How To Survive A Zombie Attack: Improvised Seige Mechanics

I recently started a new short-term campaign for some friends, using Dolmenwood and The Black Hack. At one point, they were celebrating Thistlemote's (one of the PCs, a woodgrue) birthday by having a huge bash in the Laughing Pig, their town's tavern.

Some time after midnight, a Vague began. They are in the middle of winter, and occasionally during winter in the Dolmenwood an unseason of mists and undeath occurs. They see, through the fog, a horde of horrible figures shambling towards the town. I wanted a dawn of the dead style scene where our heroes try to fend off zombies that are punching their way through the windows and doors of a ramshackle building and they have to fight to survive and protect the villagers trapped with them, franticly shoring up the walls and taking out zombies with whatever's lying around.

So I improvised some siege survival mechanics.

The tavern has 20 HP, represented by a d20 placed in the centre of the table. As the tavern took damage and was shore up round by round it was fun to change the number on the die and have tension when it went down quite low.

I rolled 3d8 (1 HD per player, in line with Black Hack's recommendation of "HD budget" for a random encounter) to determine the number of zombies that were attacking, as an abstraction. I ended up with 20 again (very Magic: the Gathering, 20 HP a side...). As PCs whittled away the number of zombies from the pool, the number would go down. I treated it as that specific number of zombies, all with just 1 HP--but 20 zombies isn't really a "horde" so I kept the number of zombies vague for the players, with occasional hints like "there's about half of them left" or "you've downed most of them".

Each round, (which I abstracted as Minutes in the Black Hack way) each PC could do one thing, as usual, with the following alterations:

If they attack the horde of zombies, they make the attempt as normal, with each point of successful damage taking out that number of zombies from the pool.

In addition, each PC could ALSO command some underlings. In this case, there were three groups of underlings in the tavern: some visiting woodgrues, some burly porters, and a few villagers. One group for each of my PCs. In order to get any given group to listen, first a commander has to make a charisma test.

If they succeed then they can either get the underlings to do something, like attack the horde, or shore up the tavern's defenses. No matter what they did, the porters had a d8, the woodgrues a d6, and the villagers a d4. So if you get the villagers to shore up the tavern they roll a d4 and add that result to the tavern's HP--but instead you can get the villagers to attack the horde, in which case they'll do d4 damage to the pool of zombies. (I improvised sensible average numbers for the underlings attacks, like 8 for the villagers, 12 for woodgrues ranged attacks, etc).

At the end of each round, the zombie horde attacked, with no chance of failure since they're just battering the side of the tavern. I'd roll a d6 for each surviving HD of zombies. So while the number of zombies was above 16 I rolled three dice for damage, when it went below I rolled two dice, and when there were less than 8 I rolled a single die. In addition, I would use a d6 for damage dice while more than half the horde was intact, but once less than half were left I used d4s.

That's it!

This simple on-the-fly abstraction led to interesting decisions being made each round, a constant juggling of taking out zombies and shoring up the tavern, while finding other ways to end the seige (Thistlemote used her pied piper ability to lead away some zombies to drown in the river, while the elf Smiles-Tolerantly snuck out with some porters to find the thing that the leader of the zombie horde was after).

If I were to use it again, the numbers could use some rejiggering as at times it felt too easy to shore up the tavern for a lot of HP -- once there were less than half the zombies left it basically was inevitable that the players would succeed, sucking much of the tension away. I also had the NPC tavern owner act on his own each round, shoring up for a d6 of HP each time, which helped the PCs a -lot-. I think maybe individuals should only be able to shore up for a d4, or not at all and let it only be an underling group ability. Maybe some sort of test for a group to successfully shore up would be good too.

One thing I wish I'd thought of was to use morale checks for the underlings. Once a PC had succeeded in their charisma check to command a group, they never had to do one again and their underlings would always do what was commanded. I would do morale checks for the underlings, probably when they fail an attack or when zombies reach a certain threshold of damage. I'd planned on making them all do morale checks if the zombies breached the walls (at which point they'd start taking out underlings)--but the zombies never got in. I think the closest they got was when the tavern was at 5 HP, but the following round three different groups all shored it up and it was nearly full again.

I should say that this all was inspired by a distant memory of a seige system I'd read about on some OSR blog that I fully can't find anymore, so if I've copied someone else's work entirely-- whoops!

In any case, there you go: an easy, hackable system for a seige!

Hanging by a: #RPGaDAY2020 3 - Thread

Today's #RPGaDAY2020 prompt is

Thread

Some years ago for the 200 Word RPG competition I came up with a mythologically-themed game called Strands of Fate, where the main resolution mechanic was two people each hold opposite ends of a length of string, pull sharply til it breaks, and compare the two halves to see who won.

I still think this is cool as hell and I want to learn how to lay out a nice PDF so I can put it up on itchio.

Some changes I'd make for clarity or to make it easier to play:

• a set of d12 tables of deity-concepts, to give the players guidance of what sort of concepts to use. Note the deliberate omission of Good and Evil:

d12 Deity Concepts:	Abstract	Worldly	Elemental
1	Love	Household	Fire
2	Honour	Agriculture	Water
3	Death	Hunting	Earth
4	Secrets	Sun	Air
5	War	Moon	Light
6	Life	Pain	Dark
7	Inspiration	Feasting	Thunder
8	Lies	Cooking	Slime
9	Peace	Healing	Void
10	Chaos	Fertility	Ice
11	Law	Craftwork	Magnetism
12	Revenge	Storms	Metal

• guidance for deciding on your deity's concepts:

"Each of you is a deity, responsible for some concept. It could be something abstract, like Love or Honour. It could be something mundane, like cheese or doorknobs. If you aren't sure, roll a d12 once, or twice and combine."

• changes to who you control and how:

"[...] Deities each have two Chosen, mortals who are their pawns in a story of adventure, betrayal, magic, and secrets. A Chosen could be a legendary champion, or they could be a milkmaid. They could be born of the gods and aware of their destiny, or they could be entirely unaware that they have been touched by the divine. Your pawns are yours to carry out your will, and do what you decree unless your will comes into conflict with another deity. Give your Chosen names, so that it hurts when they fail."

• clarity on collaborative narrative and structuring play:

"[...] A deity chosen by fate offers a simple quest: an artifact must be found, a war brought to an end, a competition won... In turn, each deity adds to the quest a detail related to their concept. Then a deity is chosen by fate to be the antagonist, who will offer obstacles to success. The protagonist's deity attempts to help, and other deities choose their own paths, making bargains and threats as they see fit. Take turns describing what the Chosen attempt to do, or what is happening in the world."

The result might be longer than 200 words but a little more playable. Now I just need to learn how to design a nice one-page rpg pdf.

Technoccult: Gygax 75 Challenge Week 1

A couple of months ago Ray Otus released the Gygax 75 Challenge, a 5-week workbook guiding one through making a small campaign setting based on the advice of an article Gary Gygax published in a zine less than a year after D&D came out.

It looks super fun so I printed it out and bound it with a pamphlet stitch and flipped through and saw a one-line suggestion that it could be a cyberpunk setting instead of standard fantasy. I shared my excitement about this with Sean Smith (creator of such wonders as Quarrel & Fable, Gully-Toads, and Exuviae), who it turns out had -also- decided to do the Gygax 75 with a cyberpunk setting.

WELL

I decided it would be fun to do a setting linked to his.  Mine takes place 100 years after a calamity destroys whatever cyberpunk civilization existed, and might even feature the same location as a ruin. Fuck knows if this will actually realize in that way but it's a hell of a good idea to start off running with.

What would the the post-apocalypse be like after a cyberpunk future?

Anyway, Gygax 75 Week 1:

i. "Get/create a notebook." This blog is it!  also the simplenote app on my phone. I did consider using a physical notebook and I might do that for maps, but I find it easier to capture ideas in text digitally.

ii. "Develop your pitch." So it's a kind of post-cyber-occult-pocalypse. Here goes:

    1. A century ago, the technologic future suffered an occult calamity.

    2. Humanity scavenges for survival in the ruins of a cyperpunk dystopia.

    3. Electric devil skeletons animated by technocultists lurk in collapsed arcologies and burnt-out server farms.

    4. There is a belief that if the dark ritual that caused the calamity can be discovered, it can be reversed. Not everyone wants this.

