Category Archives: projects

Slime Quest and Essentials and Stuff

musings, projects,

On the whole I don’t think all that highly of either ranting on the internet or creating in response to perceived flaws in something. For example Houses of the Blooded (while not to my personal tastes) sounds a lot cooler when you sell it on its own merits instead of on the ways it’s not like D&D. On the other hand I really want to have a fantasy RPG of my very own, something just right for me and my friends. Slime Quest, my planned fantasy spinoff of Slime Story, is looking like it might just be that game some day, which has me really excited to make it happen. There are a lot of reasons why I want this, including but definitely not limited to the things I do and don’t like about 4E and the subcultural baggage that it comes with.

I probably shouldn’t bother with online forums, at least not quite so much as I have been lately. D&D Essentials (along with the interview with Mike Mearls that appeared in The Escapist) has revived the nonsense we had to put up with surrounding 4E before and after its release a couple years ago. This time around there are at least far fewer factually incorrect complaints about 4E (in 2008 those accounted for something like half or maybe even two-thirds of what I saw). People are at least arguing based mostly on actual reality. On the other hand, the identity politics side of things is alive and well, not to mention I still feel like a huge portion of complaints against 4E read like reasons to drop D&D entirely, and especially 3.x. It’s weird to complain about tieflings and dragonborn when you’re playing a game where half-dragons are not unknown, it’s weird to complain about classes being too rigid when you can play a game without any classes at all (i.e., one of the vast majority of RPGs that aren’t D&D), and it’s odd to say 4E doesn’t encourage role-playing enough when D&D was pretty much only the best system available for role-playing during a brief period in the 70s when it had no competitors. While it’s low on my list of reasons for working on Slime Quest, part of me does want to proudly display a middle digit and proclaim that I have my own awesome fantasy game to play.

I have said that I design games that I want to play with my friends, and I’ve realized that this isn’t always true. In fact some of the games I want to make have a sort of distantly hypothetical audience; I’m not sure if I can actually pull together a group that would play Raspberry Heaven the way I meant it to be played, for example. Slime Quest on the other hand looks like it would be more or less perfect for that group, because it’s going to build on what we like about 4E and hopefully avoid some of its problems. 4E has been a big hit among us, even with the people who weren’t the slightest bit interested in D&D before that. For my part I always liked the bizarre worlds of D&D (especially Planescape), but the actual game never became anything like what I wanted to play until 4E. 1E (which I stumbled across at the local used bookstore) was just strange to me, 2E was intriguing but nonsensical, and 3E we tried out and got tired of after a while.

4E clicked for us in a lot of different ways. It’s like D&D, only your characters have something of the heroic stamina that you would actually expect a fantasy adventurer to have. Old-school D&D is great as a game about a bunch of nobodies struggling to survive in a very dangerous world and eventually making something of themselves. It’s not as great as the game about fantasy heroes it sometimes claimed to be. In 4E, first-level characters, while nowhere near immortal[1], aren’t disposable weaklings, and recovering from getting hurt[2] doesn’t require weeks of healing or a literal miracle from a deity. The MMO players in our group like the optimization and tactical combat, while the non-MMO players like the awesome fantasy settings and can enjoy the tactical aspect of the game without feeling like total failures for not putting double-digit hours into character optimization. That’s not to say I’ve been totally satisfied with the game, but on the whole it’s been head and shoulders above most of the other games we’ve tried long-term, particularly in terms of the actual rules contributing to our fun.

The major things I want to keep from 4E is the interesting tactical combat and characters with clear roles and interesting in-game abilities. However, I want to make the tactical combats a bit simpler and quicker, and I want the game to encourage role-playing and characters with some personality. The former is pretty easy, and in Slime Story I already have the makings of the combat system I want. The latter will be trickier (especially in terms of marrying it to a game with tactical combat), and I’m still in the process of working out how to go about it. I don’t really find complaints about “dissociated mechanics” to be terribly compelling, least of all coming from people who like older versions of D&D, but one way or another I do feel that I want to make a game that’s a bit better at generating interesting stories at the table.

