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 »]]> This is a personal playtest using the 6d6 Core System using the One Shot adventure Outbreak! by 6d6rpg.com.

The 6d6 core rules are available for free from the publisher’s wiki pages and a pdf and hard copy are available for purchase along with other rulesets that expand the basic core system and other adventures.

Disclaimer:  I do have a reviewer’s access to the system but for this playtest I am only using the publicly available materials that you can obtain freely yourself.  I have no personal or fiscal relationship with the publisher/developer. 

Brief System Synopsis - 

I go into the system in a little more depth here but to sum up, each character/creature/challenge in the world has a list of resources at their disposal which they use in various combinations to perform actions in the world.   The resources can be combined in any way that makes sense and are generally in the form of small cards forming a resource deck.  At any given time each character can only have 4 cards ready to use plus any cards that have the Static keyword which just means they’re always available.  Once a resource is used it can be put back into the deck, discarded or rotated to indicate it’s used.

On a character’s turn they can move up to two cards from their resource pile back into their readied resources.  To put it another way, a warrior in a fantasy setting might have his sword out, his shield ready, his armour on and ready sprint at an attacker or dodge out of the way at the start of combat.  He might also have a bow or a war cry or shield bash or charge or retreat ability but right now he’s focused on attack with his sword and needs a moment to shift gears and plan for something else.  That’s where the moving cards back and forth come in.

The cards or resources as I like to call them are the hit points, skills, abilities, feats, attributes and equipment of other systems, they’re just not on a character sheet because it’s easier to arrange and combine them as small cards.   The cards can be virtually any fairly focused ability that you can think up.  Dodge, Piercing Shriek, Fangs and Claws, Defender of the Innocent, Smashing Blow, Longbow, Smith and Wesson .40 Pistol.  They’re almost trait/aspect like in their scope if you’re familiar with various Fate based systems that use those.  You’re free to be as creative as you want to be to create your character.

Hopefully this playtest narration will help this all to become clear as the system is really very simple.

I have a general system of color coding for highlighting playtest documentation.  Blue text is mechanics discusions, red text is where I deviate from the default, maroon text is narrated/read aloud text and grey/italics is for notes, typically on the mechanics of a player’s decision.

Setup - 

Rather than follow the recommend party makeup for 3 players as outlined in the module,  the players chose from the provided pre-gens with Mary being encouraged to be taken.

I’m using my own read-aloud text although basing it loosely on the published material.

Additionally I’ve modified the three published characters we’re using by adding/removing resources from them to roughly fit the 60 point standard character buy-in.

The three characters resources are as follows (after modifications) -

Axel Ried – Cage Fighter
Resources – Speed 1d6+1, Toughness 1d6, Brawn 1d6, Spite 1d6, Self Confidence 1d6, Self 1d6, Five Winds Stance 1d6, Five Winds Strike 1d6+1, Five Winds Expertise 1d6, Five Winds Block 1d6, Five Winds Step 1d6, Jump 1d6, Dodge 1d6, Sprint 1d6.

Clint Harrison – U.S. Army
Resources –  Brawn 1d6, Manual Dexterity 1d6, Memory 1d6, Faith 1d6, Society 1d6, Shotgun Expertiese 1d6, Precise Shot 1d6, Protect 1d6, Search 1d6, Follow Up 1d6, Track 1d6, Alert 1d6, Point Blank Shot 1d6

Mary Mallon – Creepy little runaway girl
Resources - Distinctive Looks  1d6, Faith 1d6, Cunning 1d6, Diminutive 1d6, Creepy Stare 1d6, Search 1d6, Scramble 1d6, First Aid 1d6, Alert 1d6, Escape Artist 1d6, Hide 1d6, Scientific Prodigy 1d6, Out of Harms Way 1d6, Piercing Shriek 1d6

Opening Scene - 

We focus on a group of survivors of a zombie outbreak that happened only hours earlier.  Fleeing in a city bus ahead of the crazed killing and brain eating going on in the city, they escaped just in the nick of time, the bus busting through small but every growing packs of the infected creatures that were swarming the city, biting and chewing everything in their path.  No one knows how or why but the early reports indicated that the scene was repeated all across the nation before they lost contact on the bus.  The cell towers are jammed or down and once outside the city they’ve been cruising down the highway toward a destination they’re not really sure about, just that behind them lies death and ruin. 

We open with a view in a bus on an American highway.  It’s a desolate area with nothing to be seen but wooded rolling hills on either side.  There are some disturbing reddish brown stains on the front of the bus and trailing down the sides in long smears.   We zoom in closer and the camera cuts to an interior shot showing several pale faced figures with varying degrees of fatigue and terror in their eyes as they sit in silence watching the rolling hills roll on by in the deepening dusk outside.  

The weary looking driver tries again to find something useful on the radio when there was a burst of static and then a voice blasted out, everyone jerking in their seats and a small shriek escaping from the girl dressed as a cheerleader near the  front of the bus. 

“…repeat, this is Mad Mikey here from KZMB 95.6 the zombie radio station. [hysterical laughter] Man who’d of thought our call letters would be a serious ass case of what you call it, foreshadowing.  Zombie radio indeed…. [hysterical laughter that trails off to gasping breathing for several seconds]  Okay okay, man up Mike, man the hell up.  Okay good people, what I’m about to play you is a broadcast feed straight from the FEMA folks.  Listen my children of the night, this shit’s bound to be important and helpful.”

The DJ cuts out and the sound of a what can only be a large room filled with muted but anxious conversations in the background comes on.  Cutting over the chatter is a heavy baritone voice with a professional calm, one used to command - 

“People of America, please remain calm. My name is General Koby Bryce of the U.S. Army and I’m speaking to you from a shelter in Nevada.  We know that most of you have lost families and friends.  We know you’re hurting, you’re scared and things are looking bleak.  I want to assure you that all branches of the government are still intact, Vice President Clinton is safe in the same shelter I’m at and President Jackson is in flight on Air Force 1 with many leaders of our government.  I want you to know that we’re moblizing our forces against the disaster we are facing now.  I urge you to find what supplies you can and seek shelter and wait out this storm we’re facing.  If you must travel then do so in small groups.  The… infected are attracted to noise and movement and the larger the group the more noise they cause.   If you see anyone acting in a erratic or hostile way, do not engage them unless you absolutely must.  No matter if they were a friend, loved one or your neighbor.  Once they are…infected they are your friends and family no longer. 

If you are attacked then know that only major head or spinal trauma will stop them.  If their saliva or blood enters your skin through a bite or cut or scrape then you are assuredly infected and I urge you to consider your fellow Americans and move away from them as fast as you can.  An infected person can start displaying… symptoms within as little as 10 minutes of being infected.  

Again, I urge you to find a place of shelter  from this storm where you can wait out this challenge we’re facing.  I can assure you that as ever America will step up and deal with this disaster as we have with every other issue we’ve faced in our countries history.   Be safe and God bless. [.....dead air......] People of America, please remain calm.  My name is General Koby…”

The signal cuts off and the previous voice, obviously a professional radio announcer comes back, “That’s some crazy ass shit ain’t it folks.  Oops I hope the FCC’s not listening or I’m about to lose my license.  But you know what?  I think we’re so far fucked that losing my broadcaster’s license is so far down my list that cutting my toenails ranks higher.  And I had a mani-pedi last week.  No just kidding, I’m all man baby.  Anyway, if anyone’s left alive out there listening, this is Mad Mike, aka Michael Harding and I’m kinda trapped in the radio station at the moment with those fucking zombies outside trying to get in.  If anyone happens to fly by in a helicopter I’d surely appreciate a lift.   Did you guys and gals love how the M.I.C. never used the Z word?  If it walks like a zombie, bites like a zombie and stinks like a zombie then for fucks sake call it a …[static]…  Am I right…[static]… right?  Can I…[static]… an amen…[static]…”

The radio voice fades off as the bus starts to descend a hill and the driver leans over to try to find another station.  Seated near the front the cheerleader jumps up and points off to the side excitedly, “There’s lights over there, I see a house!  I see…”

A loud “What the fuck!” cuts her off as the driver of the bus swears and the whole bus shudders as he yanks hard on the steering wheel trying to swerve to avoid the young girl standing in the center of the highway dressed in nightclothes and holding a ragged stuffed bear.   The bus jerks and shudders and tilts, going up on its side and chaos ensues as everyone inside is flung about.  The shriek and groan of tearing metal fills the air as the buss punches through the safety rail and the slope of the ditch threatens to send it falling completely on it side.  From the darkness an ancient oak tree looms and smashes into the front corner of the bus and the sound of it scraping down the side of the bus is nails on chalkboard magnified a hundred fold.  

Game Mechanic Time - 

As a narrative challenge, per the module at this point every character chooses up to four of their cards/resources that might be able to bring to bear on this particular problem in an error to avoid the members of the group taking damage.   A tactical challenge has more involved rules as to what resources are readied or not.   To get the Resistance to success or target number the players need to beat I’m going to roll 2d6 for each player.  In this case 3 of them (the remaining NPC’s are sadly going to perish from the wreck).  I get a 5,5,6,3,3,5  for a total of 27.  

I’m using random rolls based on atmospheric noise for the curious, which are about as true random as we’re likely able to get right now. 

Mary (little girl) chooses to use – Diminutive+Scramble+Alert+Out Of Harms Way, all resources that would help her to avoid the bus bearing down her.  She gets a 5,6,1,1 for 13.
Note that this doesn’t necessarily mean she avoided the bus, this is a group roll so everyone has to contribute and everyone potentially suffers as a result of group failure. 

Mary: “I wasn’t expecting a big ol’ bus right now but I’m paying attention and I’m a small target!  I dodge and scramble out of the way trying not get hit by it.”

Clint (army officer) is going to use his Brawn+Alert for 2d6.  The rest of his resources don’t truly apply although one might make the case that manual dexterity might give him an edge in grabbing onto something… Okay when in doubt GM’s should err on the side of yes, he’s going to add Manual dexterity to get a 3d6 roll.  He gets a 2,6,6 for 14.  

GL: At this point between them the two characters have garnered a 27 which equals the target number so things are looking pretty good, it’s unlikely that the last player is going to somehow roll a negative number…

Clint: “Son of a bitch!  I spot the girl through the window right as the driver starts his NASCAR imitation and grab hold of whatever I can and hang on tight.”

Alex (cage fighter) looks at his abilties and hauls out  Speed+Brawn+Toughness for 3d6+1.  He gets a  3,3,5 (4+1) or 11. 

Alex: “I grab the hand rail and curl up into a ball so nothing vital gets hurt, I’m used to taking a beating.  Not that I lose of course.”

Together they scored a 38 well over the 27 they needed to get so they emerge unscatched aside from bruising.   If they’d of failed their roll then the amount they failed it by would have been turned into damage in blocks of 4 point wounds which would have been assigned out at random to the PC characters per the direction in the module. 

Narration - 

The bus grinds and shivers to a halt with the screech of metal!  As the Alex and Clint untangle themselves from the carnage a horrible site meets their gaze.  The driver and cheerleader both are nowhere to be seen and the front windshield of the bus is gone.   The old woman has had her head almost completely severed by a tree branch that punched through a window.  The good ol’ boy has a pipe shaped dent in his forehead where it met one of the grab bars with a little too much force, his eyes are open but sightless and blood streams from his nose.  Near the middle of the bus the older woman is crumpled in the aisle, her head bent sideways on her neck.  

Outside the little girl raise up from her crouch and turns to look down the road toward the bus where it finally came to a halt at a slant on the edge of the highway. 

Clint: “Well if this ain’t just about the icing on the cake.  Frickin’ zombies back the way we came and us stuck here on a highway with a FUBAR bus.  If that driver isn’t dead I’m going to kill him!”

Alex: “Yeah.   Oh gross!  I jump up on the seat as the blood from the headless woman flows past on the incline.  That’s just nasty.”

Mary: “I walk toward the bus.  Hello?  Is anyone in there?”

Clint: “Hearing that, I look out the window, does the girl look like a zed?”

Game Leader: “No, perfectly normal looking.  She’s wearing sleep clothes, loose cotton pants and shirt that are covered with Spongebob images and tennis shoes (or trainers as they say over there) oddly enough and a heavy gold cross.  She’s carrying a teddy bear.”

Alex: “Let’s see how bad things are, I’m going to check everyone and see if they’re as dead as they appear and also try to scrounge up whatever supplies we can find.”

Clint: “Yeah, I’ll go outside and check on the driver and cheerleader who I assume are both dead since they’re not players, meta game and all, make sure the little girl is okay and also check out the damage to the bus.”

Game Leader: “Okay what are you going to use for your various tasks?  The people are obviously dead, no rolls  necessary.  Outside you find both the driver and girl dead from hitting the road while traveling at a high rate of speed.”

Clint: “Hmm I don’t have a lot here.  Could I use Memory?  I’ve worked on cars before.”

Game Leader: “Hmm sure.  And you can add a Pseudo Card as well for another 1d6 as your basic intellect.”

Mechanics Break: 

Pseudo Cards are a catch all type of card.  In a tactical situation a character has to spend Flow to add a pseudo card and has to have a least some justification for being able to add it.  Pseudo cards cover all the things that a character doesn’t have specific cards/resources for that’s innate to the character.  Making a strength roll?  Add a pseudo card.  Happen to have Brawn as well?  Then combine it in there. 

But Dennis why would you ever not add pseudo cards to a roll?  The answer to this you definitely would in a narrative situation most of the time.  But in a tactical situation, they cost Flow which is used for other things so you have to weigh whether adding a pseudo card is worth the cost as opposed to using it for something else. 

Clint: “Okay cool.  Working from my experience with cars I assess the damage?”
Note: The player rolls his Memory+Intellect (Pseudo card) for 2d6 and gets a  4.  The Resistance to beat is a 5 that he needed to know just how bad off the bus is.  To know that the gas tank is fixable is a 7+ per the module.