    5. Power sources are valuable because old cyber-tech still exists and can be repaired and run; batteries are sparingly traded for other goods; "if it runs a current it's currency".

    6. Forests of broken solar-panel trees snaked through with exposed wires; vast expanses of grey ash made of former office tower blocks.

    7. Technoccult magicks are accomplished through rituals that blend blood with computing; sorcery is just another kind of hacking; demons are indistinguishable from rogue AIs.

iii. "Gather your sources of inspiration." Not to be viewed by players, so close your eyes I guess.

    1. Mad Max series (George Miller). Post-apocalyptic settings full of freaks in gonzo costumes roaming around a ruined landscape owe much to Mad Max.

    2. Dangerous Days (Perturbator). The visual aesthetics of dark synthwave are just right on in general but Dangerous Days in particular--I mean there's one image that literally says "SATAN IS A COMPUTER"

    3. Polybius (urban legend). The idea of a satantic mind-control arcade game released as a psychological experiment in portland in the 80s is THE BEST. also other games where demonic forces bleed into the real world like Pony Island and Undertale

    4. The neon graveyard (Las Vegas). What would the bright neon cityscape of a cyberpunk dystopia look like post-collapse? I reckon it'd be like the vegas neon graveyard.

    5. The Matrix trilogy (the Wachowskis). Specifically the real world outside the matrix with that wild underground city and giant vat-walls full of dreaming battery-humans.

    6. Blade Runner (Ridley Scott). What if this society collapsed? Those giant pyramids and video screens, dark and abandoned?

    7. the occult origins of personal computing (Al Robertson). This cyberpunk author has spoken on the idea that the pioneers of the internet, virtual reality, and mass technology were inspired by occult and psychedelic movements. Never mind if it's true or not, that idea's cool as hell.

extra credit. "Assemble a mood board" yes good

That'll do for now I think! Maybe a hack of Mutant Future could run this pretty good.

Crook: Fleshing Out Clients and Jobs

In Crook, the start of any story is our protagonist looking at their list of job offers and choosing one to pursue.

I have been thinking of this like a more focused version of the rumours a party of adventurers might hear while playing in a sandbox game. These are the hooks that lead them to interesting, potentially pre-prepared places (stocked dungeons, bounded explorable locations like forests or swamps, small towns with secret cults, etc). In Crook, because we're narrowing our focus to jobs that -patrons- offer, a way to still capture a similar sense of freedom, exploration and discovery like in a "true" sandbox game is to make a -really engaging- job board.

So what details make a job listing interesting?

The generator I detailed in a previous post provides details that allow the player to make some risk/reward decisions--the outcome literally tells you how risky the job is and what the reward will be--but aside from a very brief description of the type of patron and the kind of job, there are no evocative details to actually act as hooks.

I think the details that do the most work in this regard would include:

    -the patron: their profession/occupation, and their relationship to the crook and any factions (and potentially their personality quirks).

    -the job: the key people or objects involved, an interesting location, the obstacles, and a theme.

My instinct as always is to turn to random generators to create some inspiration for each of these factors that the GM can flesh out into details. However, that's not strictly necessary. In the same way that you can stock the rumour tables in your sandbox game with hooks leading to prepared dungeon crawls and encounters and other already-existing stuff, the crook's job board can have listings that would lead the crook to prepared adventures. Pretty much any "find this item" or "interact with this person" job can easily be fitted onto any existing adventure module.

BUUUUT it's pretty fun to create a whole adventure from just a few random prompts that then interact both the GM's setting knowledge and with the decisions of our motivated crook.

The structure I used as a starting point to make jobs for Penny was:

    patron-type occupation; descriptor descriptor place; job-type; risk; opposition; distance; reward

A lot of this is provided by the job generator: ie patron-type is criminal/noble/merchant/etc and job-type is theft/smuggle/escort/etc--risk, distance, and reward are settled too.

Sometimes I would use the "Sample Crimes", "Location" and "Potential Foes" tables at the back of Scarlet Heroes to generate some of these details, but those crimes are more for the PC to -investigate- rather than commit (the list includes crimes like "forced marriage", "treason", "dark worship", and "rape"--I'm not going to include those as jobs for the PC to do in my games and I recommend you don't either).

But mostly I'd generate the details from scratch using several different tables:

The patron's occupation came from a list of "101 fantasy jobs and professions" made by Ennead Games (now no longer available individually, though it -is- part of a $500+ bundle)--which I liked not only for the huge list of occupations but also because each one included a short hook this kind of NPC could offer (ie a gravedigger mentions that bodies are being dug up, a blacksmith needs a rare alloy for a special weapon, a teacher asks for help locating a missing child...).  This would combine with the patron-type from the job generator, ie "criminal lore master", "noble/merchant musician", and "military blacksmith". This provided a really good jumping-off point--you can already imagine the kind of work each of these combos might offer. The rest of the patron's details would come from numerous other generators that would provide personality quirks, names, ancestry/culture, etc.

The details of the job beyond just whether it's theft/smuggling/etc is a pair of descriptors, a place, and the opposition. Most of the time I would generate these using my favourite GM tool ever, Instant Game (another product that was -almost- not available anymore, as its creators and their publishing imprint Animalball Partners have vanished from the internet--but a copy of the original freely-available PDF is on RPGGeek). It had d100 tables for all the relevant categories and would result in evocative prompts like "gloomy ritual correctional system, opposition mythical legend", "steady tough government office, opposition mindless horde", and "awesome secret armoury, opposition invaders/outsiders".

These prompts about the job, in combination with the details of the patron, are enough to create a really evocative hook for our crook, and gets you about 80% of the way to what you need to run the session.

I would refine the results into a more specific job offer, using details of the world that were established through play in previous sessions.  For example "awesome secret armoury" was part of a job offer that turned into:

    "Maganak Five Names, elven diplomat, wants a wand delivered to a secret city defense armoury. but city is overrun by oozes. reward: some coin, and whatever you steal."

The city overrun by oozes was just an offhand comment in an earlier session of the game that I jotted down to keep for later.  Meanwhile "gloomy ritual correctional system" combined with other prompts to become:

    "Cotme Ower, halfling ferryman. smuggles contraband and people to/from island prison of Glama-worshipping cult of liars. wants help to con prison guards of a particular shipment. reward: standard fee and one set of enchanted armour"

Don't those sound like fun jobs to get involved in? Not only that but they give pretty clear direction for what the GM could prepare for the session if the crook chooses to do that job.

Now the question is, as I develop Crook into a Thing: should it have its own tables, or can I just recommend the use of these kinds of tables? I don't think I could do a unique job of filling a d100 table better than the tables I use, but also -none- of the tables that form the core of the job generator are widely available anymore. Should Crook include its own generators to provide prompts, or just include guidance on what makes a good job hook?

I haven't decided yet, and out of cowardice will put the question aside and work on something else entirely for the next several posts!

Guiding Principles for Crooks

It occurs to me that as I go forward trying to make the systems I've created to run a thief job duet game for my partner into something other people can use, it would be wise to come up with some guiding principles. Or at least, make concrete the ones I've been implicitly using.

***

Crook

A game where a lone scoundrel does unusual jobs for unusual people.

1. Player-focused preparation. There is only one player; the GM should focus on things -that specific- player is likely to be interested in.

2. Alternative challenges. There is only one player; it is not possible to solve every problem by hitting it.

3. Alternative consequences. There is only one player; removing them from play should be avoided, but bad things can and will happen to them.

4. Rulings over rules. In the OSR/DIY sense: don't use a rule where you can make it work well on the fly.

5. Be permissive. Yes, and/but. No locked doors without stakes.

***

Thoughts on what these mean for making decisions when designing Crook:

1: What sorts of things is our crook going to be interested in?  The people who offer them jobs, and the nature of those jobs (I've been working on a job generator for this). The people and things that can help them accomplish those jobs. Something that they can do or work towards with the rewards from those jobs (are they paying off a debt? are they atoning for their past? do they want to prove themselves to a specific person? this likely should be a key trait established in when the player makes their crook). Organizations they can be part of, influence or be influenced by that will affect the other things they're interested in (thieves guilds, town guard, noble families, merchants, gangs, etc).

It's also important to tailor to the specific tastes of the player in your duet. Do they like dungeoncrawling more than courtly intrigue? Do they run off their mouth and start fights? Have they trained for years to become the perfect silent assassin? The jobs they're offered and the challenges they face should reflect the tastes of the player-as-a-person.