There has also been some talk of the new D&D being less about the influences that lie at the game’s original roots. Gary Gygax originally made the game a mishmash of all his favorite sword and sorcery novels–Conan, Dying Earth, and so forth–and grudgingly added Tolkien stuff in later at his friends’ insistence. It seems like in an important sense D&D stopped being about that stuff and started being more about itself and its spinoff novels[3], to the point where I’d welcome some video game influence simply because it would make the game’s fiction a bit less incestuous. But then the thing is that in the case of the people I play with, influences culled from novels are basically irrelevant to most of the group. References to Conan only hold sway if they fall into the most memorable bits of the movies (“Hear the lamentations of their women!”), and the likes of Jack Vance are off the radar entirely. In stark contrast to that, video games and anime are what we’re all about. Concepts culled from Final Fantasy or Dragon Quest are much more recognizable to us than ones drawn from the works of J.R.R. Tolkien or Robert E. Howard. Slime Quest is going to be unapologetically getting inspiration from anime and video games.

The setting of Slime Quest (the continent of Galania) isn’t going to be anything astonishing, but I do like having the opportunity to do some stuff that the official and implied D&D settings largely avoid, both in terms of cultural issues and simple surface stuff. Religion is a prime example of this. While religion is ubiquitous in D&D settings, it tends to be a vague polytheism, with plenty of meddling gods (and until relatively recently full game stats for them), but very little sense of what kinds of practices these religions involve or how they fit into people’s daily lives. Although I’m not going to make such things central to Slime Quest, it isn’t going to totally ignore them either. Galania is home to both a monotheistic religion (the Church of the One God) and animist/shamanism religion, which have been forced to more or less coexist for pragmatic reasons (for now). It’s also got firearms, trains, airships, a postal service, and some other nifty stuff. (Also, an organization called the Happy Slime Club.)

[1]As we very quickly found out when we first started playing and those kobold slingers really messed us up. 30 hp goes by a lot faster than you’d think.

[2]Or rather, recovering from losing HP, which can at (vague, undefined) times represent mere fatigue rather than injury.

[3]One really wonders how much the ranger class’ design has been informed by a need to make Drizzt a viable character.

In Other News
I got Apocalypse World in print from the FLGS, though I’m still reading through it. The writing style is very Vincent Baker, though it’s weird to get 300 pages of it at once. I also got the PDF manual of FreeMarket, but haven’t had a chance to do more than skim it a little bit. The good news is that if I really wanted to I could put together the materials to play without too much difficulty, which is fortunate considering I really can’t afford the $75+s/h for the boxed set. A friend picked up some RPG stuff for me from Japan last month… hopefully we’ll actually get a chance to meet up in person before too long.

Thoughts That Are Random

musings, projects,

Pockylips Worldo
Apocalypse World has been generating a heck of a lot of discussion, and I think I’m going to have to join in, possibly in podcast form, especially once I finally get a copy of the actual book. I got to play it at the South Bay Story Games Day event at Game Kastle in Santa Clara, and was very impressed, though it’s worth noting that it was MCed by a gentleman named Carl who was very experienced with running it.


One particularly interesting thing about it–which somewhat ties in with what I talked about in the last podcast–is how the game very carefully and thoroughly delineates the GM’s job, to a degree that is basically unprecedented. (Which explains the change in terminology to “Master of Ceremonies.”) As Jonathan Walton put it, apart from explicitly encouraging hacks, “it makes no effort to offer flexibility to people with different tastes or desires.” On the one hand I don’t share Will Hindmarch‘s (apparent; I may be misreading him) discomfort with AW’s approach, but on the other hand I really like the idea of this development and the tools it implies existing, but on the third hand (I’m running Dark Sun this weekend; maybe it’s a hypothetical Thri-Kreen?) needless to say I wouldn’t want every game to work that way.

Over on Theory From the Closet’s interview, Vincent said he’s a game designer rather than a teacher, and in light of that it makes sense that he’s sending what he’s figured out about GM techniques out into the world in game form. While it goes without saying that he never meant it to be the end-all be-all of GMing techniques, the GM’s role is one of the single most ephemeral things in RPGs. There are definite advantages to that of course (another Theory From the Closet Episode has David Wesley explaining how using a human referee saved his wargaming hobby), but there’s also the problem that we don’t really have the vocabulary or techniques that we probably should for discussing (much less modifying) what exactly the GM does. There’s a lot of good advice out there, but it’s really hard to be concrete.

A Story of Slime

Of course, right now the thing with Apocalypse World that’s more immediately relevant to me is the Hx/History system (the one that gave Ryan Macklin a little trouble), since it’s pointed me to a way to improve Slime Story. Setting up connections between characters is currently one of those things that can easily become tedious because it asks for largely unguided creative input.[1] AW’s History mechanic the setup of the PCs’ relationships and shared history into kind of a minigame with different abilities per character type, which also serves to dump the players into having to work with mechanics and each other. While I’m not completely happy about stitching yet another piece onto this Frankenstein monster of a game, it looks like it has immense potential.