Game Leader: “There’s a lot of damage to the side but other than the obvious stuff you just don’t really know how bad it is.  There’s a big pool of fluid spreading out from under the bus though which you can plainly see and kneeling down you see that what can only be the fuel tank has been ripped open from the impact and the last bits of diesel fuel are spattering out onto the highway.”

Alex: “Okay I’m going to use my… Hmm I, got nothing helpful there, I guess I’ll just use a Pseudo die to search the bus for valuables.”
Note: The player rolls a  3.

[Playtest note here - Per the documentation it simply says, "on a successful search check there is a possibility of finding blah blah but doesn't indicate what value would constitute a successful search.  In perusing the core system I was unable to find any clarity on that.  Bringing me back to one of my nitpicks that there isn't such a list of recommendations in the system as to values to use for basic simple, moderate, hard type skill tests.  

I'm going to argue the point with myself and say that the average of 1d6 is an easy resistance check, the average of 2d6 is a moderate one and the average of 3d6 is a hard one and the average of 4d6 equals a extreme challenge.  This results in values of 4, 7, 10, 14 (3.5 rounded up to 4, 7, 10.5 rounded down to 10 since the module uses 10 in some places and 14) as a basic table.  YMMV.]

Game Leader: “You can come up with  a few bottles of water and a small daypack covered in signatures and flair that holds a pink cell phone, a pair of pom poms, and a math and biology book. As you can remember, most of you were just happy enough to get out of the city seconds ahead of the raging swarms of zombies.  Packing for a trip was a pretty distant second thought.”
Note: The player failed the arbitrary easy roll of 4+ with his pitiful little three. He gets nothing cool and likes it!

Alex: “Right well, I join soldier boy outside.  Yo, dude, what’s up?  How bad we talkin’?”

Clint: “I give him my damn civilian look of condescension.  I’m going to lie, a bit, ‘It’s not too bad but we’re going to need tools.  What’d you find?”

Alex: “I hold up the girlie pack and toss it at him. ‘ Here, just your style champ.  Some water and a pretty pretty princess phone.’”

Clint: “Seriously son?  That’s the best you came up with, a bottle of water and a cell phone?  Who were you planning on calling?  Your mamma? She ain’t gonna be much help in the middle of a goddamn zombie apocalypse now is she?  Did you consider checking the outside storage bins?”

GL: “Nice one, take a 1d6 context bonus and channeling R. Lee Ermey and search yourself.”
Note:  Personal philosophy at play here, player does or says something I find cool, they get a bonus in some fashion.

Clint: “Okay, pseudo-card for my natural intelligence plus my Search ability plus the bonus.  I’m smart enough to know they keep the luggage in bins you only get from the outside so I start opening everything I can find that has a handle or key latch.  I check the driver for keys if any of them end up locked.”
Note: Clint rolls 3d6 and has a 2,5,1 or 8.    Again this is an easy roll so 4+ because it’s not like they’re hidden but finding the findable stuff will require a bit of luck.

GL: “Clint with a methodical search you uncover some a few pieces of luggage, probably unclaimed, containing clothing and nothing of any obvious use but tucked into the engine compartment is a long heavy tire iron.  The tire iron will function easily as a weapon and grants a 1d6 with the keyword Rotate.  In the broken tree parts you also uncover a usable tree branch that works as a 1d6 but as a ad hoc weapon lacks the Rotate keyword so if you use it, it goes into your deck.  ”

Mechanics Break – Resources that have the Rotate keyword, when they’re used they remain in your ‘on deck resources’ aka Dynamic Pool and rotate back at the start of the player’s turn.   This saves the player from having to spend Flow to move the card back from their deck into their dynamic pool.  And allows them to use it more than once on a turn as they can spend Flow to un-rotate it.  This applies more when the characters are in a tactical scene than a narrative one like this one.
House rule –  I’ve decided that for my own sense of balancing game play to arbitrarily increase the buy cost of any card that affects Flow by 50%.  So a 4 point card with Rotate costs 6 points.  Although in this case the tire iron is a free item as loot and the characters don’t have to pay for it for this session although to keep it, they’d have to add it to their character using buy points for my gaming table. 

Additionally you can simply assign some flat random chances as Resistances, using 1d6 for easy, 2d6 for moderate etc. 

Note I was tempted to add in some road flares because it would be cool to use them as a weapon but they’d probably be of little use realistically (if that word can be used here) against zombies and it would of course adjust the balance of the module as written to add resources like that.  And I’m honestly not sure if anyone still uses such things in these days of universal cell phones and LED flashers and the like. 

Clint: “‘Here Gorgeous George, have a stick.’  I toss him the tree branch.  I keep the tire iron for myself.  I stuff some extra clothes into the day pack and put it on. ”

Mary: “I’m hungry.”

Clint: “I kneel down by her, ‘Honey why the he…ck are you out here alone?  Where are your parents? How old are you?’”

Mary: “I’m 8 but I’m smart for my age.  My granny had me tested.  The doctor was going to have me retested cause he thought I was cheating.  Cheating is bad, everyone knows that.  *sniffle* I don’t have any parents, it was just granny and me.  The zombies came and they beat on the door for a long time and then it broked down and they came in.  Granny gave me this magic amulet and said it would protect me and it did.  The zombies killed her and let me go.  They were scared of the amulet and just let me walk out like vampires in the Lost Boys movie.”

Alex: “No shit? I look at this amulet!”

Clint: “What a humanatarian.  I check the girl out, she’s not been bitten or hurt?”

GL: “She’s got a number of scratches and abrasions on her, especially her arms, it looks like she lost a fight with a blackberry thicket recently at the least.”

Clint: “Hmmm.  I keep my tire iron handy and see if I can determine if they’re bite marks or not.  I’m going to use Society and a psuedo.  The society is based on my army training, we all get basic medical.”
Note: This is a valid use of the Society resource that Clint has in my opinion so he rolls 2d6 and gets… a 4+6 = 10.

House Rule: I believe I’d be very tempted to… okay I would definitely take a leaf from Barbarians of Lemuria and give every character a card with their most important or recent  profession on it.  In Clint’s case it would be “Army Career”.  These would be for things that were more information than pure combat.  Perhaps the player could choose to take either two professions at 1d6 or one profession at 1d6+2 with the understanding that they should be different enough that it would be unlikely that both professions could ever apply to the same roll.  

This is not a function of the pseudo-cards RAW which are intended to be used for basic abilities based on a character’s racial or physical/mental abilities and doesn’t indicate they’re used for things like a character’s life experiences or history. 

For the curious, I’ve spent the last 8 months at the time of this posting writing a game system using my free time and there’s simply no way I can not read through a system and not play back seat designer with it.  That doesn’t mean the original system is ‘wrong’,  just that I have a need to tinker.  I’m never not in ‘design’ mode with a game system any more as a result. 

GL: “You check her out and nothing seems suspicious, they’re all small scratches caused by thorns or abrasions from falling.  Alex the amulet doesn’t appear to be anything unique.  You’ve seen similar ones before many times, it’s a medium sized golden crucifix with the vertical bar about the length of your little finger.  It’s getting too dark to see it great detail but you don’t feel anything odd about it.”

Alex: “Weird.  And you say the zombies just left you alone when you showed them this?”

Mary: “It was around my neck, my granny put it there right before the door busted down and said it would protect me.  I closed my eyes when I saw what they were doing and then walked out the door.  I bumped into one of them on the way out, it was cold and felt funny but it didn’t bother me none.”

Clint: “I exchange a look with Alex and indicate we should maybe step back and talk about it.  I set the girl down on the steps into the bus and give her the pink phone to play with and tell her we’re going to go look at the bus engine.”

Mary: “Can I use my scientific prodigy to come up with some comment about the bus’s condition?”

GL: “Sure, it fits the character, a child that knows far more than a child her age would. It’s not an easy test for you though, so I’ll set it as a 7.”

Mary: “Okay Scientific Prodigy plus a psuedo card for intelligence.  Drat, I got an 6.  Okay never mind.  I play with the phone.”

Clint and Alex  (roleplay based on hints/backstory provided by the GL): 

“Shit dude, what do you think is up with that story?” Alex asks glancing back at the little girl.

“Imagination I’d say.  Maybe she dreamed the whole thing, you saw those things. You see them give a crap about crosses?  They swarmed after everyone and everything.”

Alex shook his head, “I don’t know man, I think there’s something off about her.  I’ve always been good at reading people, part of why I’m 45 and 2 in my career.  And the two were just bad ass sumbitches.”

“Well she’s not bitten and if she was around a zombie, I’d expect a nibble or three.  I had something else I wanted to tell you.  That broadcast by General Kirby, I’ve heard of him.  You heard the way he kept using the word storm?  That’s a code, meant for officers of a certain rank.  It means the shit’s hit the fan hard and units are supposed to take independent action to secure their locations by whatever means necessary unless they have direct orders through their chain of command.”

Mary: “Looks like they’ve gone to bed.”
Note: Mary made a Search + Awareness roll and noticed that the lights in the house in the far distance were now out.  Note that I’m going to intermix a pseudo card as what it stands for, in this case natural awareness.

GL: “You two check and those house lights you spotted right before the crash are indeed out.   You have a rough idea of where the house was but with the crash,  in the darkness and everything else going on you’re no longer sure of the exact position.

 Alex: “Dude, no godd… no way in heck I’m trotting my ass through the woods in the dark when there are zombies about.  Especially with zombie grandmothers that turn out the lights.”

Mary: “Oh that’s not my house.  We live over that way. I point toward where I think I came from.”

Clint: “So it’s probably not zombies then, I don’t think lights would be something a zombie might think about.  That sounds like someone trying to not attract attention.”

Alex: “Hmm you might be right sarge.  One way or another they probably have a car, a way out here.”

Clint: “It’s major, not seargent but keep it simple.  My name’s Clint Harrison.”

Alex: “Alex “The Punisher” Reid.  I strike my signature pose for him.  Not ringing any bells?  Crap I must not be as famous as I thought.”

Clint: “Yeah, the woods in the dark is bad enough, adding zombies just makes it more so.  Let’s make the assumption that access to the house is from this highway which means that an access road should connect to it.  The question is, which direction? I’m going to use Memory + Awareness to see if I remember seeing a driveway back the way we came.
 Note: I consider it and assigns a resistence of 4 for Clint although to keep the suspense up,  I’m not going to tell him what the Resistance for the roll is.  But  as someone with army training and in a hostile environment I thinks that such a character is going to be paying attention to their surroundings.  Clint rolls a 1+4 and gets a 5, making the roll.

GL: “You don’t remember passing any such entrance.”

Clint: “Okay so it’s ahead of us then.  Assuming I made the roll…  Whatever let’s saddle up and get moving.”

Alex: “Wouldn’t it be better to wait in the bus for morning?”
Note: Player makes the smart decision and I give him a free 1d6 that he can use for any situation later on.  The idea is to reward players for thinking about what’s going on, rather than reacting.  

Clint: “It would make better tactical sense but we can use our cell phones as flashlights if we need to and I want to get to a land line and possibly some news as quickly as possible.  I’m worried that we might get there too late.  And with that corner of the bus busted up, we can’t close that door so someone’s going to have to play Horatio all night watching it.”

Mary: “I’m still hungry.”

The players gather up the stuff they’re going to take which isn’t much.  Alex is carrying the stout tree branch and Clint has the tire iron.  They decide to walk abreast keeping Mary in between them and head off down the road.  I make a bit of a chance roll, just a odds/evens check on one dice to see if either of the men have a ‘flashlight’ app on their phones and as Fate would have it both do.

The players ready their dynamic pools at this time based on the situation they expect, in this case, trouble.  They end up with the following Dynamic and Static pools -

Clint: Brawn 1d6+1, Manual Dexterity 1d6, Tire Iron 1d6, Alert 1d6 in his Dynamic Pool and Protect 1d6 and Follow Up 1d6 in his Static pool.

Alex:  Speed 1d6+1, Toughness 1d6, Dodge 1d6, Five Winds Strike 1d6+1 for Dynamic and Five Winds Stance in his Static pool.

Mary: Diminutive 1d6, Cunning 1d6, Scramble 1d6, Alert 1d6 as her Dynamic resources and Piercing Shriek 1d6 and Out of Harm’s Way 1d6 as her Static resources.

The utter stillness is a bit distracting, there’s no wind and the woods on either side are quiet.  You have cell signal but all you get is a fast busy when you try and connect, the same as the last few hours.   They do provide a small circle of light around you which helps keep the dark at bay somewhat. 

About a quarter mile, maybe a little more down the road you do indeed find a turn off with a mailbox by the highway.  The road is made of crushed gravel and the name on the mailbox reads The Smiths.  

The road curves back and forth up the hill, what you can see of it before it’s obscured by the heavy woods. 

Sticking to the road you follow it up, the crunch of your feet on the gravel mixes with the occasional skittering of fallen leaves as the occasional bunny or squirrel moves around. 

Mechanics: At this point I look at their resources and then have Clint make a Track+Awareness+Alert,  Mary make a Alert+Awareness and Alex make an Awareness checks, I don’t tell them what the check is for, just what dice they need to roll.  Because this is a narrative roll, it doesn’t matter which cards they have in their pools, they can use anything in their deck.

The mystery helps with the suspense and also helps obfuscate what a secret roll might be for in the future.   Clint gets an 8, Mary a 7 and Alex a 5.  The test is a 7 so only Clint makes a certain connection about animal movement and nocturnal habits.  This is not in the as written module but something I added. 

GL: “Clint you find it odd that there are animals moving about at night, typically the small game you’ve spotted is sleeping at this time of day.”

Clint: “Yeah I imagine why they’re moving about.  I alert Alex.”

“The road continues upwards, cutting back and forth and shows signs of car tracks as well it’s been maintained fairly well.  Overhead the moon beams mostly full and provides a deceptive blue gray light on everything, the shadows lay deep under the trees and your vision doesn’t penetrate far into them.”  