2: Combat shouldn't always be avoided, but there should be a focus on solving problems in a way that doesn't get the crook killed or incarcerated. This is important in all kinds of roleplaying adventure games, but I feel it's especially important in a duet. Ingenuity, insight, and non-linear thinking can be encouraged by giving the crook non-combat tools: immovable rods, vials of grease, and 1/day misty step as opposed to flasks of alchemists fire, acid arrows, and enchanted daggers (though if such standard combat items are given sparingly, that will encourage their use in creative ways).

This also can be reflected in environment design. Firey laterns swinging on long chains; precarious boulders above the narrow pass; loose bricks around the other side of the house. Traps that can be reset or redirected. Multiple paths in and out, and ways to manipulate the environment totally--what if there's a button on a pedestal that turns all the liquid in a 20 ft radius into blood? What if the inscription on the ceiling, when translated, teaches a chant that blocks out the sun for 2 minutes and then you forget the chant forever?

3: Preventing your one player from doing what they want to do by killing them or otherwise taking them out of play only serves to stop the game. Instead, have things break, or lost, or be stolen. Have important other people die. If a brutal combat does occur, have the crook be scarred or lose a limb or an eye. Or perhaps the baddies choose not to kill: it's always fun to have our protagonist hogtied and left to die in the desert--or perhaps thrown into a barrel, which is then chucked into a river heading toward a waterfall.

4: This is as much a reminder to myself to pare down rules wherever I can as it is guidance for running the game. That said, while making systems for Crook, I can and probably will go overboard, with full knowledge that I'll have to cut away all the cruft later. A rule of thumb I like for this is from Goblin Punch: "only write a rule when it is better than what you could come up with on the fly". And "better" can be defined in a number of ways as detailed in that post.

5: Others have been far more sophisticated than I with this, but nothing annoys me more than a locked door that is hard to open and if you fail there's no consequence other than not getting through the door. At least put some time pressure on: is the guardian automaton searching for the crook? Is a boulder rolling down the hallway towards us? Or give consequences for failure: the lock breaks and now you've made a wall. Or picking it sloppily triggers a visible blowdart aimed at the lock, or releases acid into the font of healing mineral water you're trying to get to. NO LOCKED DOORS WITHOUT STAKES.

If they want to do something and there's no consequence for failure, they do it! If you really want it to hurt for your Crook to try doing something mundane you can roll to see how many tries it takes and make them lose some spare change down a chasm each time they stumble (and I hope it's clear that that kind of pettiness is precisely what should be avoided). This goes for -abstract- doors especially. If our crook has a hunch about what kind of liquor the gang leader likes to drink as a digestif, they either can find out by asking the GM if they know or can do something interesting to find out (like sneaking into the leader's office and reading their diary, or bribing the manager of the member's-only bar, or beating it out of a lackey)--it should -not- be locked behind a knowledge roll that can be failed.

I think that'll do for now.

OH WAIT one thing I like about the name Crook is that it reminds me of "by hook or by crook" which is exactly the way in which our protagonist should try to accomplish things.

Another Job for Penny: Detailing Jobs for Thieves, Interpreting the Value of Favours, and the Concept of Notoriety

Last time, I wrote about how hacking a sci-fi OSR mission generator for a tabletop duet game led to discovering a recursive random table that alters itself.

This time I want to flesh out in more detail how several random tables combined to generate interesting jobs for Penny the thief, and try tweaking the way some of the tables work.

The results of rolling on the job tables gives you only this information: a type of patron, a type of job, and its risk, distance, and reward. The patron table was detailed last time, but I'll include it here with the other tables (which I hacked from the sci-fi generator):

***

Thief Job Generator 0.2

Patron: 1d6
    1-2: criminal
    3:  noble/merchant
    4: government
    5: military
    6: former patron

    (if 6, roll on Former Patrons subtable. every time a job is accepted from a new patron, they're added to the Former Patrons subtable.)

Job Type: 1d10 (criminal: -1 to roll; military or government: +1 to roll)

   

    1: piracy

    2: theft

    3: confidence scam

    4: smuggling

    5: bizarre

    6: bounty

    7: escort

    8: delivery

    9: rescue

    10: disaster relief

Risk Level (ie; Number of Encounters/Challenges): 1d6

    1-2: three

    3: four

    4: five

    5-6: six

    (add Notoriety level to the roll)

Distance from Current Location: 1d6

    1: current location

    2: nearest village

    3: nearest city

    4: 1 weeks' travel

    5: 2 weeks' travel

    6: a months' travel

Reward: 1d6 & based on Risk & Distance rolls & Notoriety of thief:

        X = (risk+notoriety)*distance

    1-2: wealth worth X*40g

    3-4: favour (proportional to X)

    5: gear worth X*60g

    6: add 1 to Notoriety and roll again

***

There's a couple of things I want to point out and work on:

Changing the range of results on the Patrons table so that "criminal" happens on 1 and "former patron" happens of 5-6 would make jobs from existing patrons more likely, which can allow fleshing out those characters from interacting with them more often--which seems like it would be pretty fun.  In practice when using the table, sometimes a new patron would be generated that seems similar to an existing one, and so I'd just make it a job from that existing patron.

Shifting the range of outcomes on the Job Type table by just adding or subtracting 1 from the roll to make the extremes unavailable is a cool idea. I wonder what it would be like if it was a roll with a "normal" distribution like 2d6?  That would be a way to make certain types of jobs more likely and certain types of jobs more rare. I might do this and set "theft" to the centre of the distribution at 7 to make it the most likely kind of job.

You could make certain types of jobs -only- offered by certain patrons by assigning them an outcome outside of the normal range and using the +1/-1 trick. For example, 2d6 can give you outcomes ranging from 2 to 12. If you want only criminal patrons to offer an assassination job -and- make it really rare, you can assign that to an outcome of 1, and give the criminal patron a -1 roll modifier on the Job Type table.

The Risk Level can be interpreted differently based on the type of job. If it's a dungeon delve to retrieve an item, then the number of encounters could be the number of "interesting" rooms in the dungeon (ie a fight, a trap, an environmental challenge, etc). If it's a mission involving navigating the treacherous relationships between a number of gangs, then it could be the number of parties involved. It could be the number of locations that must be visited to collect parts of a document.  The Risk number could even be more abstract and refer to increasingly dangerous random encounter tables (ie; if it's Risk 1, roll on the Basic Encounter table, 2 roll twice, if it's 3, roll on the Challenging Encounter table, 4 roll twice, 5 roll on Deadly Encounter, 6 roll twice--or something like that). Note that the roll is added to the thief's Notoriety level--more on that later.

The Distance table is interesting. I adapted it for the kind of travel scale that made sense for a game where a thief goes from place to place doing jobs for patrons. This encourages travel from point to point on the world map, and this travel can either be abstracted away entirely, made into a ration-using navigation minigame, or turned into a full hexcrawl, as per the preference of your duet.

The Reward table needs tweaking to help with interpreting the results. I really like that it's based proportionally on the Risk and Distance results (and Notoriety--we'll get to it!). This is easy to understand for wealth and gear worth some multiple of the number, (and this multiplier should be set sensibly for the currency of your game: probably some fraction of the cost of a sword or potion, or of the debt your thief is paying off) But what does it mean for "Favour Owed"--the most interesting result on the table?

Before tackling that, I wanted to understand the way the results work. The result of multiplying Risk by Distance ranges from 1 to 36, but it's skewed--the most likely results are 6 and 12 (rather than the 18 you'd expect from a balanced distribution). On a graph, the peak is to the left and there is a long tail to the right.  This means that our thief can regularly expect low-to-middling value rewards but allows for a wide range of surprises to occur. You can get a little as 40 g, which is a job a thief probably wouldn't take just for the money, or as much as 2160g worth of gear, which could completely re-outfit our thief--but most likely you're looking in the 200 to 900 g range. However, a bunch of results just aren't possible to get, because you're multiplying two d6 rolls--you can't get 35, or 19, or 7... this results in less round numbers for currency value rewards, which is great for avoiding round numbers. Why offer a reward of 250 g when you can offer 240 g? And if you end up with 480 g worth of gear, some if it will be fun weird filler stuff because most equipment lists cost round numbers.