A while back I made the acquaintance of Steven Savage, who amongst other things does the Fan To Pro blog and the Seventh Sanctum name generator site. (And if we can ever get our schedules to coincide enough he’s going to be on the podcast.) When I told him about the game I was working on he, having recently seen the Scott Pilgrim movie, said Slime Story sounded like “magical realism.” While Slime Story doesn’t strive for a Jorge Luis Borges type of style or anything, it does juxtapose the real and fantastic, and I think that in terms of the setting that’s its real strength. There’s an inherent tension between the teenagers’ ordinary lives and the absurd monster hunting they do. I’m not sure what to do with this epiphany apart from including it in the text, but I think it’s very important to realizing the game I want to create.

Dice Within Dice
I was at Toys R Us the other day and wound up buying the “Pavilion Games Black Die Multi Game Set.” Pavilion Games is apparently a brand name TRU came up with for selling cheap and generic board game stuff. I’d seen this many times before and put off buying it because it was $19.99, but it was on sale for around $12. It’s a black faux-leather box like a black d6, about 6½ inches on a side. Inside are two decks of cards, four small dice, a doubling cube, a set of poker dice, a small game board for chess and backgammon (with pieces for both), a rather small set of double-6 dominoes, and a booklet of rules. I think I like it more for the novelty of the box than what’s inside, though I suppose even given that I’m not really into board games it’s not a bad idea to have those things around. (Someone was working on an RPG that uses dominoes, right?) Also, it has enough room to fit several of the other assorted game materials I’ve accumulated.

[1]I’ve heard such complaints about, for example, Prime Time Adventures’ pitch sessions. The results can be great sometimes, but I certainly don’t find that kind of thing terribly efficient with my friends.

Updates On Stuff

musings, projects,

After basically being unemployed apart from some sporadic freelance work throughout 2009, I now have a full-time job. I’m not going to discuss the details publicly unless I get explicit permission, but it’s in the video game industry, if an odd niche of such. Trying to keep up creative stuff while working 40 hours a week and having a considerable commute to contend with has been a challenge so far, especially since my social life has gotten busier too (I’ve had regular stuff going on four days a week, though that’s calming down a little too), but I’m starting to get a handle on it.

I don’t want to get into the details here, but I’ve decided I need to scale back my internet use a bit, or at least my use of certain parts of it. At work it’s hard to find much else to do during breaks other that surf the web, and after a month I just feel the toxicity of it too much. This won’t affect this blog except insofar as some of those sites give me ideas for stuff to post or podcast about, but you probably won’t see me posting on RPGnet or Story Games as much (not that I was ever a prolific forum poster anyway). I’ve also stopped using my main Twitter account for the time being in favor of a new one (@bunnymuse) where I tweet nothing but random bits of stories and other prose ideas. I don’t know how long I’ll keep this up, but so far every time I’ve gone back on this decision I’ve wound up regretting it.

Slime Story
Slime Story has reached a point where I basically have the core rules where I want them for this revision, but I have to deal with a bunch of interdependent crunchy bits to get it ready to playtest. Writing up monsters is particularly challenging, since I really need to have the right variety of them and ensure that they provide the right kinds of stuff for providing adversity and interesting monster parts to make “alchemical” items with. “Monsters” in general are not an aspect of RPGs I’ve ever dealt with very much, and I think that inexperience is part of what’s making things difficult. It’s also still damn hard to come up with Talents to go with cliques, especially since I severely reduced the importance of social conflicts, which were the most combat-like part of non-combat stuff. Still, Slime Story is easily the creative project that most excites me of late, and it’s gotten more of my limited time for doing that kind of stuff than any other.

All of that means I’m getting pretty close to being ready to playtest Slime Story again, maybe even as early as next week. Slime Quest is much further off, since it will require both changes to the rules and even more assorted crunchy bits (a wider variety of “monsters,” classes and races with talents, equipment including magic items, etc.). I wanted to mention that I also have other ideas for “Slime Engine” games, most notably a new version of Thrash (I think the battlefield map system is exactly what it needs) and a thing about teenagers with special powers in the vein of A Certain Scientific Railgun, Kampfer, s-CRY-ed, etc. (so a mixture of superpower battles and boarding school life). But if those ever amount to anything they’ll be a long way off.