Mechanics: At this point I have them all make a basic Awareness check as this is the start of a tactical encounter they’re limited to their readied resources.  Clint and Mary both get a 2d6 for their basic Awareness through pseudo cards+Alert and Alex only gets the basic awareness or 1d6.    A zombified hunter is about to lurch out onto the road looking for a snack.  Per the module it gets a single 1d6 due to it’s safety orange vest.

The rolls are – Clint: 4, Alex: 1, Mary: 5 and the Zombie gets a 5.   Since ties go to the Resistance side (with one exception we’ll get to in a bit) the group failed to notice the zombie.

“The bushes near the road suddenly start to shake and then a person pushes through them and starts to move toward you.  Its about 25′ feet away and the first thing you notice is it’s wearing a orange safety vest.  Whether it’s a man or woman you’re not sure.”

GL: Okay let me have your initiative cards, a quick shuffle and Clint you go first.

Mechanics: Note that as written initiative has no modifiers other than narration and surprise.  Everyone has an equal chance to go first.   Also initiative order is not known in advance.  The cards are displayed one at a time and that person’s turn is dealt with completely before revealing the next card so the players do not know when during the order the non players may act.  A player can choose to delay their turn pending some other event though.  They can also spend the turn doing ‘nothing’ which grants them an extra Flow for the purposes of changing out their readied resources. 

Clint: “I shout at it!  Stop moving or I’ll shoot!  I just want to see if it reacts at all, a zombie won’t, a person should pull up a bit.  I’ll pull Mary behind me and heft my tire iron in preparation.  In other words I’m going to delay and see what it does.”

Zombie: “The figure lurches unsteadily forward cutting the distance between you in half.  It’s arms come up making grasping motions and that bone chilling moan that’s become all to familiar cuts through the silence of the night.”
Note: The zombie uses its one Flow to move 3 squares.  

Mechanics: The Zombie has two resources readied in its Dynamic Pool, Zombie Hug and Chow Down.  Zombie Hug causes the target to lose one Flow on their next turn and it Rotates so it doesn’t get moved out the Dynamic deck.  Chow Down is a basic 1d6 resource and is moved back to the deck after it’s used.  The Zombie has 1 Flow though so it can move Chow Down back into its hand once it’s used but it also needs Flow for movement.   Hopefully this becomes clearer in a minute.  

In its static pool it only has Undead Toughness but it’s persistent and static so it’s always available. 

This is intended to be a weak encounter so the zombie isn’t fully prepped.  Given that the players have two flow per turn, even if they mosey they can move 6 squares to the zombie’s 3 (30′ to the zombies 15′ for those that dislike squares but squares are what I use typically to describe things where one sqaure equals shockingly enough, one square on the tactical map)

A fully prepped zombie would potentially have, in addition to Zombie Hug and Chow Down, Toughness (different than Undead Toughness) and Spite as options for it’s dynamic pool.   These cards though are available to it. 

Because movement is based on Flow and zombies only have a single flow they can only move once on their turn.  In addition they’re limited to a walk which is three spaces. 

One thing I’m not sure I agree with and I had this same problem with Savage Worlds is that non-walking movement is random.  You can choose to run, by using Flow as a movement and roll a 1d6.  This has the result that 1 in 3 attempts to run, you’re going to be moving slower than your walk speed.  While that certainly makes the decision to walk or run a tactical one, it also lends a certain keystone cops to such systems where 33% of the time they trip and fall which is just a fairly high percentage.  I’d be much more inclined I think to make a run type action 1d6+1 so that only on a 1 in 6 chance are you going to move slower than if you’d of just walked. That’s a 16% chance to stumble which while still high (I don’t know about you but I rarely stumble and fall when moving from a walk to a run) it is more reasonable.  But for this playtest I’ll play it RAW.

Clint: “Okay, I’m going to go off delay and move toward it while we still only have one to deal with.  I’m going to use a Flow to move 2 squares as a walk, it’s only 10′ away now right?  Then I’m going to use Brawn+Tire Iron to attack for a total of 8.  I move up and slash out with the tire iron, going for its skull.”
Note:   The zombie uses its Undead Toughness for its defense and gets a 3, you beat it by 5.  It discards its Toughness which is a life card and is worth 5 life points.

GL: “You land a glancing blow on the skull snapping it to the side but the hunger in those cold dead eyes only fades a slight bit.”

Mechanics: Clint’s player now rotates the Tire Iron showing it’s been used and moves his Brawn out of his dynamic pool back to his deck.  The tire iron doesn’t move because it has the Rotate keyword.

Clint: “I use the follow through and smash it from the other side in a return strike.  I use my last Flow to untap the Tire Iron and use it again.  Only 1d6 but you never know.  A 4.”
Note:  The Zombie can continue to use its Zombie Toughness because its a persistent power which means it can be used over and over.   The Zombie gets a 2 so it takes 2 Damage.  It burns its Spite card which is worth 4 life points.  This leaves it with a single life card, Chow Down.  It’s hurting. 

GL: “The return swing rips off part of the zombies face revealing the bone underneath which is cracked now, its hunger for your  flesh does not seem to be diminished though.”

Mechanics: Characters can spend Flow any time they want during their turn.  So they can for instance spend 1 flow to untap a Rotated card or move a card they just used back into their hand from their deck.  In this case Clint could have spent Flow to move Brawn back into his hand, or swapped in something else but chose to use the Tire Iron twice.  Basically a character never wants to end its turn with unused flow if it can help it. 

Mary: “I’m not getting near that thing even though I know it’s not able to hurt me.  I step back a little bit to here and then I’m going to swap my Cunning out for Hide.”
Note: The player spent one flow as movement and the second flow to change cards in case she needs to run for it again.

Alex: “I  want a piece of this.  I move up, hmm it’s 4 away from me.  I add my Speed to my move die for 2d6. Holy crap, snake eyes?  You’ve got to be kidding me.  I spend a second Flow to mosey my ass over there.  Hmm I was going to go all kung fu on the zed but now I’m kinda limited to hitting it with my club.  I got a 3.”
Note: See what I mean about random movement?  This is a trained UFC fighter who tripped over his own feet from a standing start.  The zombie’s resistance is a 6 so the attack failed.  Because the Tree Branch doesn’t have Rotate it goes back into his Deck. 

GL:  ”You stagger through the loose gravel, catching a foot on a hidden rut.  A little shaken by your clumsiness you swing the tree branch, not the best weapon perhaps.”

Mechanics: Since everyone’s acted or chosen to not act the round is over and initiative cards are shuffled again.   This repeats for each round until the scene is over. 

Mary: “I’m first?  I’m good I think.  These two seem to have a handle on it.”
Note: Lacking any real offensive ability Mary’s player decides to sit this one out.  She could move up and use a pseudo card to hit the zombie with her fist perhaps but has less than even odds of hurting it and who knows, zed’s may think of children as veal and go after her.

Zombie: “Uhhhnnnggggg!”

GL: The zombie grasps out at you Clint with its Zombie Hug + Chow Down for a total of 2d6+1.  What are you going to resist with?

Clint: “Hmm, maybe I should brought back my Brawn rather than untapping the tire iron.  I’m going to try and shove the things head to the side as it tries to bite me using my Manual Dexterity.   I got a 6.  Sweet.”

Mary: “I scream loudly trying to distract the zombie!  A 2!”
Note: Mary’s player has a card with the Resistance keyword on it.  This means she can use it to aid someone else.   Unfortunately 6+2 is only an 8… 

GL: ”The zombie’s teeth close on your hand with force enough to break the skin!  You scream as the molars grind and bite down on the bones in your hand.”
Note: Unfortunately for Clint the zombie rolled a 9.  Clint is not only damaged but he’s suffering from the Zombie Hug which forces him to spend 1 Flow on his turn to get free.

Clint: “Aw hell.  Okay 1 points  of damage? 1 lousy point?! I discard my Society card which is worth 4 life points.”

Mechanics: Per the module Clint’s player now gets an Infection! card.  Periodically he has to roll a d6 for each such card he has.  If he rolls under a 4 on the die he loses one life card.  Regardless of success or failure he also gains another Infection! card.    As per the genre standard (discounting the T-virus) there is no cure once bitten.

A more experienced player would have probably made sure to use Flow to keep more than one defensive card in their dynamic pool for just such an situation like this where the damage brought to bear is more than a single die can likely deal with.  This is why we have playtest though, to get a feel of what works and what doesn’t. 

Clint: “My turn, I untap the tire iron for free at the start and I spend  flow to move Brawn back to my pool and another to break free of the zombie’s grab.   Then I use both to punch the tire iron through this damn things skull.  2d6 for a 7 total.  Crap.”
Note:  The Zombie resists with its Zombie Toughness  and gets a 2.  5 damage.   It discards its Chow Down to cover it and as that’s the last life card it has it expires. 

GL: “Your doom filled raged easily lets you slam the pointed end of the tire iron through the thing’s skull and it explodes out the back in a spray of pinkish grey gelatin like matter.  The zombie immediately stops moving and falls to the ground motionless.”

Alex: “Son of a… That means you’re one of them dude!  You’re a freakin’ dead man walking!”

Clint: “Shut it!  I use some of the clothing we brought from the bus to make a bandage for my hand.  Do I know for a fact that bitten equals turn into a zombie?”

GL: “You’re not really sure.  The movies always make it look that way.  But this isn’t the movies is it?”

Alex: “I back away from him.  We’re in narrative now right?  I start thinking about how I’m going to have to defend myself from him.  i.e. I rearrange my deck for maximum offense.

Clint: “Oh get real.  I feel fine.  Maybe the movies got it wrong.  Let’s keep moving, I want to reach that house before we run into any more of them.”

Alex: “Yeah yeah, how about you just walk out in front for now until we see what happens.  I don’t want you behind me.  And if you start feeling any sudden cravings for brains you make damn sure you let me know.”

Clint: “Oh whatever.  Come on.”  I move out making sure that Mary is between us.

Note: A few minutes later Alex’s player realizes they didn’t search the hunter but by then they’re almost to the top of the hill and don’t care to return in the dark. This costs them a few shotgun shells it was carrying.  This will come into play later.  Sadly. 

Mary: “I’m tired, can someone carry me?”

Alex: “Sorry sweetie, it’s not a good idea.”

Clint: “I can do it hon, come here.”

Alex: “Wait a minute there sarge.  What if you turn while you’re holding the girl?  You want to show up at the pearly gates with her in tow because you didn’t think it through?  You want that on your conscience?”

Mary: “What about you Mr. Alex? My feet hurt and I’m so tired.”

Alex: “It’s only a little farther.  You can make it.  And in case the sarge here turns in… gets sick I don’t want to be carrying you in case I need to… help him.”

Mary: “Hmmph.  Okay but I don’t like you very much.”

Alex: “That’s okay, you’d like me even less if, well never mind, let’s just keep moving.”

A wind picks up as the trek continues, blowing through the trees.  The sounds enough to cover the grating noise of the gravel under their feet.  A mixed blessing as it both hid the noise of their travel but also would hide the noise of anything else moving around in the woods. 

It’s with some relief the trio reaches the end of the driveway near the top of the hill and spot a house bathed in moonlight in a large clearing in front of them.   A large sprawling house with a fenced in backyard and two stories and a unattached garage.   There’s a thin line of light visible in the windows too faint to see from a distance.  Carried on the breeze are the sounds of singing or perhaps chanting. 

GL: “Anyone that wants can try an awareness check.  You can add in any music or faith related resources as well to try and identify the sounds.”

Mary: “Awareness plus Faith for me, a 5.”

Clint: “Awareness plus Faith for me as well.  Would Society or Memory work too?”

GL: “Memory would certainly work when combined with your Faith so sure.  Society… sure why not.”

Clint: “Okay 4d6 for a 11.”

Alex: “Umm, I’m just going to listen real hard I guess.  1d6 for a 4.”

GL: “Mary you recognize the noise as a hymn from a CD your grandmother used to listen to on her radio.  Clint you’ve heard it before as well.  It’s from a music CD called ‘My Life For Him’, a Christian medley of songs as sung by children, you’ve see the infomercial for it several times.”

Alex: “Let’s go see who’s home then?”

Gl: [Private note to Clint - "You find yourself getting easily irritated by small things."]

Clint: “Yeah just go knock on the damn door why don’t you?  That makes a lot of sense.  Idiot.”

Alex: “You okay?”

Clint: “Nothing, nothing, just stress.  Stay here with the girl, I’m going to see if I can spot anything.”

Alex: “Sure thing sarge.”

Clint: “It’s Major!”

Alex: “Whoa, take it easy, okay Major, you go on ahead, we’ll be here.”

Clint: “Grrr, okay I move up to the house, trying to be as quiet as I can be and try to get a look through the windows on the front porch.”

GL: “The wind covers the small sounds of your footsteps although as you step up on the porch the boards are slightly creaky.  Although the curtains have been closed, there are a couple of small gaps where you can get a partial view.  The front hall reveals a set of stairs on the left side leading upwards.  To the right is a pair of french doors, slightly ajar with a flickering light that you associate with television inside, probably the living room.   At the end of the hall is another door which doesn’t have a handle, probably a swinging door of some kind.  Moving to the right along the creaky porch you look through the front front room.

Someone with awful taste in paint decorated the place, it’s a noxious green color.  You can see a sofa and recliner, both well used and catch an angled glimpse of the tv which is showing a shot of a man standing with a large black book in his hand before a congregation, obviously a church setting of some kind, you can hear him speaking rather energetically about something.  An large arched opening on the far wall opens into dining area with another door visible on the far wall of that room.  Based on the size of the house that far door is probably to the outside.   Make an awareness check?  And then give me a Faith+Memory check.”

I changed the kitchen door at the end of the hall from a knob and latch, i.e. regular door, to a swinging door.  Makes more sense as to how the zombie cook got into the kitchen since it’s not smart enough to open doors and people just don’t close interior doors  in a house as a general rule unless they’re going to the bathroom.  And the real reason is it can cause some grief later on…

Clint: “A 1 and a 12″

GL: “Okay the volume is not high and the heavy curtains and double paned windows are muffling the broadcast quite a bit.  You recognize the setting and the man though.  It’s Brother Jacob’s Church of Eternal Salvation, a fairly popular televangelist.  They’re worth millions and even have their own satellite for broadcasting to their faithful.”