The question then becomes how to interpet this result as the value of a favour. An easy way to get around that is to treat it just like wealth or gear, but delayed or specific to certain context. Ie; the patron can pay off a bounty on your head worth X*50g, or source a special potion you need, or get you a specialist hireling for job you're doing, or a place worth that much to use as a safehouse, or perhaps a permanent discount at a particular merchant.

But the thing that makes favours interesting as a reward is their potential non-monetary value and their flexibility.  You can forsee our thief calling in a favour to arrange a meeting with an elusive clan leader, or to get safe passage through a warzone, or to hide in the secret basement of the shop when the royal guard is sweeping the town, or store something in the count's personal vault. And the thief will certainly come up with unexpected favours to ask of their patrons. Ultimately it might not be possible to "quantify" the value of such a favour, so probably the best we can do is ballpark the range of outcomes, provide some examples and leave it to the GM's discretion.

Lets say for now we carve out the range thus:

  

Patron Favour Value:

    1-6: Small Favour

    7-19: A Favour

    20+: Extraordinary Favour

This is probably the thing that needs the most work. It would probably be easier to just add Risk+Distance and centre this on a normal 2d6 distribution. OR I could just collapse it entirely! A result of "favour" is exactly that, no monetary value considered, and it's up to the duet to figure it out.  I kind of like the simplicity of that, but maybe there's an equally elegant way of still using the Risk*Distance number.

Finally: Notoriety.  Notoriety was my way of figuring out what "Reward Risk" meant in the original sci-fi mission generator I hacked for this. The really interesting recursive result on a 6 to "roll again and add 1 to Reward Risk for all future missions" felt like an abstraction that could be made specific and meaningful in the world of thiefy adventuring. We could take that number and store it separately from the Reward table and make it matter elsewhere. My solution was to make it a kind of reputation mechanic: as the thief does more jobs throughout the world, their Notoriety increases. As they become more Notorious, the jobs that patrons offer are more dangerous--and more rewarding. Not only that, but successfully completing a job gives a chance of Notoriety increasing, as part of the reward!

There is scope for Notoriety to interact with other game mechanics. If there are morale checks, perhaps rando bandits are less likely to stand their ground against a notorious thief. If there are recognition checks, perhaps merchants are more likely to provide a discount, or share the secret menu--but so too are town guards more likely to see through a hasty disguise. Depending on the amount of record-keeping you want, Notoriety can vary in different regions of the world based on where jobs are completed.  Perhaps certain patrons no longer want to offer jobs to a thief that everyone has heard of. And of course, depending on your particular thiefy exploits, GM fiat can award a point of Notoriety as the result of doing something particularly public. There's even the opportunity for the thief to do things to -lower- their Notoriety because it's making things difficult for them.

It turned out to be quite a meaty way to use a single number!

Anyway: here's a sample set of outcomes from rolling on all these tables:

> criminal, piracy, risk lvl 6: six encounters, two weeks travel, gear valuing 1800g

> noble/merchant, bizarre, risk lvl 5: six encounters, next village, +1 Notoriety and a favour

>noble/merchant, theft, risk lvl 1: three encounters, current location, a small favour

These starting points leave quite a bit of fleshing out to do. Who actually is the patron, and what is the specific nature of the job?

Next time: MORE TABLES

A Job for Penny: Discovering Recursive Random Tables

In a period of time in which it was difficult to play tabletop games with our friends due to time and distance, my partner and I made up a game where I GM'd her adventures as Penny, a master thief who would take jobs for fun and profit. We used Scarlet Heroes, whatever maps I could find, and a large amount of random tables to allow Penny to play in a fairly open sandbox.

The name of this blog comes from this game.

Many of my interests in RPG design and GMing were developed, if not sparked, by Penny's Ventures: one-on-one games (which Kirk Johnson-Weider, in his excellent series of columns on RPGnet, called -duets-), player-focused prep (ie; trying to create only what would matter to the player--especially important when there is only one), timer mechanics for pacing (very much related to fronts from Dungeon World and the clocks in Blades in the Dark) and--most enduringly--the use of several random tables mashed together to quickly generate a number of hooks and encounters.

Penny would receive criminal job offers in dead-drops she had secreted throughout the world. Each job would be from a patron (that she either knew already or was someone new) and included broad details of the nature of the job, potential rewards, and how far it was to travel from her current location. She could choose whichever one caught her interest, at which point we would use the selected job, a few more random tables, and the current context of the gameworld to set up the details of the game session--either right there at the table (in a quick and dirty manner), or well beforehand if I had texted my partner with a list of jobs and they picked one for the next session.

I want to dig into how I generated Penny's job offers, because it was key to make them interesting and fun as well as tie in to Penny's background and the gameworld.

It started with researching patrons and jobs as used in sci-fi freelancer games like Traveller. The patron-job structure needed for Penny was a clear analogue and I figured I didn't need to reinvent the wheel when I could just reskin a sci-fi one for the generic fantasy realm Penny played in. I ended up choosing the Mission Generator from Thunderegg's OSR Sci Fi GM Screen they made for running White*Star--it was freely available (at the time--I'm unable to find the pdf they offered now but the blurb on the RPGGeek page confirms my memory), very simple, and very hackable.

It boils down to 5 random tables:

1d4 to get a patron. (Corporate, Criminal, Government, or Military)
1d10 for what they want. (ie; Smuggling, Escort, Con, etc)
1d6 for the risk (how many encounters it will entail).
1d6 for how distant the job is. (your current planet, in the next star system, etc)
1d6 for the reward.

I liked that the "what they want" roll was modified by the type of patron. -1 for Criminal, +1 for Military or Government. The table is written so that the extreme outcomes (and therefore, certain kind of jobs) are more or less likely depending on the patron. Some of the tables made certain outcomes more likely by giving the same result for a range of rolls (ie; a roll of 1-3 gets a certain result).

Also, the reward was a) not always monetary (one outcome was "favour owed" which I LOVE), but also b) proportional to the Risk roll+Distance roll, which is a neat way to automatically ensure that harder jobs are worth more.

The thing that -really- caught my attention was the reward table result for rolling a 6: "Roll again, plus add +1 to Reward Risk for all future missions". Over time, missions get more difficult and take a longer time, in a way that is disconnected from the PC's level. That is, on the assumption that this is actually permanently increasing the Risk roll (AKA nudging upward the likey number of encounters the mission will entail), and not just inflating the Reward on its own (because "Reward Risk" is not explained).

In any case, the idea that the result of a roll on a random table could alter future rolls on that table is -very cool-. The use of nested random tables is long-established, where a certain result on a top-level table gets you to roll on a different sub-table. There are also results like "roll again on this table" or the more interesting "roll again and combine". But here we have random tables that are -recursive-; that not only refer to themselves but can -alter- themselves.

Has anyone seen recursive tables before? Let me know--I couldn't find any in a cursory skim of bookshelf.

***

The table determining the patron offering Penny a job is as follows:

1d6: Patron
1-2: criminal
3:  noble/merchant
4: government
5: military
6: former patron

If the result is 6, we roll on the Former Patrons subtable. Every time Penny accepts a job from a new patron (1-5), they're added to the Former Patrons subtable.

As the game progresses, Penny's list of former patrons grows, and she will receive job offers from people she's worked for before. This gives a nice sense of continuity, and the potential for some interesting decisions and mechanics. What if refusing to take enough jobs from a former patron culls them from the table? Or if choosing between two former patrons will cause conflict between them--say, if one patron asks Penny to steal from another?

Next time, I'll talk about how I flesh out the patrons and their jobs, and experiment with the structure of the tables.

In My *DREAMS

After some time away (during which OSR turned within and G+ died), I wanted to see what was going on, and found SWORDDREAM (which for my own reference, tounge-in-cheekly backronyms to Second Wave of RPG Design, DIY Rules Everything Around Me).

(I found this post most helpful in understanding what *DREAM is and might be and what it isn't and shouldn't. Also the splat is there because not everyone dreams of swords.)

There are nine principles that people have pinned to the door and I wanted to put them here (again for my own reference have you seen how many fucking blogs are in my roll I can't keep track of anything) and jot down some thoughts on each one if I had any.

Copied from a post on Fish in the Pot, with my notes under each one:

THE NINE PRINCIPLES OF *DREAM

1. *DREAM stands against hate & prejudice in all forms. We seek to actively oppose bigotry & harassment in gaming communities. We create kind spaces.
        The less people like Pundit and Zak in the scene the better, and the more diversity among designers and players the better. Even if this started as a kneejerk reaction to the shitheads (which it really doesn't feel like), it's important to make this value crystal clear.