A-Kon
A-Kon is coming up really fast, and I’ve got some preparation and such to tackle still, even with the convention handling a lot of the more basic logistics for me. I’m going to be involved in something like six different panels, a lot of which are in the evening (9 p.m. or so), and a couple of which will require some considerable preparation on my part. The one on Japanese RPGs especially will take a lot of prep, since I want to put together a PowerPoint thing to show stuff off rather than lugging a ton of books to Texas. OTOH I think I could do the one on Anime and RPGs more or less off the cuff, considering how long I’ve been blogging and podcasting about the topic.

Slime Story/Quest: Talents and Quests

projects,

Talents
Slime Story’s rules just keep on evolving, and the whole thing with Awesome and Suck Points has led me to make some significant changes to how Talents work, and also to make them less derivative of D&D4e. Some talents are Passive and just give an automatic bonus to something, but “active” talents can have Costs (in Awesome or HP) and/or Usage Limitations (once per scene, only on a triggering event, etc.), but are meant to be more or less equal in overall utility (which makes the advancement stuff much easier to work out).

I’ve basically dumped the “At-Will/Scene/Episode” thing for Talents, though there will be some with “1/Scene” among their properties. Arianrhod and Meikyuu Kingdom have both provided a lot of inspiration for how to go about setting up Talents. Arianrhod’s talents remind me a lot of 16-bit era Final Fantasy (and FF4 and 6 are two of my all-time favorite video games ever BTW), while Meikyuu Kingdom just does all kinds of crazy stuff, especially since it has Skills relating to different aspects of kingdom-building. I seem to have given myself tools that will let me rewrite the Talents I’ve already created with relative ease, though I need to keep working at it and come up with more and more creative abilities to put into the game.

The question of how many Talents characters get and of what kinds is pretty straightforward for Slime Story (two Base Talents each from clique and class, one Elective Talent each to start, and one new Talent per level). With classes, races, and backgrounds coming into play, Slime Quest is a little more complicated. In that game classes have Base and Elective talents much like in Slime Story, but characters also get a Racial Talent, a Background Talent, and they have the option to pick up Common Talents. Racial Talents are kind of analogous to the various racial abilities in 4e, except you’re not required to take any particular one, so you can go with whichever from the race’s selection best fits your character. Common Talents are ones that any character can potentially get (which makes them the closest to Feats in D&D), and each Background has a list of possible Common Talents that you can pick from.

Quests
I also have a handle on how I want to do Quests in Slime Story. These are very much like the quests you see in MMOs. I’d originally been planning to make them an optional rule, but now I’m inclined to have them be core, and potentially pretty central to the game experience.


“Quests” are a slang term for when people hire monster hunters to do stuff for them. People post up offers on the “Quest Board” at the local Monster Mart, or online (in the Slime Story setting Craigslist has an entire category for it), or wherever. They often offer cash rewards, but trades or favors can be in the offing too (especially if the client is an alchemist). A typical quest is MMO type stuff–kill 10 salamanders, bring me 8 slime cores, find my pet dog who wandered out where there are lots of monsters, etc.–but in Slime Story the NPCs who assign quests are often regular characters in the game (secondary characters). Thus, the quests provide an excuse to interact and develop relationships between characters who might otherwise be a challenge to really fit into the game properly.

In my Slime Story novel I totally want to add a part where Kelly’s mom, a card-carrying member of PETM, very reluctantly hires Doug and company to clear out monsters that are wreaking havoc at her workplace. There are just a ton of different things you could do with quests in terms of developing the story type stuff, but then in MMOs it seems like that’s one of the primary ways in which the developers put story in.

Slime Quest

projects

A while ago I had this idea to do a sort of spinoff of Slime Story called “Slime Quest” that would be a fantasy game using more or less the same rules, with an anime fantasy and console RPG sensibility. In some ways I probably shouldn’t be distracting myself with it right now, but I’ve started working a bit on the setting and other aspects of it. Part of the inspiration for Slime Quest is from the fact that while I like D&D4e a lot, I would really like something that’s significantly simpler while still retaining some semblance of 4e’s tactical combat. That’s the area where I’m most happy with Slime Story after all.

