in incinerators, not compactors. And they will be kept hot, with none of that nonsense about flames going through accessible tunnels at predictable intervals.

    
    

64. I will see a competent psychiatrist and get cured of all extremely unusual phobias and bizarre compulsive habits which could prove to be a disadvantage.

    
    

65. If I must have computer systems with publically available terminals, the maps they display of my complex will have a room clearly marked as the Main Control Room. That room will be the Execution Chamber. The actual main control room will be marked as Sewage Overflow Containment.

    
    

66. My security keypad will actually be a fingerprint scanner. Anyone who watches someone press a sequence of buttons or dusts the pad for fingerprints then subsequently tries to enter by repeating that sequence will trigger the alarm system.

    
    

67. No matter how many shorts we have in the system, my guards will be instructed to treat every surveillance camera malfunction as a full-scale emergency.

    
    

68. I will spare someone who saved my life sometime in the past. This is only reasonable as it encourages others to do so. However, the offer is good one time only. If they want me to spare them again, they’d better save my life again.

    
    

69. All midwives will be banned from the realm. All babies will be delivered at state-approved hospitals. Orphans will be placed in foster-homes, not abandoned in the woods to be raised by creatures of the wild.

    
    

70. When my guards split up to search for intruders, they will always travel in groups of at least two. They will be trained so that if one of them disappears mysteriously while on patrol, the other will immediately initiate an alert and call for backup, instead of quizzically peering around a corner.

    
    

71. If I decide to test a lieutenant’s loyalty and see if he/she should be made a trusted lieutenant, I will have a crack squad of marksmen standing by in case the answer is no.

    
    

72. If all the heroes are standing together around a strange device and begin to taunt me, I will pull out a conventional weapon instead of using my unstoppable superweapon on them.

    
    

73. I will not agree to let the heroes go free if they win a rigged contest, even though my advisors assure me it is impossible for them to win.

    
    

74. When I create a multimedia presentation of my plan designed so that my five-year-old advisor can easily understand the details, I will not label the disk “Project Overlord” and leave it lying on top of my desk.

    
    

75. I will instruct my Legions of Terror to attack the hero en masse, instead of standing around waiting while members break off and attack one or two at a time.

    
    

76. If the hero runs up to my roof, I will not run up after him and struggle with him in an attempt to push him over the edge. I will also not engage him at the edge of a cliff. (In the middle of a rope-bridge over a river of molten lava is not even worth considering.)

    
    

77. If I have a fit of temporary insanity and decide to give the hero the chance to reject a job as my trusted lieutentant, I will retain enough sanity to wait until my current trusted lieutenant is out of earshot before making the offer.

    
    

78. I will not tell my Legions of Terror “And he must be taken alive!” The command will be “And try to take him alive if it is reasonably practical.”

    
    

79. If my doomsday device happens to come with a reverse switch, as soon as it has been employed it will be melted down and made into limited-edition commemorative coins.

    
    

80. If my weakest troops fail to eliminate a hero, I will send out my best troops instead of wasting time with progressively stronger ones as he gets closer and closer to my fortress.

    
    

81. If I am fighting with the hero atop a moving platform, have disarmed him, and am about to finish him off and he glances behind me and drops flat, I too will drop flat instead of quizzically turning around to find out what he saw.

    
    

82. I will not shoot at any of my enemies if they are standing in front of the crucial support beam to a heavy, dangerous, unbalanced structure.

    
    

83. If I’m eating dinner with the hero, put poison in his goblet, then have to leave the table for any reason, I will order new drinks for both of us instead of trying to decide whether or not to switch with him.

    
    

84. I will not have captives of one sex guarded by members of the opposite sex.

    
    

85. I will not use any plan in which the final step is horribly complicated, e.g. “Align the 12 Stones of Power on the sacred altar then activate the medallion at the moment of total eclipse.” Instead it will be more along the lines of “Push the button.”

    
    

86. I will make sure that my doomsday device is up to code and properly grounded.

    
    

87. My vats of hazardous chemicals will be covered when not in use. Also, I will not construct walkways above them.

    
    

88. If a group of henchmen fail miserably at a task, I will not berate them for incompetence then send the same group out to try the task again.

    
    

89. After I captures the hero’s superweapon, I will not immediately disband my legions and relax my guard because I believe whoever holds the weapon is unstoppable. After all, the hero held the weapon and I took it from him.

    
    

90. I will not design my Main Control Room so that every workstation is facing away from the door.

    
    

91. I will not ignore the messenger that stumbles in exhausted and obviously agitated until my personal grooming or current entertainment is finished. It might actually be important.