2. *DREAM works to be radically inclusive. We seek support and encourage creators, GMs, Players, and organizers from marginalized groups. And we seek to get better at this all the time.
        Same as above thought. Also: how can -I- be better at this?

3. *DREAM encourages the use of sensible tools for communication and consent.
        The X Card comes to mind. Are there other tools?

4. *DREAM opposes harassment and strives for non-toxic discourse. We value best intentions, we call in before calling out, and we start discussions before we make accusations. We seek to empower everyone to curate their spaces.
        Thoughts 1 and 2 again. Curating our own spaces is important. Nobody has to listen to shitheads if they don't want to, especially not in their own house. This isn't some rationalist agora. I feel like Principles 2-4 are ways of implementing the broader value expressed in 1.

5. *DREAM values creators & their work. We support equitable pay for professional creators and fair treatment for hobbyists.
        "Fuck you, pay me." But also, fair treatment for hobbyists means that if people hack your work, or criticize it--don't go after them.

6. *DREAM values a DIY approach to creation. We question gatekeeping, we take alternative approaches when traditional publishing models fail, and we believe anyone can make great games.

7. *DREAM values experimentation in game design & world-building.
        I like this a great deal.

8. *DREAM isn’t defined by, but is interested in: anti-canons, emergent story, generative worlds, kitbashing, non-violent play options, and more. And it is fine if some of these things contradict each other.
        So much of these specific interests are my own that I really want this scene to persist (and of course I should contribute to the pile if I really mean it), but to pick out one that challenges my preconceptions: -emergent story-. I have used Fate a bunch and enjoyed many so-called "storygames", but this feels like something different. Is it in the OSRian sense, where the story comes out of what the players actually do in response to the neutral-abiter-DM's in-game situations -as opposed to- having written out a plot and characters etc? Not like to railroad the PCs but like... are emergent narratives the opposite of adventure paths and box text? This, above all, for me, warrants exploration. A delight of OSR/DIY/artpunk(and now *DREAM) is the rich, dense items in random generation tables. For improvisational purposes, a detailed-yet-brief prompt is a strong start... for emergent narrative? I have usually defaulted to very neutral items in my tables (but was I using those for generative worlds? or what even is that if I misunderstand?) and let improvisation and the depth of the setting inspire details. Anyway, there's loads of stuff to explore in this space.

9. There is no one *DREAM. Anyone who commits to these principles is *DREAMing.
        Excellent.

I look forward to seeing what comes out of the *DREAMJAM so we can see what up in this scene.

Reasons to Do Gamethings: a calendar of narrative game design challenges and writing prompts

A seasonal calendar of recurring game jams, blogging prompts, design competitions, and challenges to spur your work on narrative and tabletop games.

You might find it useful too.   UPDATED July 25th 2020

This is fairly extensive (but necessarily incomplete). It includes board games, RPGS, storygames, and interactive fiction. I have deliberately excluded game jams focused on graphical video games, but if that's your jam (HA) then you can check out the calendar at Indie Game Jams. I've tried only to include -active- competitions that have happened more than once. There are loads of new game jams on itch.io going on all the time as well--and Max has a collection of current physical game jams on itch.  I've guessed at the likely date of some competitions based on previous years. Some long-running competitions have ended or are no longer updated, but have extensive archives of games worth looking at--they are listed at the end.

(Also, someone should host another Threeforged because that was a great idea, and the One Room Game IF Competition was great and should come back in some form. Even more also, I'm surprised at how many individual, unrelated One-Page RPG competitions have been started and fizzled out. I want there to be a big official one. There is a One Page RPG Jam again, on itch.io! But now I'll hope for Game Chef to return.)

Do let me know if I've missed any regular things!

ONGOING / TRY ANY TIME

    The Gygax 75 Challenge    https://rayotus.itch.io/gygax75 (make an rpg campaign setting in 5 weeks, working through a booklet)

    RPG Blog Carnival    https://ofdiceanddragons.com/rpg-blog-carnival/ (monthly topics hosted by active bloggers)

    RPG Generator    https://sadpress.itch.io/rpg-generator-alpha (randomly generated game idea)

    Meta Prompt Generator    https://crateredland.blogspot.com/2020/07/meta-prompt-generator.html (write an rpg post about...)

    Boardgame Geek Monthly 24hr Challenge (anytime w/in month)    https://boardgamegeek.com/thread/2307821/current-contest-info (also several other rotating contests are listed in this post, including faves like the Mint Tin Challenge and the 9-Card Challenge)

    Game Crafter Community Contests    https://www.thegamecrafter.com/contests (boardgames, roughly every 3-4 months)

    One Month Story Challenge    http://howtomakeanrpg.com/a/one-month-story-challenge.html (nobody has used the hashtag since 2015, but the challenge is self-guided for creating a bunch of narrative ideas)

WINTER

    Secret Santicore/Santicorn     http://santicore.blogspot.ca/ (OSR rpg content, now mostly run on the OSR Discord but archives up to 2017 still online. 2018/2019 collected on various blogs)

    Cardboard Edison submit (Jan 31 deadline)      http://cardboardedison.com/award/ (unpublished board games)

SPRING

    Spring Thing (Mar 1 deadline, submit by Apr 1)       http://springthing.net (interactive fiction)

    Secret Jackalope (an Easter-ish version of Secret Santicorn for OSR rpg content)

SUMMER

    NarraScope Game Jam (May-Jun)    https://narrascope.org/ (interactive fiction)

    RPG Superstar (deadline June)    https://rpgsuperstar.com/ (rpg content design competition)

    One Page Dungeon Contest (deadline Jun/Jul-ish)    https://dungeoncontest.com/

    IntroComp  (deadline Jul 31 but pre-register in Jun)    http://introcomp.org/ (first room of an interaction fiction)

    #RPGaDay (August)    https://melestrua.wordpress.com/category/rpgaday/ (daily prompts for blogging/game design)

    Saga Forge Scribe (August 24 deadline)    https://www.wearesaga.com/sagaforge (one-shot module competition, Halloween theme)

    One Page RPG Jam (deadline Aug 31)    https://itch.io/jam/one-page-rpg-jam-2020

    200 Word RPG (did not run 2020 but claims it'll be back)    https://200wordrpg.github.io/

(and ongoing submissions at reddit.com/r/200wordrpg)

AUTUMN

    The Mega RPG Jam (ran in Sept 2019)     https://itch.io/jam/mega-rpg-jam/community (creator says will be another one in 2020)

    IFComp (deadline Oct 1 but pre-register in summer)    https://ifcomp.org/ (interactive fiction)

    ECTOCOMP (deadline Oct 31)    https://itch.io/jam/ectocomp-2019-english (Halloween/horror interactive fiction)

   NaGaDeMon (November)    http://nathanrussell.net/naga-demon/# (national game design month)

***

DEFUNCT (but archives available)

    BGDF Game Design Showdown    http://www.bgdf.com/forums/game-design/design-contests (last thread was posted august 2018)

    One Game A Month    http://onegameamonth.com/ (officially ended in 2018)

    24 Hour RPG    http://www.1km1kt.net/cat/24-hour-rpg (last entry was august 2016)

    XYZZY Awards     http://xyzzyawards.org/ (last awarded for 2018)

    New Year's Minicomp     https://intfiction.org/t/eleventh-hour-new-years-minicomp/12848 (last ran in 2017)

    Game Chef      (no archive or website anywhere! I just thought I should mention this great little competition that appears to have completely vanished)

Strands of Fate

This is the full text of a game I just made up for the 2017 200 Word RPG Competition:

***

Strands of Fate

It is a time of myths and legends. Before you lie two cotton threads, each one metre long.

Each of you is a deity, responsible for an important concept (like Love, or Honour) and two Chosen Ones, OR two minor concepts/elements (like Fire, or Hospitality) and one Legendary Hero.

The Heroes and Chosen Ones are your pawns in a story of adventure, betrayal, magic, and secrets. A pawn chosen by fate--a roll of the dice--is the protagonist. A deity chosen by fate creates a sacred artifact that the protagonist must find. Another deity chosen by fate is the antagonist, and works to prevent the protagonist's success. Other deities choose their own paths, and should make bargains. Tell each other the tale.