One of the things I’ve started working on is the selection of races. I don’t generally find races in fantasy RPGs all that exciting–the vast majority of my D&D characters have been human, and the exceptions have all been kind of gimmicky–but I’m liking what I’ve come up with, especially once I realized that there was no reason to bother with elves or dwarves. I’ve heard many times that elves and dwarves are a vastly overdone cliche and a symptom of bad Tolkien pastiche (whereas I’m going for bad J-RPG pastiche), but I don’t think I’ve ever felt them quite so extraneous to a game as in the case of Slime Quest. Anyway, here’s my current list of races:

  • Arcadians are living artificial constructs and relics of an ancient civilization.
  • Asuras are people with some demonic heritage. So they’re basically anime-fied AD&D2e tieflings. Or they’re the race to pick if you want to create a character who’s something like Aetna from Disgaea.
  • Eidolons are people imbued with otherworldly essence, whether through some experience or their heritage. This can include demonic (what I called “Asuras” until just recently), fae (Sprites), elemental (Djinn), and so forth. I may be trying to pack too many concepts into one “race” though. In any case, it can cover stuff like Genasi and Tieflings from D&D, and characters like Aetna from Disgaea and the sprite from Secret of Mana.
  • Flaum are basically little furry mascot characters, along the lines of Tabbits (from Sword World) and Tarutaru (Final Fantasy XI), physically weak but inherently magical.
  • Humans you’re pretty familiar with I’m sure. The only twist here is that I’m planning to include actual “racial variations” so that the humans come in different varieties that can actually matter.
  • Ogrekin are the big bruiser race, stocky humanoids with horns (which are something of a status symbol for them). Still need to develop them more, and maybe come up with a better name.
  • Wild Folk I already did a full D&D4e writeup of, but they’re a race of inquisitive tribal people with animal traits (so you can make catgirls and whatnot), with a vitality and ambition that has not yet been realized. (Can you tell I was reading Terry Pratchett’s Nation around the same time I was doing the 4e writeup for them?)

I think between those six I have enough variety without getting into inaccessibly weird stuff. Each race specifically has room for interesting variations, including humans of different ethnicities, different models of Arcadians, Wild Folk with different kinds of animal traits, etc., and the opportunity for players to invent new ones if it suits them. On the other hand since Slime Quest will have sentient “monsters,” I need to put some thought into those. It would be very silly to emphatically leave out elves and then include orcs.

The classes are going to be a tad more generic, albeit with alchemists (who can variously be gunsmiths, engineers, potion makers, etc.) and knights (not unlike a D&D4e warlord, a.k.a. my favorite D&D class to play, bar none) thrown into the mix. I want to do something with backgrounds and something to encourage more plot hooks, but I need to get a better idea of where the overall game is going.

I don’t have a good name for what is going to be the setting of Slime Quest as of yet. People think of their world as “the world” or sometimes Gaia, and are only dimly aware of other worlds through the lost lore of the Forerunners. I’m not going to develop the setting in too much detail, both because I’m not sure I can do all that good of a job, and because I remember how the D&D3e Forgotten Realms book put me to sleep. I want to create a setting that’s very over-the-top and not especially realistic without falling back on “a wizard did it, I don’t have to explain shit.” There’s lost technology of an ancient civilization scattered around the world (including a floating automated city), trouble with demons, and so on. There’s also an actual monotheistic religion (a somewhat generic “Church of the One God) that stands in contrast to many different varieties of shamanism, which is why Acolytes (basically D&D clerics) and Shamans (nature-y clerics) are among the classes.

The structure of the game is necessarily going to be a little different from Slime Story, as it’s meant to cover actual fantasy adventures. The major thing I’m planning to add are “Challenges,” which are analogous to skill-based obstacles in Mouse Guard. The twist is that characters can potentially have specialized and awesome skills like Elementalism that let them tackle challenges in fantastic ways. A mage with Elementalism could make skill checks that use any of the elements he has a spell talent for to solve problems, so the guy with the ice spell could make checks to put out fires, make a bridge across water, that kind of thing.

Anyway, I just wanted to throw that stuff out there. I may well be jumping right into fantasy heartbreaker territory, but I also have the makings of a game I really want to be able to play with my friends.

Update (4/29/2010): Note the switch from Asuras to Eidolons above. I’ve started working on the actual rules some, which I’ve decided to keep fairly close to the Slime Story rules (though I renamed Awesome and Suck points to Hope and Despair points). The most notable difference (which may or may not make it into the final version) is that I swapped out Connections to other characters for Beliefs, which gain in rank and provide certain bonuses in a manner somewhat similar to connections. On the other hand it’s looking like I’m going to start working on the two games in parallel, especially since I now have a good idea for how to approach the quest rules for Slime Story.

Slime Story: Awesome Progress

Design Journal, projects

Nothing particularly Easter-y going on with me, yet I have time to put up two blog posts in one day. Go figure.