Clint: “I check down the sides of the building?”

GL: “To the right side the house runs back to a tall fence that encloses the backyard with a closed gate.  On the left side is a narrow walkway between the house and the garage closed with a gate.  The garage is closed.”

Clint: “I wave my cell phone at the other two, hopefully they’ll figure out that means I want them to come up.  We should have set up a signal beforehand.”

Alex: “Hey he’s waving his cell phone at us.  I bet that means he wants us to join him and not take it as a signal to run away.”

Clint: “Smart ass.”

Alex: “What’s up?”

Clint: “No signs of people but the TV is on with that jackass faith healer send me your money or you’ll burn in hell tv preacher.”

Alex: “Knock?  Or just go in?”

Clint: “I try the knob?  Okay it’s locked.  Okay you stand there and keep an eye through that side window.  I knock on the door.”

GL: “The heavy knocks echo in the house, you wait for several seconds but there’s no change or response.”

Clint: “Okay I jam the tire iron into the door jamb and pop the lock.  I’m going to use Brawn+Manuel Dexterity+the tire iron.  3d6 for a 15, nice.”

GL: “The lock has a resistence of 2d6+1, no way it can resist you, with a quick pop and splintering of wood the door pushes in.”

Clint: “Wait a few moments, no response?  Okay I move up to these doors here on the right that look into the living room?  Anything different than I saw from the outside?”

GL: “While you do have a better view from here, there’s nothing of note that you didn’t spot earlier.  You can see that a magazine rack stuffed with piles of scandal papers, the Moon, the Inquiry and similiar offerings.  The ones with 4 headed baby born in the Yucatan and Angelina’s tryst with Bigfoot.   On the TV Brother Jacob is beseeching those of his following to come to their complex and to bring their most valuable goods and it will insure that they will be saved in these end times that are upon us.”

Alex: “Can I see a remote?  I hate this crap and there has to be something useful on.  I look around for it.  Awareness of  5″

GL: “The remote resists your search with a 1d6 for a 3.  You find it where you’d expect to, down in the cushions of the couch.

Here’s another example of where the module simply lists “A successful search will find the tv remote” but doesn’t list what value constitutes a search.  Again this leads me to believe there is a standard system of values for this, I’m just not seeing it either through oversight or it not being in the documentation.  In this case, I decided to just use a resistance of 1d6 for each person that looked to make it more random and because it’s in the obvious spot, in the sofa cushions.  But having looked for remotes in the sofa before I know from person experience that it can be in there and you don’t find it at first and have to exhaust other locations before you come back. 

Alex: “Okay I flip through the channels, what’s on?”

GL: “A lot of ‘We’re experiencing technical difficulties.’ static screens.   On channel 55 is a service announcement with a ticker scroller and a countdown timer for the next live update which is counting down from 25 minutes right now.  The scroller is displaying common sense things, find a safe location, fill containers with water, take stock of your supplies etc.”

Alex: “Okay I leave it on that one for now.  What now boss?”

Clint: “I’ve been watching the hall and stairs while this has been going on, anything of note?  I’m using awareness and Alert.  Man I can’t roll for crap, a 2.”

GL: “No the house is pretty silent except for the TV, the occasional creak and groan as it settles a bit from the winds outside. Nothing ominous in and of itself.”

Clint: “Okay Alex, me and you in front and let’s check out that door at the end of the hall, probably the kitchen and then we can move upstairs and sweep the house.”

GL: “Okay stop.  Give me an awareness check.”

Clint: “Awareness plus Alert for a 8.”

Alex: “Awareness for a 1.  I don’t notice crap.”

Mary: “Awareness plus Alert for me too. 4″

GL: “Clint as you get within a few feet of the door you pick up a faint noise, hard to distinguish over the sound of the wind but its the sound of running water.  And a rythmic very faint knocking noise, the sound of somethng hitting wood.”

Clint: “I motion Alex to get on the left side of the door and put Mary behind him.  I move to the right side and using the tire iron I gently push the door open.”

GL: “Somethings about to happen, set up your pools please and hand me your initiative cards.”

Clint: Brawn, Manuel Dexterity, Alert, Tire Iron for Dynamic and Protect,  Follow Up for static.

Alex: Toughness, Brawn, Five Winds Strike, Five Winds Block as Dynamic and Five Winds Stance as Static

Mary: Cunning, Diminutive, Scramble, Alert as Dynamic pool and Out of Harms Way and Piercing Shriek as Static.

Note: The players at this point have determined that going all offense is an easy way to end up bitten and thus infected.  They’re switching to a small attacks to try and chip away at the zombies rather than take them out with one big hit.  This is actually a optimal strategy with 6d6 as I see it right now.  Because a target has to burn enough life points to cover the damage and each card is worth at least 4 points, you can cause them to lose a life card with a single point of damage from two attacks.  To do the same with a single attack you have to deal at least 5 points of damage.    Granted it takes time of course but having defense against the zombies is key. 

Additionally because you use up defenses that typically get burned and have to be pulled back on your next turn, multiple attackers can be seriously deadly compared to many systems because the first one makes you chew up your defenses and the rest essentially eat you alive.   I think it’s almost a requirement for any character to have at least one persistent card of some kind that can be used defensively, the obvious of course is armour.   But in this situation our heroes just haven’t had a chance to come up with anything like that. 

GL: “It’s a kitchen as you surmised.  High end wooden cabinets and a stainless fixtures with a center island and granite counter tops.  Standing on the far side of the island is a large woman with a chef knife chopping vegetables on the cutting board.  Only you can see she’s cut off sections of her fingers of her left hand and the island is covered in drying blood.  Her milky white eyes look up at the swinging door and a snarl crosses her face.”

Initiative is Zombie, Clint, Alex, Mary

The Zombie has in its pool: Spite, Chow Down, Zombie Hug, Chef’s Knife and Undead Toughness and in its deck Toughness.

Zombie: “The zombie lunges forward, covering the short space to the door and then grabs for Clint before he can react.  It tries to nuke the unlucky army major and combines Spite+ChowDown+Zombie Hug+ Chef’s Knife and gets a 13.”

Clint: “Well crap on a stick.  I try and fend her off with my whole arsenal.  Brawn+Manual Dexterity+Tire Iron+Alert.   An 11.  Crap again.

Mary: “I scream really loudly trying to distract the zombie! A 3!  That gives you a 14.”

Clint: “Sweet, beat it by 1.  As the she-bitch lunges at me, I grab the tire iron in both hands and push it between her jaws to keep her biting at me and then push her back a step.”

GL: “Awesome work.  Okay it’s Clint’s turn now.”

Clint: “I spend two flow to bring my Brawn and Manual Dexterity back up and untap the tire iron for free.  I’m going to bring the tire iron up and then slam it on her head.  A 3.”

Zombie: “The zombie resists with her undead toughness for a 1.  You deal 2 points of damage.  The zombie discards its Spite card worth 4.”

Mary: “I move my shriek back with a flow and delay.”

Alex: “I’m going to use my Five Winds Strike on it and do a jump kick to put my boot in its skull.  1d6+1 for a 6 total.”

Zombie: “Again it uses its undead toughness with a  2.  You deal 4 damage to it.  It burns it Toughness.”

GL: “End of the round and Alex you go first this time.”

Alex: “Okay I think we’re good, I’m going to use flow to get my strike back and then combine it with Brawn for a 2d6+1 strike.  8, not great but better than it can do.”

GL: “You’re right.  The best it can get is a 6.  No matter what it rolls it’s going to take damage and it only has one life card left.   With a sickening crunch your kick slams the zombie into the door frame and its head caves in.  That hungry look on its face goes away and it falls to the floor.

As the piercing echoes of Mary’s cry fade out, you hear a muffled thumping noise from upstairs, a moment later you hear a second from a different section of the floor.  The staggering lurching foot falls of someone injured.  Or perhaps no longer among the living.”

Note: At this time Clint makes an infection spread check.  He has one Infection! card so he has to roll a 1d6.  He rolls a 2.  As a result he has to discard one life card and burns his Faith.  He also picks up another Infection card.  The next time the disease ‘ticks’ he will roll 2 dice and have to beat a 6 or lose another Life card.

GL: “Alex, Mary, give me an awareness check please?”

Alex: “3″

Mary: “5″

GL: “Mary you notice that Clint isn’t looking so good.  He’s sweating even though it’s not all that hot and he’s a little pallid looking.”

Mary: “Mr. Army sir, don’t you feel good?”

Alex: “I take a look and then ease back a few steps.   WTF man, how you doing there?  You don’t look so hot.”

Clint: “I consider whacking him with the tire iron but refrain.   I point upstairs.  Let’s worry about that first okay?  I’m good for awhile longer.”

 …. Do our heroes survive this latest discovery of  the undead?  At what point is Clint going to turn?  Do they find a vehicle and get away?  Try playing the game yourself and write your own ending…

p.s. For the truly curious, Clint turned and Alex put him down but not before Clint bit Alex and infected him.  Leaving Mary all alone in the woods filled with zombies. 

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.

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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 'tension' factor of the various re-roll mechanics out there has been something that I've been considering off and on ever since reading an article by someone, the details of which escape me.

To sum it up, if a player has the ability to re-roll then any given roll loses it's immediacy/tension/pucker factor, whatever you want to call it. If they have a pile of bennies, fate points, hero chips, plot points etc ready and waiting to turn any given miss into a hit then it takes something away from those "I've REALLY gotta hit nail this roll this time or [insert something bad happens]" situations.

In LCA! I was (and maybe still am) going to allow the Rewrite mechanic to allow the heroes a re-roll of a missed skill check among other things.

But as of now I've changed it so that our heroes must decide before they roll to spend the Rewrite and by doing so, they get a +5 on their roll. For the math curious, the system I'm using, two rolls equals an average dice result of 5 higher than a single dice roll. They can stack the Rewrites up if they have them, so they could spend additional Rewrites to keep piling on the +5's for that single dice roll.

This allows the heroes to go a long way toward 'nailing that incredibly important shot' when they simply have to have it. But they might have made the roll anyway and just blew those Rewrites for nothing.

And Rewrites are important for many reasons, they mitigate damage, let the players change the scene to their advantage, make minor but impacting changes to the current storyline, gain soft advantages and in general have many uses aside from trying to do better at dice rolls.

Thus spending them on something you may not have needed them on adds in some tension to a dice roll that's otherwise missing.

And a little tension isn't necessarily a bad thing to have.

#KOC

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 »]]> I’ve been going through and working on the penalties and bonuses or handicaps and boosts as I’m calling them and trying to balance the checkbook so to speak and make them useful, meaningful but not onerous.

Right now they range from +/- 1 to 10 but typically they run out as a 1, 2, 3, 5 in general with 10′s being used for things like very easy tasks or trying to fight in complete darkness.

I believe in best case situations the ‘average’ character should succeed roughly 85 to 90% of the time.  That assumes high skill, no handicaps and quite likely some boosts involved.  Barring those -10′s coming into play the same character might drop as low as 40-50% success rate if they’re marginally skilled or if they have some handicaps going against them.   Without training in a skill the success rate is much more likely to be around 20%-25%.   Which is a reasonable spread I think.

In general I’m shooting for a 70-75% success rate for any given test for any given character trained in the underlying skill.  Note that success in combat doesn’t necessarily mean the attack was successful.  They still have to roll damage of course.

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 »]]> Obviously not a lot of awesome updates to post the last couple of weeks.  It’s all been minor cleanup on LCA! and working on the sample scripts.

I’ll be using the included Zombie Apocalypse script that will be included with LCA! as a general play test that I’ll podcast in the upcoming weeks.  Getting the group together is proving to be troublesome and on top of that I need to delay the test until the current project has run its course.

In addition Skyrim has captured a sizable portion of my free time the last week or so along with the holidays which is never good for productivity.

The Change Log  for the last few iterations, I change the revision every couple of days on average.  Just so you can see the pure ‘awesome’ changes that are being worked on.  Yes awesome was meant sardonically or ironically or even sarcastically.  Take your choice.

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 doing the math.

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.

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 »]]> Just a short video of my table in action.  I got the lasers calibrated this weekend.  Still needs some carpentry work to lock down the U channel that keeps any stray laser light from leaking off the edge of the table.

httpv://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sTe15HvXOw0

It’s based on Laser Light Plane technology or LLP and I’m using 4 x 850nm IR lasers, one in each corner that use a beam spreader to convert the laser dot into a 120 arc of IR light.   This is project just above the surface which is two sheets of polycarbanite and a sheet of vellum sandwiched between them as a projection surface.  I’ve tried other surfaces and broke ass cheap vellum is by far the best on the ‘reasonable’ side of things.   Sure you could go with the $40 a foot projection film/acrylics and get superiour results but on a cost effective basis I’ll take my $2 sheet of vellum any day.

When objects intersect the laser field, they’re first cut in half like in Resident Evil no wait, that would be cool but they’re not.  What really happens is the laser light hits the object and then reflects off it.  That reflected light shoots off the object and a good chunk of it goes down into the interior of the table where it’s picked up by a PS3 EyeToy camera with a custom lens and that has had the IR filter removed and a visible light filter added that filters out everything but the laser light.

This creates bright blobs in the camera view and a couple of pieces of software turn those blobs of light into something that act like mouse cursors.

The image is just Microsoft’s Surface Globe app that comes with their Surface SDK kit.

The primary use of the table should be pretty obvious.

Continue reading »]]> This is a review of “The New Death and others” by James Hutchings.

In the interests of full disclosure the copy was a review copy and I have no previous affiliation with Mr. Hutchings and no fiscal involvement with him or this book.