    
    

92. If I ever talk to the hero on the phone, I will not taunt him. Instead I will say this his dogged perseverance has given me new insight on the futility of my evil ways and that if he leaves me alone for a few months of quiet contemplation I will likely return to the path of righteousness. (Heroes are incredibly gullible in this regard.)

    
    

93. If I decide to hold a double execution of the hero and an underling who failed or betrayed me, I will see to it that the hero is scheduled to go first.

    
    

94. When arresting prisoners, my guards will not allow them to stop and grab a useless trinket of purely sentimental value.

    
    

95. My dungeon will have its own qualified medical staff complete with bodyguards. That way if a prisoner becomes sick and his cellmate tells the guard it’s an emergency, the guard will fetch a trauma team instead of opening up the cell for a look.

    
    

96. My door mechanisms will be designed so that blasting the control panel on the outside seals the door and blasting the control panel on the inside opens the door, not vice versa.

    
    

97. My dungeon cells will not be furnished with objects that contain reflective surfaces or anything that can be unravelled.

    
    

98. If an attractive young couple enters my realm, I will carefully monitor their activities. If I find they are happy and affectionate, I will ignore them. However if circumstance have forced them together against their will and they spend all their time bickering and criticizing each other except during the intermittent occasions when they are saving each others’ lives at which point there are hints of sexual tension, I will immediately order their execution.

    
    

99. Any data file of crucial importance will be padded to 1.45Mb in size.

    
    

100. Finally, to keep my subjects permanently locked in a mindless trance, I will provide each of them with free unlimited Internet access.

Continue reading »]]> Whoops, screwed up some things so nothing was posted while I was off on vacation.  My first in almost two years to be exact.  Laura and I went up north to Michigan to our annual Foog Fest which is a gathering of folks who play online together, ranging from old timers like myself from Ultima Online days to folks just now getting started in MMOG’s.

We had a pretty good time although the drive was one major ass suckage, 15+ hours one way so pretty much two of my vacation days were spent in the car.

We played several board games, Last Night On Earth, Settlers of Catan, several Munchkins, and some Guitar Hero Aerosmith, Rock Band and a few Wii games in general.  We also got in a few games of paintball and I was able to break out my Line SI Bushmaster complete with Airgun Designs Six-Pack.  Very old school shit but it still shoots like the sweatheart of a gun it is.  I took my Automag but it ended up leaking down the powertube (seal issues) and the seals I have are old and have taken a set so I’ll have to see if you can still get them and get some.  It would be shame to have such a legacy in a condition unable to shoot. Â  I didn’t take my Autococker or Autococknocker as we called them back in the day.  There’s only so much crap you really want to take on a vacation.

The host of this year’s gathering did an excellent job but took way too much on himself to provide food, cooking several really good meals for everyone but at the expense, in my opinion, of his own entertainment and enjoyment.  I’m going to try and make a point of it to stress that doing one breakfast and one dinner is extent of any host’s permissions to take unto himself and everyone can fend for themselves as they see fit. Â  And that’s optional.  Seriously delivery pizza would be preferable if it means everyone gets a good time.

I’ve spotted some updates and news thingies I want to make note of and I’ll get to those tomorrow, it’s been a long day.

And it appears my appeal to my hosting provider (www.1and1.com) has fixed my issues with image uploads in my absence.  I’m assuming they repaired the security issues with the tmp folder for the anonymous access account to allow the use of the ‘crunch’ of the uploaded images properly.

Addendum, while looking for an image to put in this post I found out that according to someone, apparently less than 150 of the AGD six-pack’s are known to exist.  Well I know about 2 of them personally that I can attest to working perfectly.  I also have a Micro-CA that works perfectly well as well.  The Micro-CA is the littlest brother to the Six Pack.

Continue reading »]]> Okay the Alpha version of the new table top is done and in place. As mentioned previously this is a piece of Lexan from Lowe’s cut down to fit inside the inset on the gaming table I built. (which by the way has rope lights embedded in the edge of the inset for that uber geek pimp look).

In the picture here the top safety film is still in place so it’s a little hazier and less translucent that it will be in actual game play. With three small children used to playing on the gaming table with my miniatures, dice, their miniatures etc. I left it on so the first actual game usage would be relatively scuff, fingerprint, and scratch free. After that it’s all bets are off as usual around here.