I’ve been pretty badly stuck on what to do with Slime Story for a while, but I think I’ve finally figured out where to go next. The game has involved ripping big chunks out and putting new stuff in every step of the way, and this is no exception. The major issue is how to set up interludes to do what I want them to, and the solution has wound up involving stuff that resembles bits of Bliss Stage, Meikyuu Kingdom, and Nechronica. (And it will no doubt require plenty of playtesting to get right.)

So, the game has two currencies, called Awesome Points and Suck Points. They represent general positive and negative trends in a character’s life, which can be psychological or karma or whatever. You gain AP when you roll doubles (other than snake eyes), raise a connection by a rank, and certain other things, and you take SP when you roll snake eyes (a Fumble), get taken out in an encounter, or voluntarily take them to use things you’d otherwise have to spend AP on. Characters can end up taking SP to get through an encounter and to heal themselves afterward. All of that makes AP kind of like the Hope points in Meikyuu Kingdom, but with some weird twists. That includes making many Talents have a Cost rather than ripping off the Encounter/Daily thing from D&D4e. Another point economy to (heavily) playtest. Le sigh.


Anyway. Each character has two “Limit Breaks,” which are disadvantages that activate if they take too many SP. If you have 3 SP you have to pick one Limit Break to activates, and if you get 6+ the other one kicks in too. That’s your major incentive for getting rid of SP. I’m still working on specific Limit Breaks, but these are kind of like the fetters in Nechronica. I’m thinking there’ll be one called Clingy (for example), which requires you to stay uncomfortably close to whatever characters you have a high connection rank with, another called Unsocial that limits your ability to use teamwork or be close to others.

During interludes, each PC has the opportunity to do a quick vignette, which have wound up being a lot like Interlude Actions in Bliss Stage, which is to say you role-play, and an unrelated participant decides what mechanical effect you get. That will include a lot of the stuff I already had in the interlude rules (though significantly simplified in some cases), but removing a Suck Point will also be one of the major things you do (which also resembles the Conversation Checks in Nechronica).

I have high hopes for this whole thing working out (eventually), though it’ll take a lot of work to fully implement, especially since it’ll drastically affect the selection of Talents I need to write up. Aside from that and all the stuff I blathered about in my last blog post on Slime Story, I decided to add higher-level items crafted from monster parts, basically to give characters more crap to play with. I still need to work out more details and figure out what the heck to call them though. (And whenever I get around to working on the novel again I’m going to have a ton of setting elements to integrate.)

Adventures of the Space Patrol Playtesting

playtesting, projects

I’ve now run two playtest games of Adventures of the Space Patrol, and I’m now getting a much better idea of what I need to do to improve it. It’s the kind of game that somewhat depends on how the people playing handle things, and it’s the kind that isn’t likely to fly apart and become a big, interesting mess, so it took a while to really figure out where to go.

Stuff With Aspects
It will come as no surprise to anyone who’s played FATE before that making aspects and compels work properly is absolutely vital, and it’s a big part of why the first playtest was flatter than the second (though the fact that for me and one of the players our Skype session was very early in the morning was a factor too). I had been using compels mainly to represent characters doing something disadvantageous, but that’s actually severely limiting their scope. Compelling an aspect can also include stuff that will change the situation in a way that’s disadvantageous to the PCs, and for me at least it’s much easier and more interesting to come up with those kinds of compels.

I’m planning to go through and revise the characters’ aspects, with two things in mind. First, each character should have an aspect that’s clearly good for compelling. Second, each character should have an aspect that’s clearly about getting closer to others. Jono’s portrayal of Katrina, the Venusian Cat Princess was terrible and awesome, but I found she was a little more selfish than I really want characters to be for the same. However, changing her “Time to play!” aspect into “Play with me!” could make a huge difference.

Fusion Points
Jono and his friends are also into Primetime Adventures, and were actually in the habit of shouting “Fan Mail!” whenever someone did something they thought was neat (sometimes even when not gaming!). I’ve always found these kinds of reward mechanics to be a really powerful tool (Yuuyake Koyake has Dreams, and Peerless Food Fighters has Applause Tokens, and both work really well), so I’ve decided to try implementing something similar in Space Patrol in the form of “Fusion Points” that players can award to one another during the game. I love the atmosphere of creativity and improvisation they brought, and I’ve found that these kinds of mechanics help foster that. I’m also contemplating letting players use Fusion Points to do compels on other players.