I was very quickly struck by an aura of familiarity after starting the book.  In short order I’d drawn connections between the author’s style and works of Harry Harrison, Spider Robinson and Steven Brust.   This is not a bad thing as you’re aware if you’re familiar with those authors.

The book is reminiscent of 1001 Arabian Nights in flavor although not form.  It is a series of short, some very short, stories and poems with a very punny thread surfacing time and again.  Many of the stories have a middle eastern color to them while others bring to mind the touch of an African folktale influence.

The stories range from decent to very good in quality, with some unusual and unexpected twists to them, the Face in the Hill was especially evocative and thought provoking for me.

As I said there’s a punny underlayment to a lot of the stories and some are outright groaners (riding the emotional rollercoaster) while others border on genius (emotional babbage). If puns are something you avoid like a bad case of herpes then you’ll probably not like many of the stories in this book.  But if Punday Night is something you’re familiar with you’ll find some delights in this book.

The technical quality of the writing is good, I didn’t notice many (or any that I can remember) obvious typos or grammatical issues. It’s obvious that someone did a very serviceable job proofing this book and didn’t just hit F7 in Word.

Overall I’d give it a very solid 7.5 out of 10 in my personal scale of which I have no 10′s and precious few 9′s.

You can check out the book at (and no I don’t get anything if you click those links):

http://www.smashwords.com/books/view/92126

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 »]]> I’ve decided to switch to using IR Lasers to make a LLP or Laser Light Plane style table.  I’m just unable to get IR LED’s to work the way I want them to due to the size of the table.

The LLP method should work and is cheap enough to experiment with to see if it does and if the experiment works then I can pick up a couple more frickin’ lasers to make it a fully functional massively multi-touch.

I’ve got a couple of 10mw IR lasers in the mail somewhere on their way to me that are in the 850nm range.  I could have gone with the cheaper 780nm lasers but I already have a camera that filters for 850 and 850 works better with ambient light and allows for lower wattage lasers.

I’m doodling with how to set them up so that they can be adjusted for pitch/roll/yaw and remain ‘locked’ in after finding the right setting.

If these work then I can also pick up a sheet of tempered glass to put on top of the table surface to use as the touch surface.  Glass is easier to clean and way less scratchable than arcylic is.

Continue reading »]]> A lot of the last week or so of LCA! work has been nothing more than clean up.  I had to re-org the document breaking it down into 5 sections because Google Doc’s was starting to choke seriously on the size of the whole document.  On the plus side it makes it easier to proof that way, perhaps not easier but makes it feel easier.

I’ve had a lot of clean up on top of the normal stuff due to the mechanics changes from 3d8 to 2d20.  I’m also at a bit of a decision point on what mechanic to use to refill the stunt points.  It was doubles which on 3d8 occured like 38% of the rolls.  But with 2d10 you have a whopping 10% chance to roll doubles.  Hmm what if I made 12=2′s.  i.e. if the last digit on teens would match the same single digits.   That would boost the rate a bit but how much?  I was also going to make rolling a 20 on either dice fill it to full.  So you have a 10% per round that you make a skill roll of getting a full load of stunt points.  But then the mechanic starts to get long and unwieldy.

By no means is the document finished but the mechanics are all in place.  I’ve continued work on the sample adventures, well at the last the classic fantasy one which is about half done.

Luckily I don’t have anyone pushing at me, “We paid you an up front fee!  We want results!”.   And my personal gaming, I’m a player in a heros campaign (so not my favorite system any more) so I don’t have any personal reason to push it.

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 »]]> Okay I’ve switched to rolling 2d20 for skill mechanics.  It’s an odd choice I know but it makes the math pretty on the back end and I like pretty math.   It also lets me fall back to a unified “Any skill roll on your turn takes a standard action” rather than “All skill rolls except in the case of duel wielding weapons”.   And its more likely that any given player will have 2 d20′s versus 3 d8′s.  And you can buy a bag of d20′s, but not a bag of d8′s.

Continue reading »]]> The last few days I’ve been trying to come up with an elegant percentile dice mechanic system for RPG’s.  By elegant I mean it works for everything, general, combat, opposed, attribute tests. There were some bullet points about percentiles I liked looking at the idea casually.

a) it’s obvious what your chances to succeed are (or is it? actually it’s not due to sliding impact)
b) it allowed for a nice way to show natural talent, your skill level could be the combination of your attribute and the training.
c) it provided more granularity (or does it? it doesn’t it actually decreases granularity to some extent because each percentage makes a big impact in the short term scale)

Percentile dice systems are a fairly uncommon method in RPG’s, I can think of three systems off hand that use them and they’re all old school.  Warhammer FRPG which had the oddity that your chance to hit had nothing to do with your target’s ability to not get hit.   Runequest (ugh).  And Call of Cthulhu (non-d20 of course).

I rewrote my combat simulator to use percentile dice.  In order to keep the evasion mechanic I decided that the attacker would have to roll equal to or under their skill value, this means they got a potential success.  The defender would then have to roll equal to or under their evasion skill (for now I just set it to have melee).  If both succeeded then whoever rolled higher ‘won’.

The rationale was that the person who had the broader skill would win more often.   This has the subtle effect though of defense tending to block critical hits whenever it blocked anything  rather than ‘normal’ hits which isn’t necessarily a bad thing.

I used levels of success in blocks of 20.  So if you rolled 20 under your skill you got an extra success, 40 under and 2 successes.

So anyway, I got the sim set up for that including penalties for taking trauma levels (using the existing stress/trauma damage system) and impairment i.e. getting hit adding a handicap penalty.

When I let it rip using skill levels of 60 (a nice blah success rate), I was surprised to find that my initial values were almost spot on at generating a 50/50 win rate.  I only had to drop the off hand penalty from 10% to 5%, leaving the dual attack penalty at 10% and ended up with a 51/49 win/loss.

But then things went bad fast.  What I found was that a 5% shift resulted in a 20% shift in win/loss ratio.   That’s right, a warrior with a 65 melee skill won 60% of the time versus a 60 skill.   The differential dropped as the percentages when higher due to the percentage of change going down.  i.e. at 60% a 5% is 1/12 gain.   At 70% a 5% boost is 1/14 gain etc.   But a mere 15% difference ended up with a 73/27 win/loss ratio.

That’s inherently broken to me and although I’m not aware of any modern system using a d% system to determine outcomes there are some older ones.

The problem with this, and why it’s so broken in my opinion is that a 15% spread between players is not only not going to be uncommon but expected.  This means that a player with a 60 and one with 75% fighting a monster with a 60, the first player will win roughly half the time.  The other one will win 3/4 of the time.   Not ‘too’ horrible.  But a player with only a 50% fighting a single monster at 75% is going to lose 85% of the time.  And that’s with only a 25% difference in skill.  Granted the decreasing boost continues to apply though and a 50/85 skill contest only changes the win/loss from a 85% win to a 90% win so 10% boost in skill results in a 5% win boost.

There are other problems as well.  Dropping the starting values to a 30 melee skill / 15 defense results in the 2handed weapon wielder winning 75% of the time.  The reason is due to the multiple action penalty and off hand penalties.  That 5% and 10% is a huge penalty when the base is 30% where as 60% it balances it perfectly.

This means that penalties are more penalizing the lower your skill while bonuses are less bonifying when your skill is high.

It’s just busted as far as I’m concerned.

The end result is that encounter balance and design will become extremely difficult, it’s Hero System Super difficult and force GM’s to fudge dice rolls or just watch their players walk all over the bad guys, which isn’t all that much fun, or TPK their players, which isn’t all that much fun.

So it looks like there may be a reason so few people other than old school designs use percentile systems, someone else has done the math.  I’m just posting it so other people don’t waste time on it.

The below image is the combat sim I wrote, it was originally to test some theories about the math in Savage Worlds and then another system using dice pools and then another system and so on.  Hence the various and sundry tick boxes and spinners that may have nothing to do with the current iteration.

Continue reading »]]> First draft of the Traps chapter in the adventuring section.

Mechanics -
Each trap will include the below data which is used to define the trap.  Some traps may include additional attacks listed as secondary, tertiary etc that typically only go off if the initial attack is successful but see the descriptions for any exceptions.  Any special features of the trap will listed at the end.Description: A description of the trap, including appearance, the trigger means
Stealth – The value that must be equaled or beaten to detect with Perception
Trigger – What the triggering conditions are that set the trap off.
Attack Skill:  What skill is used to determine if the trap
On Hit Effect: What happens when the trap goes off if it’s not plain damage.
Damage: The damage dice pool that is roll when the trap affects someone.
Disable- The skills and opposed values that can be used to disable the trap. Typically a critical failure will result in the user trying to disable the trap being affected by it.
Disable Effect: What happens when the trap is disabled.
Evasion:  How hard it is to hit something vital with an attack to disable it
Physical Defense: How hard it is to hurt the thing once you hit a vital part.
Trauma/Stress: How much trauma or stress the object takes from damage before it’s destroyed/disabled. Each device will have one or the other.  Trauma devices are harder to destroy obviously than ones that are destroyed by Stress.

20’ Pit Trap -
Description:  The trap is a chute roughly 10’ a side that drops away to a floor covered in rusted iron spikes roughly the length of a dagger.  Anyone who steps on the covering is subject to attack by the trap and any resulting effects.  The trap will reset immediately afterwards with the cover raising back into place to catch the next unwary passerby.   It cannot be opened from below without breaking the catching mechanics.
Stealth: 15
Trigger: A creature steps on to the top of the trap.
Attack: Melee 0
On Hit Effect: Target ends their move at the bottom of the pit.
Damage: Standard falling damage from 20’ (2d6)
Secondary Attack: Melee x 2 / Iron Spikes
On Hit Effect:  None
Damage: 2d6 damage
Disable:  Burglary vs 15, Mechanics vs 15
Disable Effect: Trap no longer functions until repaired. It can be disabled closed or open.
Evasion: 10
PDR: 3
Trauma: 1 (any trauma result on damage will break the mechanism so doesn’t automatically close any more)

Projectile Traps -
Traps of this nature are a staple of any dungeon although typically they’re used in areas where the inhabitants don’t travel as a general rule or used to guard treasures. A section of wall or ceiling has several holes concealed with thin paper the same color/texture of the wall.  Inside each of this is a projectile propelled by a strong spring.  The projectile trap can be set up with many types of projectiles from poison coated darts to long spears.   The damage and effects on hit will vary as a result.  Listed below are two variants, the poison coated darts and the spears.

Flaming Dart Launcher
Description:  In the ceiling of a damp passage way are several angled dart launchers.  Each dart is covered with a substance that burns when you put water on it.   People are roughly 60% water.  The results are pretty predictable.
Stealth:  17
Trigger:  A trigger plate that covers the width of the passage way.
Attack:  Ranged 0, Blast 2 in designated area.
On Hit Effect: NA
Damage: 2d6
Secondary Attack: Energy 0 vs 15
On Hit Effect: Darts burst into flame.
Damage: 2d6 Fire damage.
Disable:
Trigger: Burglary 15
Device: Mechanics 15, Burglary 10
Disable Effect:  The darts do not fire or they are blocked from leaving the holes.
Evasion: 10
PDR:  5
Trauma: 1
Special:  Any projectile that misses will burst into flame upon hitting the damp floor.  Any projectile that doesn’t flame upon hitting a person is considered to have degraded into useless or combusted in the launch tube.  If a projectile can be preserved without combustion then it acts as a 1H Melee weapon which upon hitting the attacker makes an Energy 0 roll vs 15 and the target takes an additional 2d6 Fire damage attack.

Vertical Spear Trap
Description:  A series of iron spears are placed in tubes in the ceiling.  Atop each one is a slam of heavy stone that will drive them downwards.  Not only will the spears be painful but each square of the area is considered difficult terrain.
Stealth: 15
Trigger: When a character enters the designated target square.
Attack: Ranged 0 Blast 3 centered on target square
On Hit Effect: NA
Damage: 3d6
Disable:  Trigger: Burglary 15
Disable Effect: Trap does not activate.
Evasion: 10
PDR: 6
Trauma: 1
Special: The trap does not reset automatically. The spears can be broken or bent badly enough to be pulled free from the ceiling.

Continue reading »]]> The rough draft of the Drives and Motivations chapter for LCA!.   The purpose of the chapter is to assist those players who are new to the game/hobby or those for whom typically their character is just the equivalent of a nail in the wall to hang their guns and swords on.  Hopefully by including these kinds of things the Director and players can work to pump a little depth into their characters and color into their scripts.

Note: Excuse the formatting, it’s a cut and paste from Google Docs which just refuses to have any kind of cohesive formatting.

Continue reading »]]> Just added the Simple Chase mechanic to LCA! as I needed a quick way to improv chase scenes like those below rather than using the full blown Extended Challenge system which is much more involved, includes stunt systems and the like but requires prepwork to work at its best. The Simple Chase is more narrative in style allowing more freedom to the heroes and director as to what happens while keeping enough ‘hard stuff’ in it. The below is the play by play example of one such chase.

Obviously (hopefully obviously) in practice the verbiage would be a lot more lurid and narrative, this is just a play through for my own needs to insure it works as expected.

It makes it look like they’re alternating going first on purpose but actually the order is determined randomly each round. All the various rolls in this example are ‘real’. There are rolls that are implied but aren’t mentioned with numbers like the opposed athletics roll when Willie went over the fence. He got something like an 8 if I remember right and Steve got a 12. The standard TN is a 15 so if these were ‘straight’ tests then neither would have made the climb. But that’s not the point of the chase P&D system, it’s more how well you did something compared to the guy you’re chasing or being chased by. As of right now all Ploys and Diversions use Opposed rolls rather than versus a Target number. We just compare relative success. Where it fits we use skills, where it doesn’t fit we use attributes and if all else fails we just make basic opposed rolls. For instance the trashcan grab and jump didn’t really have a related skill so it was an opposed Grace roll.

Hopefully it plays out well, it feels good the run throughs I’ve done with it using guys on foot, in cars and in airplanes.