Whenever there is conflict or the opportunity for interesting failure, two deities wrap the ends of a chosen thread around their fingers, and pull sharply to break it. Whoever ends with the longer piece succeeds--the shorter piece means a setback. If the pieces are the same length, someone is granted a boon. Both pieces of thread are returned to the table. If the thread doesn't break, there is a catastrophe.

***

Inspired by breaking a thread off a frayed jacket, and written entirely in about 45 minutes.

If you try playing it, let me know how it goes!

Digging A Hole

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning.

It's halfway through November now, and I should probably actually stop researching, planning, ideating, etc., and just got on with it. Getting to the point of making something is always a hard transition for me. Luckily, I'm far from the only person to have to deal with this. Em Short has an excellent post on how to get from idea to implementation. The method that looks the most doable is to actually, in your chosen medium, implement the most basic but complete and working version of your game.

This reminds me of advice in other fields to make a working prototype as quick as possible and then iterate it. Applies in any time of game, any kind of art or design project, any kind of experiment--no theoretical plan survives contact with the real world, so get it into the real world as quick as possible. I hope I get better at doing it quicker with time.

Anyway, this begs the question: what is the minimum viable version of my game? I think an almost totally linear version of the story will do for this. Here's the answer I'll implement (it doesn't have to be right or good or accurate because the whole point is to add to it and change as I go!):

ONE:
     newspaper. town name, family names, suggestion of bad things, suggestion of investigation.
     always goes to TWO

TWO:
     newspaper. corpses are being dug up. flesh out bad things. information on ritual. reveal that protagonist is NOT investigator, but perpetrator.
    goes to THREE

THREE:
     graveyard. look at specific graves, epitaphs. dig up some for ritual.
    goes to FOUR

FOUR:
     graveyard. confronted by real investigator.
     CHOICE: kill investigator--go to END1
                     kill self--go to END2
                     give up--go to END3

all ENDs are a final newspaper page.
END1: ritual completed. bad things avoided--but at what cost?
END2: ritual completed? (interesting idea for full game--depends on how many/which corpses dug up, state of relationship with investigator?) ambiguous/unclear.
END3: ritual incomplete. bad things happen, but conscience clear?

Righto, let's get cracking!

Grave Consequences

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning.

I tried out the tutorial for Texture and found it pretty simple and intuitive to use. I don't think there will be much trouble making it work for the core interaction of the graveyard game, reading a newspaper and learning things (which will be stored as flags). However, this design has consequences: as the game progresses, later choices all need to respond sensibly to every possibly combination of choices made up til that point. I've successfully mocked up a test of newspaper reading in Texture, but I'll definitely need to try out a multiple-choices structure that stores the results of previous choices as flags.

In an attempt to see the story in a way that would help map it onto such a structure, I've given a first stab at a design. It's hung on a simple three-act narrative and has some more specifics about what screens there should be and what sorts of things the player can do on them.

Primary gameplay: Each day, read the newspaper, and then decide how to proceed with respect to the blood ritual.

Plot structure:

Act 1: Introduction of town, major elements of its history and old family lines, the POV character, and the graveyard.
    hits: weird troubles in the town. corpses being dug up from graves. investigation begins.

    transition: it becomes clear that the POV character is the perpetrator, -not- the investigator.

Act 2: Exploring the need for the blood ritual. Dark past of the town, actions of the families. Something bad will happen if the ritual isn't completed--or at least, that's what the PC believes. AMBIGUOUS. PC is -reluctant-, feels forced into ritual.
    hits: patterns of blood drawn in graveyard. link corpses to town events and history. investigator antagonist gets closer.

    climax: choice! to kill investigator to complete ritual now, or continue with corpses to avoid murder but possibly fail at saving town.

Act 3: the ritual either succeeds or fails. either way, there are consequences: for the town, for the PC, for the investigator. it's never quite clear if it really worked--but there are clearly different endings for the results of major choices.
    hits: differently depending on choices, but... PC faces peril and -survives-. investigator resolves relationship with PC. town lives on, changed.

likely necessary screens:
    newspaper;
        pages include headlines, weather, funnies, horoscopes, and obits.
        verbs include read, contemplate, note, leave, ...
    graveyard;
        pages include individual tombstone texts, cemetary overview, possibly a shack, ...
        verbs include read, contemplate, note, leave, dig, bleed, paint, ...
    library???;
        pages include the catalogue, individual books, ...
        verbs include read, contemplate, note, leave, ...

Next: more writing! I need to develop the setting and characters.

Sympathy for the Devil

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning.

I've played a few more pieces of Texture to see how people have been using it. There's not a lot out there yet, especially with regard to the investigation mechanics I'm thinking about using. I guess I'll have to be the one to make them?

That's not to say I haven't stumbled upon a few interesting tidbits. Em Short's Endure involves translating and contextualising a piece of greek text from The Odyssey, and I think a similar mechanic would work for my (provisionally titled) graveyard game.

As a first step towards the design, I'm imagining that the "main screen" of the game will be interacting with a newspaper. You'd be able to [read], for example, the {front page}, {funnies}, and {obituaries}. You'd be able to [think about] certain highlighted people's names, locations, etc. The resulting text would reflect the POV character's perspective on the topics. You could also [note] certain topics, perhaps adding new verbs to your list.

There are several pieces in the Texture library one could essentially consider spam. Like there's one that is just an ad for someone who'll write essays for you. Another that's a little more interesting is a simulation of encountering a consultant at a trade show. I'm not sure it was intentional, but at one point the consultant asks for your contact details and you have the options to [give card], [give fake number], or [leave]--and if you hold [leave], no words are highlighted so you can't actually do it. Aside from being really funny in the context of playing an advertisement presumably written by the consultant you meet in the simulation, the idea of having an action that you can't do is a useful tool (which of course has been used to great effect in other interactive fictions like Rameses and Depression Quest. We'll see if there's an opportunity to use it in the graveyard game.

I've been thinking about the POV character, and the difficulty of encouraging the player to identify with the person they will inhabit despite the whole digging up corpses for a blood ritual thing. I don't want the PC to be like Dexter or Walter White where you root for them almost just because they're the protagonist, in spite of all the horrible things they do. I want the player to understand or at least empathise with the PC when they feel they have no choice and need to do this horrible thing. This can happen when the blood ritual is being done to stop something even -worse- from happening, something that the PC genuinely believes will absolutely happen if the ritual isn't completed.  I want to stay away from the Mythos as well, as a) it's been done and b) I'm not that into it. I'm put in mind of Mr Tuttle in Punchdrunk's immersive theatre production The Drowned Man. My interpretation of his story and his one-to-one scene is that he is aware that some horrible things are happening in town and he wants to stop them, but in order to do so he's gotten into some weird bad blood magic and has cracked under the pressure.

I don't think I'm a good enough writer to adequately give these experiences to players of the graveyard game, but uuuuh aim high I guess!

Next: either more theoretical procrastination by formalizing some of this design, or actually trying a prototype in Texture!

No Turning Back Now

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning. 

In order to familiarize myself with Texture, I played a few of the fictions available in the Texture Public Library. Go on, try Predictions for a Strip Mall Psychic or Awake, it shan't take long and you'll enjoy it (and things I say now about Texture's behaviour will make sense!).

The way that the text on each page of a Texture fiction shifts and expands when you interact with it is interesting. I think it lends itself to stories of contemplation, reconsideration, and realization. Using one of the few verbs you can choose from on one of the highlighted words usually adds more text or recontextualizes what's already there, possibly adding a new verb unless it ends the scene and prompts you to go to the next page.

It's very much about navigating through the text by focusing in on individual words and how you can understand and interact with them. There's some tricksy things you can try (check out the Texture experiment "Put the Fruit in the Bowl" where your selection of verbs is recast as items in your inventory), but the slow and deliberate display of word changes and red highlighting really puts the focus on the text and your understanding of it. The natural game is to try a verb and then see how you've changed the meaning of the text.

I think that this could work well for a game involving investigation. Inspecting clues, or the words that people say, or trying to understand how certain elements fit together... To incorporate this into my graveyard game I have a vague idea that the POV character reads obituaries of the recently deceased and investigates further details to see if that person fits the Pattern of whatever blood ritual they're conducting. Perhaps I'll need to play a Texture fiction with some investigation in it for another creative spark (though I feel like the answering of search terms in Awake gave a pretty good approximation).

Googling around for more ideas on Texture, I found a couple of articles by Emily Short.  This one on RPS gives a pretty good rundown of how Texture works and what it might be good at, but it was while reading her interview with Jim Munroe that I had a sudden brainwave. They talk about significant choices, and pulling the player in different directions, and early choices leading you down fairly different branches.

In my game I've been thinking that the PC is digging up corpses after researching them, collecting blood to draw some complex pattern. I think it will be important to force the player to choose whether or not to kill someone, rather than continue digging up corpses. I have an image of the POV character suddenly realizing that some other character Fits Into The Pattern, and not only that but obtaining their blood would end this ritual and free the PC from their obsession. A genuine branch in the narrative, depending on the choice made--(and perhaps a rewarding third way if the player avoids temptation or an obvious path).

The contemplative nature of Texture will encourage a suitable narrative. I like the idea of the PC thinking about and realizing recently deceased people connect to each other (and perhaps the small town setting? not sure), and then having the player come along for the ride when the PC realizes they might be capable of murder--and having the player decide only whether they go through with it or not. I suspect I'll need to approach this with some care. And if I can't get the feel right, I might need to put aside Texture for a different system that's a little gamier (like ChoiceScript perhaps). But yeah, let's see if I can get the player to want to kill someone to complete a blood ritual!

Next: some specific design details, or playing a Texture fiction involving more explicit investigation for inspiration.

All Souls Day

This month I am creating a game for NaGaDeMon 2016. You can follow along from the beginning.

Before I dive right into writing a game in Texture, I want to get a sense of the setting, characters, and plot I could work with. A lot of my creative energy recently has gone into preparing material for the Xenoarchaeology game I want to run, and I don't want to use that for this game project.

My favourite tools to inspire some creative thinking are random generators, and one I like in particular when thinking about setting is Instant Game by Mike and Kyle Jones. The pdf was available for free from the Animalball games website, but that has gone offline and now it's available from archive.org. It's a rules-lite game system that comes with an incredibly useful set of d100 tables with titles like "Tones" and "Things" and "Other Things".

To generate an instant setting, you roll on the tables {Setting, Tone, Thing, Thing}, which I will do below and see what ideas the results spark.

Setting: 19--Contemporary
Tone: 77--Realistic
Thing: 11--Blood
Thing: 55--Mysterious Energy

Well, I'll admit that initially I'm a little disappointed... but there's definitely some interesting stuff here. The first three elements immediately put me in mind of police procedurals, and serial killers, of crime or horror, involving some kind of investigation. Maybe I could twist that: perhaps this takes place in a blood bank, or a hospital, or a slaughterhouse. Maybe it's somewhere that involves blood in a less direct way: out hunting in the woods, or in miniature, inside a body.

The final element of mysterious energy adds a nice feel. Perhaps the police are investigating cultists who might be conjuring something up. Perhaps the blood is part of or being affected by some energetic phenomenon (like mutations, or superhero origins). Maybe the blood is the source of magic, in some ritualistic way, or maybe in a sort of druidic/natural/life-force way.

This is a rich vein (ha!) to draw from, but maybe another roll on the tables will help narrow it down. I'll roll on the Descriptor table to modify one of the Things, and on the Places table to narrow down the setting.

Descriptor: 31--Extravagant
Place: 36--Graveyard

Crime and horror it is, then. Lets say that "extravagant" goes with "blood". Some kind of intricate pattern of blood is necessary for a ritual, and it all culminates in the graveyard?  What if it -begins- in the graveyard? What if the player is not investigating a cultist/murderer, but actually IS one? Maybe a reluctant one who doesn't want to kill anyone, so instead digs up graves to acquire the necessary blood.

Alright! We have a game. The player chooses bodies to dig up in a graveyard in order to collect blood which must be arranged in a certain way to accomplish a ritual involving mysterious energy. Darker than I thought I'd go, but I suppose today IS All Souls Day...

Next steps: play some games in Texture to familiarize myself with it, and flesh out this graveyard game by adding some plot details and obstacles.

Get Devil Snake

Today marks the start of NaGaDeMon 2016: National Game Design Month. It's a challenge to create a game of any kind during November. I've mucked about with creating game mechanics and homebrew settings for my tabletop roleplaying, and created a small boardgame for the Coursera MOOC Introduction to Game Design (which I 100% recommend to you!), but never fully completed a game despite a few aborted attempts for GameChef and 200WordRPG.

I am going to try something this year. It might not go anywhere. I am publicly giving myself permission (and you a warning?) that I can decide not to complete a game and it won't count as a failure.

This year I think I'll create a piece of interactive fiction. I've loved int-fic for years, and enjoy playing the winners and nominees for stuff like the XYZZY awards every few years. The question now is what language to pick. I've messed around with Inform 7 before and have a half-sort-of game built off of the tutorial from Brass Lantern, but I think I should put that aside and start fresh. I also don't feel like I really understand Twine or fit into that scene. And I don't want to dive into older, weirder, more programmerly languages (like Hugo or TADS or whatever else lurks below).

One that recently came out might fit the bill: Texture. It seems to be designed specifically to be total-beginner-friendly, with a pretty drag-and-drop interface that reminds me of programming Lego Mindstorms and which Killscreen has a positive opinion of, so: why not?

NAGA DEMON! I SHALL CREATE FOR YOU A GAME USING TEXTURE.

Next: random seeds for inspiration.

Story-Flavoured Powdered Beverage

It's the final day of BrigadeCon's daily RPG prompts! Check out their site to see the full list, sign up for the online convention, and donate to Child's Play. I only started doing the prompts on day 10, so I will continue to do them into September (though I might do more than one a day on occasion).

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: best advice you were ever given for your game of choice. Strap in: this is a big and rambling one.

There are two concepts that changed the way I think about running games, and both of them come from D +Vincent Baker .

The first, from Dogs in the Vineyard, has spread widely: "say yes or roll the dice". Loads of intelligent people have written on this, and players with different philosophies have debated its merits and re- or mis-interpreted it. My own take on it is informed, I think, by trying to use the bloated skill systems of the 3rd ed d20 games.

I hope I'm not being hyperbolic when I say d20 had too many and too hyperspecific skills. It wasn't just stuff like Use Rope and Decipher Script, there were also skills with fill-in-the-blanks like Knowledge (_____) or Perform (_____) which effectively made the list simultaneously too specific -and- infinite. And the existence of these skills encourages their use, so even with advice like "use the Knowledge skills to drive the plot and give the players crucial information", you're basically telling players "roll to see if you get this information I want to give you". It's worse with the practical skills, because either they never come into play, or you're constantly rolling them (like perception or search checks in every. single. room.) so you're guaranteed to get a failure eventually; which again, ends up being "roll to see if you get this thing I want to give you".

Playing only within that paradigm, it took a hell of a mind twist to realize that I can just give the players things I want to give them. Whichever PC knows about the history of this region--they know the bit of trivia about this old ruin which could help them avoid a trap. They don't have to roll. The old sailor PC who would have 10 ranks in Use Rope? Why would they need to roll to see if they can moor a boat? PCs that are good at stuff should get to just do that stuff. This is just the "say yes" part of the advice!  It was probably the most revelatory for me, as it blurred away this assumption that skills must always be rolled.

The "or roll the dice" part took much longer to grasp, and I'm still figuring it out. This post on the old forge forums goes a little way towards explaining why--I think this way of playing doesn't work in every situation. I argue the key factor is that the system, players, and setting must support characters attempting to do things that they have a chance of failing -and- allowing interesting consequences for failing. In other words, the attempt should have a chance of getting the PC into trouble. The advice becomes something like "say yes, or throw rocks". This is different from asking for rolls when you want to drive the story forward--it's the reverse: drive the story forward whenever the PCs try something worth rolling for. And it's only worth rolling for when it would be interesting to fail. The classic example is to avoid rolling to pick a lock when there's no time pressure and no trap set. Rolling the dice should significantly affect the game.