Conflicts
More or less by accident, I stumbled on some stuff to improve the conflict rules. In the game I’ve simplified conflicts to basically being an effort to succeed at opposed rolls to give the opposition three temporary aspects before they do the same to you, and in the second playtest I did a conflict that was the PCs in a rocketship vs. a crazy volcanic moon. Reducing the sides to two active characters (with others lending a hand) and allowing characters to impose aspects on the other overall side worked really well. I need to sit down and refine this, but it goes a long way towards fixing the issues I saw with the conflict rules, while making non-violent conflicts that much easier. Also, turning a volcanic planet into a “character” was really neat all around.

In Conclusion
On the whole I’m really happy with how the game it turning out. I think I’ve managed to keep the bits of FATE that I really want and do some fairly novel things with the rules elsewhere. I’m grateful to Dan (whose Final Hour of a Storied Age needs work but is really neat), Peter, Jono, Sushu (whose Jiang Hu game has a ton of potential), and Aaron (who was awesome to do playtesting with) for lending a hand with my insanity.

Witch Quest Book II Release

Japanese, projects

witch_tarot

Some time back (last August) I posted about how I was planning to translate the free version of Witch Quest, a venerable (from 1991) Japanese TRPG about witches and their cats, in the vein of Kiki’s Delivery Service. I’ve been exceedingly inspired to translate stuff lately, so I’ve finished off Book II of the game. As I noted before, I’m doing Book II first because it contains the actual rules of the game. In some ways it’s very old-school (lots of randomness, no unified mechanics), and in other ways it’s just very quirky (a “Witch Tarot” deck features prominently in the game).

I’ve put together a PDF from the best layout I could manage in MS Word, and I don’t really have the skills to do anything better, or to make a character sheet. If anyone wants to tackle either, I’ll be happy to provide the files and such.

Witch Quest Book II PDF
Text-Based Tarot Cards (PDF)
Japanese Share Text (LZH Archive)

Update: Wilper has been really passionate about this game, and amongst other things he’s made a Crowdsource Witch Tarot Deck.

Adventures of the Space Patrol

projects,

For whatever reason I’ve been very inspired to put a lot of work into Adventures of the Space Patrol. I think it’s partly because I’ve been thinking about shorter games in general (and I hope to have some exciting news to share before too long!), and (in MS Word with normal margins and 12-point type) AotSP is likely to top out at around 40 pages maximum.

I’ve posted about it before, but Adventures of the Space Patrol is a game about “Space Agents” trying to help ordinary people with problems from outer space. The setting is inspired by a mixture of the art of Shane Glines and other illustrators/animators, and a mishmash of cheesy old sci-fi as seen through that general kind of lens. The rules are a very light implementation of FATE 3.0, with a little bit of a Japanese TRPG sensibility added, and a whole lot of influence and attitude derived from Yuuyake Koyake. Thus, it’s a game of bold, stylized, heartwarming adventure, with cute girls, beautiful women, square-jawed heroes, and strange aliens. Unlike a lot of my other games, it’s not based on a particular genre or range of actual titles (though My Life as a Teenage Robot is probably the closest to what I’m going for) so much as a general attitude and aesthetic. That also means that getting the right artwork–with some of that amazing confidence and fluidity of line–is going to be critical for making the final product work.

The biggest change I’ve made to the game in my renewed enthusiasm for this game is to make all of the characters be pregens. It saves me some work making up extra Shticks (basically the same thing as Stunts in SotC), it reinforces the “pick-up role-playing” aspect of the game, and they’re just plain fun to work on (especially when I can give them names like Jenny Jetstream and Rick Fireball). Each character also has only three Aspects and three Shticks, to keep the character concepts simple and tight and give PCs a few interesting tricks to try. Billy Smith, the Plucky Kid who’s a Deputy Space Agent, has my favorite Aspect in the game so far: “Hey, mister, what’re you doing?” Coming up with Shticks that are flavorful and useful yet don’t at all relate to anything violent is really fun but very challenging too, as it runs against the grain of what we’re used to for RPGs. (Yuuyake Koyake is quite impressive in this regard, and I’m going to spare you the whining I could be doing about how hard it’s been to come up with clique-based Talents for Slime Story.)