————–

A quick play example of the Simple Chase rules. Sometimes things get out of hand quickly and you don’t have a full extended challenge scene ready to cover a chase and sometimes you just don’t want to bother. The Simple Chase mechanic is designed for those times when you need a quick clean resolution to a fox and hound situation:

Steve Masters has cornered Willie the Rat in an alley and has threatened and Intimidated him into spilling his guts. To liven up the scene the Director spends a Rewrite to add a Complication. A housewife opens a door into the alley and shrieks as she sees the two men, one looming over the other. Willie the Rat takes advantage of the diversion and makes a break for it and gets to medium range as Steve yells at the woman to get back inside, he’s a cop!. (Rewrites are pretty powerful stuff, especially Director Rewrites).

We start our Simple Chase at that point. Steve and Willie are at Medium range.

In the first round Steve goes first and tries a Ploy using his Intimidation skill to get Willie to stop. “Damnit Willie I’m going to throw you in lock up and lose the key if you don’t stop running!”. He gets a success and Willie has a -2 on his Chase roll from the success and Steve has a -1 from the attempt.

Willie tries a Ploy and slams some garbage cans into his path. Steve easily leaps over them. Willie now has a -3 on his Chase roll garnering another -1 from his attempt to slow Steve down.

Neither side tries an attack and the round ends and both sides make a Chase roll. Steve has a -1 penalty and gets a 9. Willie has a -3 penalty but gets a +1 bonus as he has a faster base of roughly 10% over Steve. He ends up with a 9 as well. Steve our hero wins ties and closes the distance to Short.

Next round Willie goes first and we’re at Short range. He tries another Ploy choosing to go up over a fence and down a cross alley, hoping Steve will be slowed down. The ploy uses Athletics. Steve nimbly vaults the fence and Willie is at a -1 for the attempt. Steve grabs a handy chunk of brick and is going to use it as a 1h ranged weapon. He nails Willie in the center of his back dazing him and dealing some stress damage.

Willie, dazed continues to stagger forward but is now at a -6 on his Chase roll. Steve is at a -1 for attack action. Unsurprisingly Willie loses the Chase roll and the distance is closed to Point Blank.

In the third round of the chase Steve gets to go first and since the range is point blank he is going to try to Grapple Willie. He nails the Grapple roll and in a flying body tackle brings Willing down landing on him leaving him gasping for breath in the alleyway.

“Now Willie, where were we? Oh yeah you were about to tell me when and where the shipment is coming in or I’m going to paint this alley and use your face as the brush…” Steve growls as he gets comfortable sitting on Willie’s back.

Continue reading »]]> Spent the last few days converting Last Night on Earth to a vassal engine game so that I can play it online.   I’d actually started to write a .Net application to let me play online and that would let me put in some basic AI for the Zombies so that a friend and I could play Co-op against them but being Time Impaired I did some quick googling and came across the Vassal Engine system that lets you convert board games into virtual board games.

Vassal is very much just a presentation layer application.   It does it pretty well but it just doesn’t have any ability to actually program anything in it.  But it took a couple of hours to get the resources into it and working which is significantly less than writing client/server app from scratch.  You get what you pay for and in this case the cost is time.

Last Night on Earth

Continue reading »]]> I was pointed to an actualplay podcast featuring the game system Old School Hack.  Now in the interests of full disclosure I’m not really a ‘silly’ gamer and this particular game had some serious silliness.  Is that even possible?  Serious silliness?  I digress.  But while I can see that the system could nudge people toward silly that’s an function of the people and not the system per se. It could just as easily be kept serious.

Anyway, I’ve had a chance to read through the basic PDF which is very short with just single pages dedicated to each of the mechanics and character classes.  25 pages total which covers everything.

The system reminds me, even though it came out much earlier, of Gamma World in that the players define what they have in the way of gear and what their powers are and all that.  I’m a huge fan of this by the way, my own in progress system uses this same mechanic, empowering the players to truly make a character feel like it’s theirs rather than fighter_001.

The combat system is light and really promotes player engagement rather than “I swing my sword.”  The arena system is fairly unique in my experience and very user friendly and cinematic rather than a tactical mini’s game (which I also enjoy).

The ‘numbers’ are nice and low, weapons deal 1 to 2 damage base but can be boosted with Awesome Points.   Awesome Points can be used for a few other things and function similar to Fate chips.

There’s a neat little mechanic with Face Dice which determines if you hit them in the face (duh) and essentially lets you ‘crit’ with the attack and deal an extra point of damage.

The mob mechanic where lots of bad guys are beating up one player is a cool way to do it.   Minions, 1 hit wonders, are done well.  One on one it’s unlikely a PC would ever lose to one barring just horrible dice rolls but between the mob bonus and lots of minions they become a force to be dealt with.

With 25 pages as you can imagine there’s not really any ‘setting’ data.  It’s a generic fantasy swords and sorcery system and it’s really up to the GM to come up with what’s going on.

In all honesty although I can certainly see this being used for a series of adventures I believe I personally would use it more as a ‘beer and pretzels’ game that you bring out when you don’t have time to have a long in-depth campaign.

It looks very easy to pick up by anyone, even children of a certain age and acuity and has big  potential for bringing in casual players.   The openness of the system IMO would be more female casual gamer friendly.  I think women, and this may be sexist I guess, but I think they tend to favor a less hard mechanic system in general over a detailed minutiae based system.

The main purpose of the system IMO is for people to simply have fun and enjoy some easy RPG’ing goodness without having to dedicate a lot of prep time (or any really) to it.  If you’re looking for a long term detailed character treadmill+carrot creation this isn’t it.  But if you’re time impaired or just need a break from your 3 year running [insert detailed game system here] then you could do FAR worse than this.

So the next time you’re having a little group get together of a friend or two and their wives you might consider hauling this out, handing out some character sheets and getting your wizard on with some of the classics, the ‘toll booth’ with bandits or the ‘rescue the damsel’ from the necromancer or the sneak into the dragon cave and steal their treasure horde.

Continue reading »]]> This is a continuation from the first DS playtest and the queen mum of the scarabs changed into a Gaj to allow for a more complex encounter…

Actors: Gerao an escaped pit fighter slave, Areen a disenchanted noble, Jaina a spy for the Veiled Alliance and a practitioner of defiler magic.

Scene: Exterior shot of a blasted desolate desert wasteland.  golden gray sands form dunes studded with rocky outcropping as far as the eye can see. A cloudless sky reveals millions of stars that sparkle down giving a dim light to everything.  Breath steams in the frigid night air.   Focus on three people rising to their feet as a insectile monster burrows up from the sands in front of them.

Director: “As the gaj’s cry is still echoing out its multi-faceted eyes lock on yours and a dreadful intellect gleams in them.  Feathery antennae on its head flutter in your direction and you pick up a torrent of alien thought processes but as twisted and strange as they are you easily sense the hostility running through them all, hostility aimed at you.  Let’s go straight to initiative shall we?”

Gaj Encounter - 

Round 1 - 

Areen:   KC    Geraro:   5C    Jaina:   AS     Gaj:  Red Joker

Gaj: “Sand flies out under the Gaj’s powerful thrusting claws and it drives straight toward you.  It moves with speed slides to a halt directly in front of the group in a shower of sand.    Everyone please make a Acrobatics or Perception roll at +3 to avoid getting sand in your eyes.”

Areen: “I see the danger in plenty of time to turn my head.”

Geraro: “I shield my eyes with a lightnig fast move of my arms.”

Jaina: “I see it coming and duck my head and close my eyes.”
[Note:  Areen and Jaina both went with Perception while Geraro trusted in his reflexes.  Note: Two of them would have failed without the +3 bonus that the Director gave them.]

Gaj: “Jaina as you duck your head two giant mandibles come flying through the dust.   They close on…. air.  The Gaj spends a Rewrite and tries take 2.  Instead of missing the mandible grab catches you squarely around your right arm as you throw it up to shield you from the dust and the jagged serrations of the Mandible crash shut on your arm.  You’re going to take a Level 2 damage result if you don’t try and Shake it Off…”

Jaina: “I spend the rewrite and get a 26 on my fortitude roll bug queen!  I laugh in it’s face.”

Director: “Excellent!  Your arm fits right between two of the larger serations, trapping it firmly but not so tightly as to cause damage.”

Jaina: “I’m still grabbed?  I got rid of all the damage?”

Director: “Yes the grab still hit you, you just avoided the damage of the grabbing attack.”

Jaina: “What’s it’s mean to be grabbed?”

Director: “You can make a Athletics or Acrobatics roll to escape the grab on your turn using your basic move action.  You also get one standard action which you can use as another escape attempt or you can attack the creature if you wish with any one handed weapon and get a bonus since the target has a harder time evading you.   Two hand weapons suffer a -5 penalty.  The grabber can force move you and gets an automatic hit on you dealing 1d6 or 2d6 damage + strength.  In this case the damage is going be 2d6+2.”

Jaina: “I”m up next, I’m going to use.. ugh, Acrobatics is a -3 and Athletics is a -4.  I should maybe get some training in one of those huh? Okay an 11.”

Gaz: “As you try and squirm and twist to get your arm free the Gaj shuffles in response and the mandibles retain their grip.  If anything they’re now tighter on your…”
[Note: The opposed check was Jaina's Acrobatics and the Gaj also chose Acrobatics and the result was 11 to 20 in the Gaj's favor.]

Jaina: “Crap I’m going to try again and use my standard.   14?”

Director: “Jaina squirms and struggles against the stone hard mandibles locked on her arm but no matter how much she tries it remains locked on.   Let me see some Nature checks?  Oh, those are some horrible rolls!  A 2, 8 and a 6?  Never mind.”
[Note: If any of the players had gotten a success they'd of remembered some of the capabilities of the Gaj.]

Areen: “Does Jaina count for MOB?”

Director: “Actually yes since she has the option to attack the creature on her turn and that’s all it takes.”

Areen: “Okay then we have +2 to hit it right since we’re all adjacent?”

Director: “Correct.  And you have another +1 for it’s large size.”

Areen: “Awesome!  Okay I find a good spot and plung my gythka into it and give it a good solid twist! 10 damage and I’m going to stunt and force it to move back.”

Director: “It reduces forced movement by 1 square so you’ll have to spend 4 points to get 2 squares of movement which will reduce to 1?”

Areen: “No problem.”

Director: “Areen steps up and smashes her thrikeen spear into the gaj’s carapace and sends it reeling back dazed.  It releases Jaina as it skids back in the sand, legs scrambling.”
[Note: Forced movement breaks grabs.]

Jaina: “Thanks sis!”

Geraro: “Hey bug!  Try..kal this!  A 16?”

Director: “Ooooh, just missed.”

Geraro: “Lucky shot!”
[Note: Geraro spends 4 stunt points on the Lucky Shot manuever which lets him add a +2 to his dice roll to turn a miss into a hit.  The Gaj's Evasion is 17.]

Director: “Good enough, an 18 hits.”

Geraro: “23 damage, no 26 damage because it’s dazed. Let’s see it shake that off!”

Director: “Level 3 damage result, nice one.   It spends a rewrite to try and shake off the damage and fails.  It takes two Stress and 1 Trauma.”

Round 2 - 

Areen:   4S    Geraro:  4H     Jaina:   3S     Gaj:  7S

Gaj: “It shakes it body spastically and then steadies itself quickly.  The butterfly antennae start to flutter and then a shimmery ripple goes out filling the area in front of it, an area that includes all three of you.  Jaina and Areen roll to the side and end up prone here and here but Geraro you don’t make it. The wave blasts over you as you try unsuccessfully to dive out and blasts along your nervous system. You take a level 3 damage result.”

Geraro: “How the hell does this work out, I’m the only one trained in acrobatics?!  Ouch, I’m going to shake it off.  Damnit.  Okay I take it.  That’s 2 stress and 1 trauma right?  Is this physical or mental?”

Director: “Phsyical.  Oh and you’re blind….”

Geraro: “Anything else you want to pile on there?  Maybe glue my feet to the ground?”

Director: “Hey it’s not me, it’s the gaj, blame it!”

Areen: “Jaina, get on that side, I’m going to get on this one, that’ll give us Flanking and keep us out of a group AOE.   I stab into it!  Damnit, miss but I recover my stunt points.”
[Note: She rolled a 13 which bonuses up to a 16 (+2 MOB, +1 Size differential), 1 short of the 17 needed and two of those dice were 5's which generated 5 stunt points which she uses to refill her stunt pool up to it's max of 4.]

Geraro: “I try and recover, nope.  I spend a rewrite to get rid of the daze so I can act.  I shift back here and then I’m going to try Taunting it and pull it forward and keep it focused on me.  I’m going to waive an attack so I have a better chance at the taunt and keep it from going after Jaina.  Since she saved me from the pits after all, I owe her.”

Director: “The gaj scoffs at your attempt to piss it off.  But I applaud your use of your My Life For Her trait, here’s a rewrite.”

Jaina: “I shift… no I move here, yes I know that’s going to cause an OA but I want to get some range.”

Gaj: “It whips its head around as you start to retreat and the sharp mandibles rip through your side.  17 damage roll, level 3 hit on you.”

Jaina: “Dang, okay, I’m going to spend a rewrite and drop it to a level 2.”

Director: “Okay the mandibles slash into your back and as you turn to retreat, the dazed result stops your action but you can stumble another square if you like and get some range.”

Round 3 - 

Areen:   KC    Geraro:  6H     Jaina:   KS     Gaj: QS

Jaina: “Dazed and confused am I.  Okay failed my recovery roll and no rewrites to buy my way out of it. Hmmm single action, I’m going to pop it with my Fireblast.  Damnit, missed big time.”

Director: “There’s a sudden flare of light on the side of the creature that Jaina is on, Geraro you see a ball of fire blaze on her hands and then fizzle out.”

Areen: “What was that?!  That looked like magic! I’m going to jump up and bring the gythka down, I’m trying to see what’s going on over there on Jaina’s side.  I bring it down in a high arcing blow and cut into it’s side.”