I drew a grid on the ‘underside’ of the lexan using metallic sharpie. I tossed around the thought of using a dremel tool in a little homemade jig and a routing bit to scribe lines in the lexan to make them permanent and probably a little better looking but the plastic isn’t that thick to start with and I could easily see it just fracturing along those scribe lines when I lift it up to put things underneath it leaving me with a bunch of broken pieces.

So one asstastic amount of grid lines later I’ve got the tabletop on the table and it doesn’t look too bad. Given the size and the fact I was doing this on the floor not all the lines are perfect and the ink flow from the metallic sharpies wasn’t all that standardized so. And one of the pens had a very hard time writing on it. But over all I think it came out very much okay.

As you can see it’s possibly in theory to put things under it and have them still be readable through the map. Also in theory I could create maps in a mapping program like Dundjinni, Campaign Cartographer or even just Photoshop or Illustrator or GiMP, print those out and slide them under the grid to have color maps. Nifty eh?

I still need to ‘stonify’ the gray matte paper underneath, but I need to do some testing to figure out what I can use that won’t eventually or immediately stain or discolor the lexan that’s going on top of it.

Continue reading »]]> Found this image when I was looking for something off the beaten path for the Skaven article and thought it was pretty cool. The artist’s other pictures are also for the most part interesting to look at. Your opinion may vary of course and feel free to do so.

Also in doing so I found the ‘elfwood‘ site that I remember from a long time back. The artwork ranges from child like scribbles to some pretty great stuff like this image here.

You can check out The Best on the site to find things that the majority of people have ‘tagged’ as favorite and in general barring ballot stuffing will let you find some nice things depending of course on your tastes and level of need for nice things.

Like this one for you orc lovers. Or maybe you need a pair of a paladin love birds? Or something from the darker side of life? Or that Big Bad Evil Guy that your players are going to be facing off with next?

Continue reading »]]> Not that I really expect it to be ‘needed’ I’ve fixed the contact system so you could in theory use the site to email me a comment or whatever. Even in my prime when I was creating 3d resources and scripts and the like for Never Winter Nights I rarely got any email directly through the site, most of it was through regular email. But hey I’m not putting my regular email on this site because of spam scraping so you might find it hard to send an email that way. Hint – my name at this domain will work.

I’m also trying a lot of oddball little plugins. Apparently WordPress doesn’t really have a Private Message system they can incorporate into their code. Which is really odd IMO as that’s pretty much a staple. Even when I wrote my own CMS that would be the thing I’d put in after I added the ability to add and edit posts.

Anyway you can use the Contact Me link over on the right somewhere. If you feel a need to contact me.

Continue reading »]]> In looking around at the site I realized it had been awhile since I’d upgraded the base site code which is Word Press. I’ve now taken care of that and migrated from 2.1.3 to 2.5.x. On the back end a few things are different and I’m not sure if it’s an improvement but it’s not a dis-provement so I can adjust to change.

In addition I’ve had to update my existing plug ins and as a result of finding new versions I’ve added some others that I came across so there are some new things there.

The site shouldn’t have been down for more than about 10 minutes, the time it took to dump the files up and overwrite the existing ones and do a database upgrade. FTP from a network location in Vista is dog ass slow. Which is a strange phrase really but my aunt says it a lot, she’s around 87 now I think and if I live to be 67 with half the ability she has still I’ll be happy.

Anyway sorry for the brief outage to anyone that was visiting trying to get some the PDF’s I’ve posted recently. If you use them for play testing I’d love to hear about them as I haven’t had a chance to play test either the Half Orc race or the Bard class.

Continue reading »]]> An interesting thing I just saw, I was using Google to search for “true20 alternate core ability” and I was very surprised to see that this site was the first return. I’ve only mentioned True20 once I think and didn’t use that exact phrase. Well now I have but even so this worked before.

Anyhow I just found this very strange that out of all the True20 sites out there that the first time I search on a phrase I came back with my own site as the first hit. And I thought I’d share.

Continue reading »]]> There won’t be a DnD session this weekend although there will be other gaming going on. I’m thinking of running a webcam pointed at the playing field and pump the images or video out to the world. No real reason other than I think it would be interesting.

Not sure where I’d put the camera, I think directly overhead would make the most sense but then I’ve got a webcam stuck on my ceiling. Perhaps in a corner of the up on the wall pointed down at an angle? But first I’ll need a pretty long USB cord. I went on CompUSA’s web site and that showed them selling 15′ cords for $3.49. And yet when I went to the actual store they were more like $34.95. For $3.49 I’ll be happy to avoid going through my storage boxes full of cords to see what I’ve got stockpiled. For $34.95, not so much.

I’ve been looking for a new theme to put up on the site. I’d like something ‘undeadish’ or ‘horror’ based but man I really don’t want to sit down and spend the few hours it would take to do the design, layout, css and graphics. Such is life.

I’ve been reading through True20 and angling toward a NoTLD thing or actually it would be more a Dawn or Day of. Perhaps an Evening of? I’ve really got to point buy up some characters (no rolling involved with T20) and go through some basic combats and such as more than a few of the powers don’t seem balanced very well. In specific Cold Shaping lets you deal damage equal to half your power rank which I’m shakily assuming is your ranks of Adept levels. But Fire Shaping gives you a +2 damage. That doesn’t seem very balanced at all. Especially given that fire will damage something a LOT faster than cold will given an equal energy expenditure in real life.

Continue reading »]]> Porra, Ghimli, Gnatsum showed up, Alhman was tied up and Jo is of course still out of town. Next week though I expect to have at least 4 of the 5 at which time we’ll forge ahead with the Temple.

If I get the time this week I’m going to write, direct and produce and stick in a little side adventure as well while they’re on their way back from town. If you’ve played my only released NeverwinterNights module it’ll be based on the crypt sequence I put into that one.

As for yesterday we played Munchkin of which everyone won one game and someone won two. Who the someone was I don’t remember other than I don’t think it was me but I could be wrong. We played Super, Star, Impossible, Fu, hmmm maybe everyone only won one game as I can’t remember the other type of Munchkin we played. Oh well.

I think I’m going to pick up Zombie Town (ratings)as well. If nothing else it gives me 100 zombie miniatures to use in our DnD campaign. And from the people who bothered to review it, they enjoyed it. What’s not to like? It has zombies and PVP?

We tried again to find the Order of the Stick boardgame but were unable to. We’ll probably have to just buy the silly thing from some place like FunAgain which I’ve used in the past. Reasonable prices and so far at least reasonable customer service.

Anyway that’s how we spent our third weekend in a row without any campaigning because too many people couldn’t make it at the same time.

Continue reading »]]> Sadly, in the nook where I’ve got my gaming table I’ve got no ceiling fixtures, indeed in the entire huge ass room (20×25′ish) I call my computer room there’s one ceiling fixture and it’s off to the side in a really WWTT location.

So I’m looking at track lighting that I’d like to put up there, I hate overhead lights but I need something shining down from above on the table for lighting purposes and track lighting is different enough that perhaps I won’t hate it completely. I’d actually prefer cove lighting in order to bounce indirect light off the ceiling and downwards but then I’d have to cove the whole room and that’s expensive.

But… there’s no way to run wire to the location that doesn’t entail knocking holes in sheet rock and removing a large chunk of the ceiling because of the way the joists for the second floor run versus the points of access.

Now I’m looking at having to run that ugly wire conduit up the side of the wall and across the ceiling. Granted I could paint it to match the wall, crown and ceiling to help it blend it a bit but it’s still ugly.

I need something really cheap (termite prevention and new guttering killed my disposable income for the year and then some) but attractive. Get your mind out of the gutter please.

Continue reading »]]> Well we won’t be having a session this weekend but after this I’m going to try for as many weekends in a row as possible. Being old with three children it’s not like my Saturday nights are full of important events.

Brandon will be joining us hopefully next time. He’s Greg’s son, my nephew, which if you’re doing the math makes Greg my brother. I’ve rolled him up a ranger (and yes gd’it rolling applies in this instance unlike the term’s usage in MMOG’s). His favorite World of Warcraft character is a hunter so I thought he’d like a Ranger as his first foray into PnP gaming.

I’ve been reading ahead in the module (duh) and also going through rules and such to try and familiarize myself from a DM’s point of view of the 3.0 version of Dungeons and Dragons. I also (shhhh don’t tell anyone!) downloaded pdf’s of the 3.5 books. If I print them out it should only cost me about $100 a book. What a bargain!

Continue reading »]]> This is a new site that I’m doing with the vague thought of documenting some kind of roleplaying gaming sessions. In case you’re wondering the domain comes from a very hilarious comment made by Temple, one of my players, after one even more so than normally harsh fight.

As the characters lay sprawled about, so nigh death that they were hearing angelic chorals in the background, Temple said, “What are you going to do next?! Key our cars on the way out?” referring to the fact that that was the last battle for that night’s gaming session.

Temple has a lot of good quotes really. One day I’ll perhaps post them here for posterity.