I also finally finished the episode creation tables. The idea is that in order to very quickly plan out a scenario, the GM can use playing cards to get elements from three different oracle-like tables (Who’s in trouble? What’s their problem? What space thing is involved?), which of course meant I had to come up with 156 different story elements. The tables are packed with references that range from obscure (“Mo-Ran, a Robot Monster”) to silly (“Stephen, an arrogant talk show host”) to personal (a few people I know are subtly mentioned in there). On the whole I’m really happy with the result. I tried it out to make a sample scenario, and I got “Cindy, a veterinarian who loves animals very much,” “Something important has gone missing,” and “The Men In Black, secret agents that try to cover up weird stuff.” Hence, the MIBs carried off one of Cindy’s patients because they mistook him for a missing alien diplomat.

I still need to think more about the overall rules. In particular, the game is meant to be mostly non-violent, and while I’ve made a point to avoid Shticks that serve violent purposes (hence I’ve gotten rid of Jenny Jetstream’s “Ray Gun” shtick), I’ve left in Conflict rules (albeit a very simplified version of the Awesome Adventures version of FATE), I’m not sure how or even if I could/should enforce nonviolence in the rules. Yuuyake Koyake strongly cautions against violence, and I think the rules make it uninteresting and unrewarding.

Anyway, all of that means that playtesting won’t be too far off, and I’m really looking forward to giving the game a try.

Slime Story Design Journal: New Stuff

Design Journal, projects

Now that NaNoWriMo is finally out of the way (and I’m starting to recover from such), I’ve started working on Slime Story again. Here’s a quick look at what I’m working on right now.

Elective Talents
Playtest Version 2 just had the Base Talents of each class and clique (which I’m refining a bit), but I’ve started working on the “elective talents” that players get to choose themselves for their protagonists. These are an aspect of the game that’s at once interesting and tedious. They have an element of exception-based design, so I get to figure out a bunch of different ways for characters to bend the existing rules in interesting ways. On the other hand, writing up well over a hundred of the things can get to be a bit of a slog after a while.

I had been toying with an idea for “Talent Pools,” and having each class and clique give you access to a couple of pools, but I wound up just having separate sets of talents for each class and clique, which also lets me customize the abilities of the different character types much better.

Vignettes
This is probably the most important change in terms of how the game plays, and it’s my attempt to address the issue of interludes not involving much role-playing. During an interlude players can create “vignettes,” short scenes in the overall story. These can take place a bit in the past or even the future relative to the monster hunting run going on in the game, which will makes it much easier to involve secondary characters without contriving to have them show up during a hunting session. More importantly, you pretty much can’t do an active action in an interlude without wrapping it in a vignette of some kind, though there’s quite a bit of freedom in terms of what kind of active action a given vignette can take you to.

I’m still not sure how Crafting (making or modifying items) will fit into things. It doesn’t seem like something that would make for good vignettes, and I may just separate crafting from the Action Point economy.

Terrain Variations
This is a simple but interesting little rule, which basically lets you add special properties to positions on the battlefield map. It’s kind of an obvious idea when you think about it, and the kind of thing where adapting the relatively simple concept to the rules’ abstractions is kind of neat. I can make little cards for the GM to lay down on the battlefield map, a random table of terrain setups, and customized maps with those setups already on them. On top of that, I can do a bunch of neat stuff with certain monsters and items affecting the terrain variations.

Portal Flora
I’ve made a small but interesting change to the setting, which is that the portals also deposit immobile plants from time to time. My grandmother recently passed away, but a little before that I gave her an audio recording of the prologue to Slime Story: The Legend of Doug. She had a dream where there were trees that produced amber. People took the amber from the Mother Tree, and all the other trees wept and created a flood, but the Father Tree sheltered them. Under the circumstances I couldn’t not do something with the idea.

“Portal flora” include those amber trees (though taking the valuable “portal amber” tends to attract angry monsters), but also herbs and other plants with special properties similar to monster parts, dangerous plants like razor ivy, and “monster grass,” which herbivorous monsters seem to particularly like. These also add to the variety of terrain variations.

I’m contemplating some kind of rule for “foraging” (not sure if that’s the right term), seeking out useful stuff from portal flora, abandoned monster parts, etc., but it runs into the same difficulties as crafting.

Monster Variations
These are basically Slime Story’s version of d20 monster templates, and a way to use different combinations to expand the range of possible monsters. In terms of the setting, there are certain plants, parasites, symbionts, mutations, etc. that can substantially change what a monster is like. A monster that eats a certain portal fauna shrub becomes a berzerker, certain monsters get a fire aura if they somehow eat a salamander crystal, and there can be mundane stuff like a stumpy that inhabits a metal trash can instead of a tree stump can take more damage.