Gaj: “The gaj recoils from the blow and it’s head whips around toward you! It recovers from the blow but is left a little woozy.  It shifts one square back and angles its head and unleashes a mental blast that catches Areen and Geraro in the same blast area.  Areen you’re hit by a wash of mental agony.”

Areen: “I spend a rewrite to drop it to a level 1 and take the Daze.”

Geraro: “I shift forward and bust it upside the head.”

Director: “You’re dazed…”

Geraro: “I Rewrite the daze out then… I nail it, level 2 damage.”

Gaz: “It’s front section is looking pretty bad, lots of little cracks in the chitin and it’s definitely woozy on it’s feet.”

Round 3 - 

Areen:  5H    Geraro:  3c     Jaina:   9C     Gaj: 9S

Gaj: “The gaj tries to recover and fails, it rewrites it away.  It snaps its head forward and tries to grab Areen and… fails.”

Jaina: “I burn it again, I’m going to pump the pyroblast up and add the dot to it… and miss.”

Director: “More flames flare up on Jaina’s hands but fizzle out.  Areen you can easily see the source of the fire this time… Defiler magic at work…”

Areen: “Defiler!!!!  I’ll deal with that after we take care of the bug.  Darn, critical failure… I’m going to shift back one square after the miss.”

Gaj: “You so overexpose yourself Afreen that the Gaj has an easy shot at you but dazed as it is it just can’t quite pull it off and misses you as you move back.”

Geraro: “I shift to here and punch my polearm at it and… miss.  I was doing so well too.”

Round 4 - 

Areen:  7C Geraro:  Red Joker     Jaina:   AH Gaj: 5C

Geraro: “I’m going to fake it out with some fancy footwork and then bash it.”

Director: “Your ploy fails miserably it’s got 8 legs, you only have two…  And your attack misses as well.”
[Note: Geraro tried a Combat Ploy using opposed Grace rolls.  The gaj won hands down.  If Geraro had won the Gaj would be at -2 Evasion until it's next turn. ]

Jaina: “I blast it one more time, just the basics.  And another miss.  I was doing better with the weapons!”

Areen: “Bam!  I smash the gythka down on it!”

Gaj: “Ouch!  A level 3 hit, one Rewrite left.  I have to reduce it to a level 1 or the bug is unconcious.  It makes a Shake it Off roll and gets a 26!  Reduces the hit to nothing.”

Areen: “Well crap.”

Gaj: “It shifts here and then lunges at you Areen but the shifting sands foil its strike.”

Round 5 - 

Areen:  QD Geraro:  AH     Jaina:   7H Gaj: 7S

Geraro: “I shift to here and I’m going to kick it and try and knock it off balance as a Strength ploy.  Sweet!  It’s Off Balance.  And that -2 is enough to get me a hit!  And a Level 2 damage…”

Gaj: “The bug rocks back from the pit fighter’s kick and it can’t quite dodge the incoming trikal blades.  It’s chitin splinters some more and the shocks are transferred directly into the floating brain buried in its head section.  It slumps and then collapses all the way, out cold.”

Areen: “I step closer and bury my gythka into that head section and scramble its brains and then I stare over the bug at Jaina, a Defiler…”

Geraro: “I step over to Jaina’s side of the bug putting myself between her and this know nothing noble brat…”

Continue reading »]]> Lots more internal changes and changes to various mechanics although not massively drastic.

I’m now working on Section 3, Chapter 3 – Damage and trying to make it as least confusing as I can get it.

To sum up every character has three areas of damage they can take, Physical, Mental and Vitality.   Physical and Mental damages are pretty much identical and are split into two types, Stress and Trauma.   Stress is the temporary damage that you can recover fairly easily with just a bit of a breather.  Trauma is the broken bones type of damage.

Vitality damage is more about endurance and recovery but I’m calling it damage just for continuity sake so that all three trackers are damage trackers and function very similarly which helps make it the system easier (not necessary easy) to understand.

As of now, you ‘spend’ vitality to recover stress.  You recover vitality by resting.  Vitality is also drained if you do extraordinary feats of strength, try to stay awake too long without resting or push yourself too hard by fighting too often without resting.   So Vitality is kind of important in that it determines your ‘work day’.

When you take a breather after a fight, you spend Vitality to recover stress damage.  Very similar to Healing Surges in 4E DND.   There is no risk in this other than if you spend too much vitality you will start to get groggy and woozy (i.e. take negatives) and you can actually knock yourself unconscious this way if you choose to.

If for some reason you’re out of vitality or don’t want to go into negatives you can instead elect to try First Aid on the stress damage.  You only get one shot at it between scenes and this runs the risk of a critical failure (about 4.7% chance) which if that happens you just really made things a lot worse and the paitent takes a Trauma level as a result.

The Healing Power removes stress but burns Vitality.  The energy user though can burn their vitality instead of the patients if they choose.  They can also burn excess power and get rid of the Vitality cost if they want.

Trauma damage on the other hand, that requires longer term healing.  Trauma damage you can only try to heal once every 24 hours.  At that time you make a choice, either use First Aid or try to naturally heal.  Or both.  But you have to choose at least one.   The Natural heal option requires an attribute roll, Resolve for Mental trauma and Fortitude for Physical trauma.   If you fail, you just got worse.  If you succeed, no change.  If roll excess successes then you recover.   If you critically fail, you just died.

The First Aid option is the better one.  You only get worse on a critical failure and get better on any success.   It’s the option that most people will choose to take.  The natural healing option is there for people with a high attribute value and no first aid training or those people who want to risk the critical failures and ‘double up’ on their healing in a 24 hour period.

I’ve gone through various iterations of the system and this is the one I currently dislike the least.  Oh I like it because it adds enough options and enough risk of the True Death that getting wounded is something to be concerned about.   As a general rule a player cannot re-roll a critical failure although they can build their character such that they can if they choose.  This means that when recovering trauma damage there’s that flat 4% chance that you very well could….DIE!

Although if you have a Rewrite to spend you can pay for a Cliffhanger Ending for your character which if the Director agrees to removes your character from play for at least a couple of sessions to come back with a story of epic proportions as to why they’re not dead.

Even in the movies, sometimes the heroes do die no matter how awesome they were or how much people might want to milk them for a sequel or three.

Continue reading »]]> [Just an FYI: After discussing this with my wife who will be using this system I'm leaning heavily on a single attack roll at +2 bonuses to attack and damage.  A character dual wielding the same type of weapon i.e. two melee or two ranged can make a single attack roll at +2 attack and +2 damage when attacking one target.  If they want to they can make a split attack and make two attack rolls at -1 each and will know that long run that's the worse solution by the math.  If they're wielding a ranged and a melee then they have to make a split attack.  Of course making a ranged attack while in melee range causes OA's so I don't think it'll come up that often to be honest but I didn't want to just flat out ixnay a character being able to split their attack.  Against minions it might make perfect sense to go for two kills rather than a more assured single kill.]

As luck would have it with my near obsession with having a trued up base foundation to build LCA!’s mechanics on, I unovered a problem with the current system for Dual Wielding.

The mechanic of the day for dual wielding is they make two attack rolls, one for each weapon and suffer a -1 penalty on this.

This has some issues -

1. It complicates the Action definitions and action economy.   All standard actions are one action with the exception of dual wielding which is two sub-actions.
2. It slows down combat that extra little bit as the dual wielders have to make two attack and two damage rolls compared to other builds making one.
3. As skills go up equally between the Dual Wielder and the 2-Handed wielder the odds shift in favor of 2H.  At the end of the skill scale the fights are 60/40 in favor of the 2H wielder.  At the start of the scale they’re 50/50.
4. It’s balancing with penalties rather than bonuses which is perceptually not as good.
5. It complicates the attack roll ever so slightly as people have an easier time adding than subtracting.

So I looked at duplicating the same mechanic that other systems have used, i.e. making dual wielding a single attack roll with bonus(es).   FYI, none of the ones I’m familiar with that use this method give you enough of a bonus to make up for the difference.  Typically they give you a +1 or something silly like that.  It doesn’t come close to balancing when the average damage on a hit between the two weapons is significantly better than the typical 5-9% that a +1 adds depending on the system.

Anyway to get numbers that balance up and down the skill levels so that the two types of warriors remain evenly matched, assuming no other changes, I have to offer a total of +4 to the dual wielders attack mechanic.

This +4 can be a +4 on damage, or +1 attack roll and +3 damage or +2 attack roll and +2 damage.

The most balanced (for obvious reasons if you’re mathcentric) is the +4 damage.  The other two options are not quite as balanced but are within acceptable margins.

So the question becomes, do I keep the current unbalanced system (depending on skill levels) or do I drop the two attack rolls and make it a flat bonus.

The down side is as I see it -

1. Dual wielding doesn’t necessarily feel like you’re dual wielding any more
2. You either hit or miss with ‘both’ weapons.
3. Adding bonuses to attack rolls results in fewer misses.

The numbers and background data -

LCA Melee Basics:
1H weapons are 2d6 and max at 4d6.
2H weapons are 3d6 and max at 5d6.
Trained Melee skill ranges from Rank 0 to 5

I can offer the following options (stats down below)

Dual Wield with seperate attack rolls at -1 penalty
Dual Wield with one attack roll at +4 Damage
Dual Wield with one attack roll at +1 Attack, +3 Damage
Dual Wield with one attack roll at +2 Attack, +2 Damage

Dual Wield with 2 attacks is okay at low skill numbers but as the skill increases on both sides the numbers start to significantly favor the 2H warrior.

The stats (100,000 fights at each combination)

————-
Using Dual Wield = 2 attack rolls

Both attacks suffer -1 penalty
With Rank 0 on each side the ratio is 50/50 win/loss between the two builds.
With Rank 5 skill ratio is the 40/60 win/loss in favor of 2H builds.

So between two equally skilled opponents with everything else equal the 2H just got a +20 boost in win rate.

————-
Using Dual Wield = 1 Attack Roll

1 Attack at +4 Damage, no penalty or bonus on AR.
With rank 0 the ratio is 50/50
With rank 5 the raito is 50/50

End result both builds benefit equally from skill and equally matched up and down the skill range.

————–
Using Dual Wield = 1 Attack Roll
1 Attack at +1 Attack Roll and +3 Damage

With Rank 0 the ratio is 51/49 in favor of dual wield.
With Rank 5 the ratio is 51/49 in favor of dual wield.

—————

Using Dual Wield = 1 Attack Roll  (Probable winner)
1 Attack at +2 Attack roll and +2 Damage
With Rank 0 the ratio is 53/47 in favor of dual wield.
With Rank 5 the ratio is 50/50 tiny favor on dual wield

 

Continue reading »]]> This playtest is going to be using the Dark Sun setting.  Granted I only have an old 2nd Edition version so I’m not sure how much might have changed but I would imagine that the Sorcerer Kings are still running things and the Templars are still doing their dirty work and the Veiled Society is I’m sure still looking to have a say in things.

On a “Man those were the days” moment it’s very nostalgic reading things like multi-classing, racial bonuses/benefits per level, the basic classes,  and all the various treasure tables.

So let us once again, for old times sake visit the land of Athas, only this time using the LCA! gaming system.

[Edit: I'm going to very loosely mimic the Penny Arcade Dark Sun podcast. The key thing is very loosely.]

Director:  Okay this will help set the tone and give you some idea of the setting.  Gather close my friends and let me tell you of a world where the Sun and Sand is a mortal enemy and immortal Sorcerer-Kings rule the few livable areas with an iron fist.

“The Sun, it is Dark indeed this year. The world is Athas, a world of heat, pain and grief.  A world where only the strong survive and they die young.  The weak are enslaved and put into servitude.

The three of you, a woman of a minor noble house who calls herself Areen, fleeing an arranged marriage, an escaped slave named Gerao from the pits and the woman Jaina who helped him escape have joined a caravan to distant Tyr where rumors have it things are better but even that is relative.   The sun during the day is remorseless and merciless, beating down at temperatures upwards of 125 degrees in the shade and at night plummeting to a miserable 50 degrees.  

The caravan is a small one and their fee for taking the three of you reduced for that reason.  The more people in the caravan the less likely weaker bands of those that living in the Tablelands will be to attack it. 

Your trip so far has been mostly uneventful, days of trying to not go sun mad and nights of trying to stay warm.  The kanks, the giant bugs which carry the caravan continue their plodding day in and day out. their insectile minds dull and obedient to the herders that keep the caravan on line and in line.   The caravan masters have remarked how hot it is during the high sun, more than any trip they’ve experienced in the past.

The night before a strange display in the southern skies, streaks of light falling from above to flare and then vanish has the caravan on edge and everyone is worried about what the lights might mean.  Some think that Tyr may have been attacked by another sorceror-king and fear is a palpable thing, a city under siege or at war is not a pleasant thing to end the hard journey with. 

The next oasis is three days travel still and already water is a concern, even more so than normal and everyone hopes for news of the south.  The unnatural heat for the year has depleted the water supply with great speed and most of the water barrels now contain only the ever present golden sands.

With dawn the blazing crimson sun of Athas climbs inexorably as do the temperatures by mid morning heat shimmers dance in the horizon in all directions and the sun blasted dunes and rocks radiate the heat back.

As afternoon approaches, bringing with it the greatest heat yet, the southern horizon begins to haze, the line between sand and sky blurring, the signs of a sand storm approaching.  With no time to waste, losing time to the storm will signal the first deaths, the caravan masters move along the caravans fastening shielding cloths on the kanks breathing holes and eyes and tying each to the one in front of it.    The passengers and crew also wrap thin breathable supple leather veils around their heads, ensuring there is no exposed skin.  An Athas sandstorm can literally scour the flesh from the bones in short time. 

With the speed of a diving hawk the sands blast toward you and everyone does what they can to get ready.  But nothing could prepare them for what was to come, a storm out of legends…”

Jaina: “So we’re just riding along in the caravan then?”