The other concept comes from Apocalypse World: "play to find out what happens". This one's a little looser and there's lots of ways to use it. It reminds me of +Justin Alexander 's classic post, Don't Prep Plots. By creating situations, tricky or complex or dangerous ones, and then throwing the PCs into them, not only do we avoid all the problems of trying to railroad players through a specific sequence of events, we let the players -and- the GM discover a story. The value of surprise seems pretty obvious for players--the GM springing plot twists and sudden monsters on unsuspecting PCs is a pretty classic way to play--but what about for GMs?  Maybe random generators are fun partially because it means the GM doesn't know everything that will happen. Why not extend that further? Create a compelling situation, get the PCs in there, and play to find out what happens.

At this point, it's patently obvious that I have drunk, deeply, of the story games kool-aid. However, I think that these two bits of advice are applicable to any game and have the potential to improve the experience at your gaming table for everyone. Avoid making players do stuff that has no point and let them get on with what they're interested in rather than using them as pieces in "your story". This works in classic D&D just as well as the most pretentious Nordic LARP you can imagine, and games that bake it into the system (like Fate and Dungeon World) hit a real sweet spot of player- and character-driven gaming.

Atmospheric Conditions

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: describe the ideal game room if your budget were unlimited.

I'm a big fan of setting the right atmosphere for a game. I try to always have theme music and appropriate ambience playing for games I run. For some halloween one-shots in the past I've played around with everything from using only a glowing salt rock for lighting, to having players dress as their characters and hiding blood packs in my mouth to burst in coincidence with a hidden capgun going off. There's a pleasure in making the gaming environment theatrical.

One attempt I'm particularly proud of was a way of setting up Dread. I'd hidden a speaker under the gaming table, attached to my phone so I could secretly play sound effects and loud musical cues, separately from themed ambience I was looping on my computer. One sound was a blood-curdling scream, and it absolutely made the players JUMP. It would be unfair to do that if the Dread jenga tower was on the gaming table, so I came up with an idea that you absolutely should try: I set up the tower low on a coffee table away from the gaming table. Players had to get up and leave the comfort of the group to try actions, and physically kneel or bend uncomfortably to move a piece. I'd also dimmed the lights and set up a cheap LED spot, shining diagonally from below at the top of the tower. This lit the blocks very dramatically, and also cast a shadow stretching across the ceiling over the gaming table. This shadow grew longer and less regular as the game progressed, a constant imposing reminder of the tower -literally- looming over the players. I think for horror games in particular establishing a tense atmosphere is important, and I think this way of setting up Dread went a long way toward accomplishing that.

So: my ideal gaming room would allow a huge amount of control over -atmosphere-. At minimum the table would be surrounded by speakers and theatrical lighting. This allows us to establish a mood with coloured gels and music, and highlight certain items or moments with spots and sound effects that come from specific locations. I would also love to control smell, using scents to evoke a musty old library or a dank cave (a trick used by museums and immersive theatre, already being explored in RPGs) But my budget is unlimited, so what else can we add?

Projection mapping would be great--on the walls, ceiling, and the tabletop itself. It'd have a library of different environments, and the tabletop projection in particular would be interactive, to display maps and control stuff like fog of war. Holographic tech might be interesting, but there's something about the physicality of objects that really feels good. So of course each PC would have a gorgeous, custom-sculpted mini, and key game items could be realized as props--old parchments and spellbooks, a legendary sword, a deadly puzzle from a dungeon...

The table would be large, and solid, and a beautiful carved and varnished piece of wood, with comfortable surfaces for writing on and rolling dice, and holders for items like character sheets and pens. The chairs would be as ergonomic and cool-looking as we could get them--maybe a different set for each different setting. The walls would have paintings and sculptures depicting people and events from past campaigns.

And fuck it, throw in a fog machine too--oh wouldn't that be lovely for an unexpected trip to Ravenloft. The point is, I would want every tool at my disposal to immerse the players in the game world and get that atmosphere dead-on right.

A Character Reference

The final week of BrigadeCon's #RPGaDay2016 begins today. BrigadeCon is an online convention taking place at the end of October, and the RPG Brigade raises money for the Child's Play charity. If you'd like to give some games and toys to hospitalized kids, please consider registering and donating.

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: what makes for a good character?

This is a ridiculously huge question. It's easily the biggest of the prompts, considering that it's of interest to basically all of storytelling in general and not just roleplaying. Of course it is a key question for RPGs and comes up everywhere--just the other day Craig Dedrick posted on Gnome Stew about creating a character via a solo session.

To focus my answer, I want to riff on that a little: the player collaborating with the GM to create a PC. Craig suggests starting with a sketch of the PC when they're young and playing through key scenes of their life as they grow--sort of like a game of Microscope focused on just one character. As the PC grows up, the player and the GM adjust the PC's abilities and stats based on what's happened in their life. At the end of the process, you have a fully realized character.

This method of character creation has all sorts of handy side-effects. It allows the GM to build the PC directly into the setting, history, and plot of the game. It allows the player to tell the GM through play what they're interested in and what sort of a person the PC is. It ties the stats and abilities of the character to their backstory. It's quite a clever way to make character creation into actual gaming time that also ensures the PC exhibits some elements of good characters.

The first of those elements is consistency.

A good character fits into the world. This doesn't mean that the player can't be creative and play whatever they want, just that they need to tie the PC into the setting in a logical way. Eberron has Warforged because someone wanted to play robots in a fantasy setting, and it totally works. This does require both player and GM to be flexible--there is some negotiation involved in fitting a character concept into the game.

Internal consistency is also important. The PC's abilities and statistics should reflect their background and their current status. This could be as simple as ensuring your fighter has high Str, but it also includes the fighter with a high Int because they wanted to be a wizard but got bullied into being a fighter, as well as the aspects generated by having adventures with the other PCs in Fate's Phase Trio, and the Instincts and Beliefs that drive characters in the Burning Wheel.

Characters should -make sense-, by fitting into the game in a consistent way.

The second element is a clear goal.

A good character has something they want. It doesn't have to be complicated: maybe the adventurer just wants to acquire as much treasure as possible and retire in a lavish stronghold. Maybe the aging and grizzled warrior wants to die gloriously in battle. Maybe the PC wants to find his missing brother, or cure the townsfolk of lycanthropy, or become CEO of the company. The character's goals can be linked with their internal consistency as well--they want the things they want because of who they are and where they are.

The point is that PCs with clear goals allow the GM to create obstacles. If I know where you want to go, I can put things in the way. This is how grand adventures are generated--characters struggling to get what they want.

The third element is being active.

A good character actively tries to accomplish their goal. They want something and they are going to work to get it. There's not much point in making a PC who is going to stay home and wait around. Of course, they can be reluctant. Bilbo certainly didn't want to go on an adventure at first. Maybe the PC's goal is just to get back home. But the character needs to attempt to do things, not to just give up, otherwise there's no story.

A solid PC is part of the setting and has a personal history. They know what they want, and they try hard to get it. All of these elements are linked, and if they can be generated all in one go through collaboration with the GM, then all the better for the game.

On-the-Job Training

Today's #RPGaDay2016 prompt is: what's the best way to learn a new game?

When I get interested in a system, my first step is to look for a set of free quick-start rules. A read-through of these is usually quite short and gives a good feel for the core elements of the system, as well as the tone and key themes of the setting. This is an option for a good amount of systems, and sometimes the free rules are quite extensive (like with D&D 5e Basic). Even if there's no quickstart, the full rulebook might contain a sample session, or lots of sidebars highlighting key concepts. Probably the best way to learn a game thoroughly is to start with a well-designed rulebook!

Unfortunately not all systems have a quick-start, sample adventure, or particularly helpful design. In these situations, I look for a cheat sheet of the most important rules. Often these will be created by players rather than included in the rulebook, so the first place I look is G+ communities for the game or in the files section on RPGGeek. I also find that the cheat sheet gives a quick visual overview of how crunchy a game system is, and similarly I can get a sense of how much there is to learn by seeing the number of rules questions/clarifications I can find for the game on rpg.stackexchange.

More often than not, after a look at a quickstart and/or a cheat sheet we should just start playing and see how it goes, though this can be difficult if the players aren't comfortable with winging it. Sometimes I'll solo a session of the game to get a feel, and make notes of details to look up later for clarification. Ultimately, it's desirable to pick it up as we go, and handwave anything we're not sure about. I'm not overly concerned with running the system exactly as written, and the more rules there are to learn the less likely I am to want to learn it in the first place. Perhaps particularly complex rule systems can't be learned just through play--I can't imagine just picking up Rifts--but who's got the time for that anymore? Rules-lite and good summary design is the way to go!