Gerao: “Anyone acting supsicious of us?  Being an escaped slave I know the punishment for that isn’t all rainbows and puppies.  Would we even know what a rainbow is given it never rains?”

Director: “The three of you are in a howdah on a kank near the tail end of the caravan.  You’re used to eating dust, you get water from the kank barrels and you share it with a family of 6 but you didn’t have sufficient resources to get a  better location or one to yourselves.  But perhaps Fate was kinder than you might have thought.  As the winds sweep down upon the caravan carrying the bitter stinging sands you hear cries of pain and fear from further up the caravan.   And then as the front edge of the storms blast over you, a arm length shard of obsidian black material punches through the chest of one of the family and the boy falls backwards dead before he knew what had happen.  It’s an obsidian storm, hard straight line winds carrying upon them light weight shards of razor edged and needle tipped obsidian.

More shards slash through the front wall of the howdah and before anyone can really react have carved the ones in the front of the shelter into so much chopped meat.  The three of you at the rear have been spared the worst of that initial blast as the ones ahead of you have absorbed the blows but they’re falling like chaff.

The kank starts to shudder as shards punch into it.  A partculary large shard runs down the length of the bug cutting into its chitin and severing the lines and straps holding the howdah onto it.  The furious winds smash the howdah backwards off the kank and your world heaves and shifts before it and you all land in a broken pile behind the kank.   The creature shivers and flails and then drops down, it’s body shielding you from the worst of the storm.”

Areen: “Unholy crap!  Being a noble I probably don’t have any idea what’s going on?  Is there anything I can think of to help the situation?”

Director: “All of you have heard the stories of obsidian storms but they’re the stuff of legends, no one claims to have ever seen one or the aftermath of one.  It’s something that you all assumed the caravaners used to scare people into signing on with them.  But it appears to be all too true at this point.   The storm is driving thousands of deadly shards of obsidian glass before it and they’ll slice anything to ribbons.  Actually right now holding tight seems to be the best solution.  The kank is blocking the shards from you and in the lee of it’s body the worst of the winds are swirling past.  Visibility is perhaps a foot and that’s only if you don’t value your sight.”

Gerao: “I do what I can to check the family, is there any help for them?”

Director: “Nice, here’s a rewrite for your compassion, the family thanks you for your concern, if they weren’t carved to ribbons.   No they’re bleeding out, they were standard human stock, a family of weavers that were heading to Tyr to move in with family after being driven out of business by a rival back in Urik the town you’re from.  There’s nothing more you can do for them.”

Gerao: ” I cover them then as best as I can, we’ll bury them once the storm subsides.  No one deserves to be dropped into a food processor like that without someone saying something.”

Areen: “Sucks to be them but there will always be more peasents, they breed like rabbits.”

Jaina: “Nice, you kiss your mother with that mouth?”

Areen: “I’m rich, I pay someone to do that.”

Gerao: “No hon, you were rich.  Now, not so much.  That’s why you’re eating dust back here with the rest of us.”

Areen: “Hmmph.”

Jaina: “I burrow down into the remains of the howdah and prepare to wait it out.”

Gerao: “Yeah not much else we can do except ride the storm out.”

Director: “The winds howl for hours as best as you can determine although they bring one unexpected benefit the temperature drops to around 90 degrees, practically balmy for Athas during the day.  Eventually like everything, this too must end and you wake to silence.  The sand muffled whoosh of the winds gone, taking with it the rasp of the sands.    Digging out of the dune that’s formed around and over you emerge into the freezing night air.  There is nothing but silence out there, a faint sound of sand collapsing around you into the holes you climb out from.”

Gerao: “I dig out my gear and strap my weapons on.”

Director: “Now would be a good time to figure out what everyone has actually.  Not that there’s a fight coming up or anything.”

Geraro: “Hmm I dig out my pit fighter gear as well from the blanket it was wrapped in.  Articulated sheets of chitin that cover me from neck to mid thigh.  I assemble my trikal, attaching the two shafts together to make the pole and snapping the three glastone blades into their notches.   Three obsidian blades go into sheathes at my waist ready for throwing or dual wielding.  I used my free weapon Tweak to give them the Throwing property.  I have a small pack with some basic supplies in case I get separated from the caravan.  Or it from me as is apparently the case now.”
[Note: The player's descriptions of his weapons are entirely his own, all that's required is that the weapon fit one each of two categories, either Melee or Range and one hand or two hand.  Each character gets a free weapon Tweak when they build their character, these characters are all level 1.   The player has used that free Tweak to allow him to throw his 1H weapons without penalty as well as use them for normal melee.]

Jaina: “I strap on the bracers that hold my wrist razors and run the bracing strap around my fingers ready for whatever.  Under my outer garments I’m wearing ironsilk undergarments, soft and protective at the same time.  I sling my knapsack over one shoulder, hidden in the strap is the message that I’m taking to Tyr for my chapter house.”
[Note: Jaina's player is dual wielding weapons that are reminiscent of a certain certain superhero's claws.   The downside is they're an uncommon weapon and worthy of comment.  They do leave her hands free though for the focusing gestures that are required to channel energy in Athas, at least this version of Athas.  It's an minor advantage but LCA! is about player empowerment so the Director allows it.  The message is a plot hook that the Director has set up in advance.]

Director: “Areen, what about you?”

 Areen: “We were trained by a thrikeen weapons master, all the house was. As a result  I favor two chatkcha’s strapped criss cross in sheath’s on my back and carry a gythka which I spent the Thrown tweak on so I can use it as melee and throw if I have to.   I’m wearing glass cloth as protection, it’s sparkly, stylish and befits my station.”
[Note: For those not familiar with Dark Sun, chatkcha's are basically just boomerangs that return to sender.  This is a Tweak option for Ranged weapons but the player didn't want to burn a character point to add the Tweak to these deciding to rather have a 2H Ranged/Melee combination weapon.]

Side Note:  All the character’s have opted to wearing some kind of armour.  In LCA! the value you gain from Armour has an equal cost to your Evasion on a one for one exchange.  Harder to damage = harder to hit and vice versa. Geraro has 2 points but has the Knack Armour Training which reduces the Evasion penalty by 1.  So he’s gaining +2 PDR and losing -1 Evasion.  The other two have opted for a lighter protection and are only gaining +1 PDR and losing 1 Evasion.   Another thing of note, Athas is a planet desperately metal poor.  Few people will see iron in their lifetime much less own anything made of metal.  Weapons and armour are all crafted using non-metallic materials, stone, glass, bone, chitin from certain bugs.  These weapons act just like normal weapons, there’s no mechanical difference in Dark Sun or LCA!.

Director: “The stars are hard crystal lights, the dead eyes of the gods as some believe.  The temperatures are frosty, maybe 50-55 degrees.  The sands around the kanks are soaked in their inner fluids from where they were carved open by the shard storm.  Give me a Common Lore roll.”
[Note:  Every character has the Common Lore or Common Knowledge skill, the nomenclature depends on the setting and is interchangeable.  The Director has set up some information for the players, a Rank 3 / Tertiary type information.  This type of information requires a skill roll.]

Director: “Jaina apparently you prepped well for this journey, not surprising for one of the Veiled Alliance but as your feet sink into the damp sand you realize just how bad things are about to get you.  Water Scarabs are drawn to free moisture, they can sense it from miles away.  Each one isn’t very danagerous but it’s unlikely you’ll be facing only one.  As your eyes widen in realization you can hear the first faint whispers of something, a lot of something’s moving over the sands.”
[Note: Jaina rolled a 25 on her Lore check, the other two rolled 8's.  Neither of the other players deemed it necessary to re-roll, trusting in Jaina to share her knowledge.]

Jaina: “What do I think my best options are?  What else do I know of these things?”

Director: “Getting away from the moisture is rule 1 and then driving off any errant scarabs that might come after the water on the hoof.  If you kill any of them, it’s not a big deal, their own fluids are so far from usable that nothing on the planet larger than a protoplasm will touch a water scarab’s remains.”

Jaina: “I scream at the others to follow me and ask no questions and lead the way from the caravan as quickly as I can move.  I’ll double move and hope the others do the same.  If there’s anything remotely defensive in nature I’ll head toward.”

Director: “It’s night time…”

Jaina: “Ahh but I have…. wait a second… here it is, I have a light orb.  I dig it out of my knapsack and let it hang, the running motion will activate it.”
[Note: A light orb is basically an organic cyalume stick only orb shaped.  Shake it up and the creatures inside react by giving off light.  It sheds decent light out to 5 squares and dim light to 10 squares.  Dim light suffers a -1 penalty on Range and Perception checks.]

Director: “Let’s see you want something defensive, let’s see what there is…. Well as luck would have it there’s a rock outcropping thrusting up out of the sands.  Before you ask, it’s slick basalt spires that end in jagged spear like tops, no way to climb it or any place to stand on it. You could put your backs to it though and not have to worry about being attacked from all directions.”
[Note: The Director let the dice determine the terrain and made a standard roll, 3d8 and got a success and let the players find something defensible but so awesome that they can just avoid the fight completely.  After all this is Dark Sun, fighting to survive is something expected.]

Geraro: “We get to the rocks and put our backs to them, I’ll take this side, Jaina you take that one and we’ll put the noble lady in between.  She’s an unknown quality in terms of combat skills.”

Areen: “I can pull my weight damnit!  I stamp my foot attractively.”

Jaina: “I roll my eyes.  I shove the light orb into any handy crevice or hang it by it’s lanyard from something if I can.”

Director: “Yes you can find a crack to stuff the handle into.   As you turn back a swarm of scarabs pour around the outcropping like water in a stream.  The feelers on a bunch of them twitch and twirl and turn in your direction.  These peel off and scurry across the sands.  The scarabs are about 3′ long by a 2′ wide in terms of body although their legs extend out another 1 to 2 feet.  The legs are thick powerful things with claws and flat on the back side which pushes them under the sun during the day time with ease.  The shells are  hard black and green shimmery chitin with short head piece covered with a lot of gnawing bits in their mouths and hundreds of small tubes that are used for sucking moisture out of sands.”

Dark Sun Encounter 1 -

 Round 1:

Areen: 6S     Geraro:  8S    Jaina:   RJo  Scarab Group 1:  10C  Scarab Group 2:  4D  Scarab Group 3: JC

Jaina: “What do I know about them? Do they have any weaknesses?”

Director: “Your lore knowledge roll was impressive, a level 3 result so you know practically everything about them.  They’re relatively mindless driven by a need for water.  They burrow under the sands during the day to avoid water loss and thus there are tales of causing them to flee by creating very bright lights.  They avoid fires, heat causes water loss obviously.   Their shells are hard but not exceptionally so.  They also tend to avoid concentrations of their own body fluids, assuming and usually rightly so that something is killing them and thus to be avoided.   Their fluids and innards range from mildly toxic to deadly depending on the concentration and you know that some of the Veiled have been known to use it as a poison although it requires great care to create.  Their bite has a brief paralytic effect.  If you’re bitten by one you must make a Fortitude roll or you’re Off-Balance for a turn.”

Jaina: “Okay, let’s build a ring of fluids around us my friends.  Let loose the veils and show these things that there is more to fear on this world than the sun!  As soon as the first one is range I slash it open with my claws.  I’m going to hold off on showing my powers I don’t want Areen screaming Defiler at me just yet.”
[Note: Jaina's ranged abilities are in her powers and because magic is extremely reviled and in some places actively hunted down, only the Sorcerer Kings and their Templars enjoy the freedom to use it openly in most places.   Magic is what destroyed the planet leaving it a barren wasteland over most of the surface as the magic was powered by life energies.  Her player is going to defer her action until something in in Melee range.]

Scarab Group 3: “Three of the scarabs attack from this side, advancing in a double move to end right next to you Areen and Geraro.”

Scarab Group 1: “Four more scarabs split off this stream of beetles heading toward the caravan sensing the moisture on the hoof that are you.  They move and end up here along this line next to you Jaina and also threatening Areen.”

Jaina: “I attack as they end their turn.  I’m going to slash this one with my primary hand and this one with the off hand.  Due to that setting rule I’ve got a -1 on melee right?”

Director: “Correct.   Every character that doesn’t train in combat skills gets a -1 in either melee or range.  Dark Sun is a dangerous place and everyone has exposure to some type of combat training from birth.  If you choose not to take melee or range you essentially take the minimum penalty which is a -1 rather than the normal penalty which for you would be… a -3.”

Jaina: “Oh crap.. critical failure on my first roll?   Seriously?!”

Director: “”fraid so.  You slash out at the scarab but the unstable ground and its hard chitin shell cause you to seriously misjudge your aim and your right hand blades glance off it and you flail a bit and I’m going to need you to make an attack roll against Areen.  At +1…”
[Note:  The basic critical failure roll table as option 1 has "you make an attack against an adjacent ally and subtract your skill from the attack roll."   The basic idea is that a more skilled warrior has less chance to hit an ally.  But since Jaina has a -1 she ends up with a bonus to hit her ally. ]

Jaina: “What the hell!  Another critical failure?!”
[Note: with 3d8 the chances of getting a critical failure is roughly 4%.  Getting two in a row like this is pretty unusual to say the least.]

Director: “Don’t worry, at this point nothing happens, your primary hand glances off the scarab and your flailing arm whips right over Areen’s head and sparks fly from the spire behind her.  Make your second attack.”

Jaina: “Damn a miss.”
[Note: She rolled a 15, -1 for the melee skill, -1 for the off hand when dual wielding for a 13 total.  She also gets a +1 because she's attacking a target that is also adjacent to one of her allies bringing it up to 14.]

Director: “Don’t be so sure about it.  These scarabs move very slowly in this cold and aren’t very agile under the best of times, their Evasion is only a 13.

Jaina: “Cool.  Shoot, only a 5 damage.  I don’t suppose…?”

Director: “Not quiet.  Hard candy shell I’m afraid.”

Geraro: “Well I’ve fought weirder in the pits.  I smash this one with my trikal.  Whoa…”

Jaina: “Holy hell, a 32?!”

Geraro: