Dragon World Hack 0.4

anime, games, Kickstarter, ,

dw cover new

Dragon World is a Powered by the Apocalypse RPG for fantasy comedy adventures in the vein of classic anime like Slayers and Dragon Half. The game has been in the works for a while now, and we’re now gearing up to launch a Kickstarter some time in the next few months.

Dragon World Hack 0.4
Dragon World Playbooks

I had the idea for Dragon World when I finally got my hands on the Dragon Half manga. (Which BTW is finally getting an English language release from Seven Seas.) In anime there was a weird trend in the early to mid-1990s of making short direct-to-video adaptations of much longer manga, which in turn sometimes wound up being the only versions that made their way to the English-speaking world. Dragon Half started as a 7-volume manga (later re-released in a 3-volume “omnibus” edition, which the English version is based on), which could’ve worked nicely as a full 26-episode TV series. Instead it got a mere two OAV episodes, and plans to do two more episodes got scrapped. The Dragon Half OAVs had a little bit of a cult following in the early anime scene, and I devoured the manga once I got my hands on it. It shows its age and anime-ness with a lot of fanservice (our heroine pretty much only wears a metal bikini), but the zany humor, flagrantly ridiculous take on the fantasy genre, and Ryusuke Mita’s energetic art make it worth your time.

That wasn’t too long after I’d discovered Apocalypse World, and as I made my way through the manga, I kept seeing it in terms of different AW-style moves and their outcomes. This was before the term “Powered by the Apocalypse” came about and while it was still the thing to have those “AW hacks” end with “World,” so “Dragon World” was born. A certain portion of anime and manga, especially from the 90s, used “dragon” in titles to essentially signify “fantasy,” probably a result of Dragon Quest being so massively popular and influential, plus it was a tongue-in-cheek nod to Dungeon World. (And I did talk Jonathan Walton into making a game called “& World.”) From there I watched a ton of Slayers (probably the single most popular comedy fantasy anime), and a bunch of others, giving me a wider palette of ideas to draw on. Dragon World most blatantly shows its influences in the selection of classes, ranging from the likes of the Explosive Mage and Dumb Fighter (which have Lina and Gourry from Slayers at their core) to the Angsty Shadow Warrior (for whom Dororo from Sgt. Frog was an inspiration, but also a bunch of fantasy tropes) to the Shiny Paladin and Ruthless Warlord (who come from silly takes on D&D classes). One of my favorites is the Chosen Visitor, which is a Japanese teenager sent to this fantasy world and given weird powers, echoing shows like Magic Knight Rayearth and El Hazard.

This is the fourth version of Dragon World that I’ve shared with the world, and it’s generally been through a lot of revisions as I did a bunch of playtesting and figured out what did and didn’t work, and thought of new stuff to add. The game started considerably closer to Apocalypse World, but I dropped things like highlighting stats and marking experience. On the other hand (although I refined it a bit), the concept of replacing Harm with “falling down” remained a core part of the game from the start. I changed the selection of classes a little, adding the likes of the Ruthless Warlord and changing the Useless Bard into the Foolhardy Bard (which was how people had been playing the Useless Bard for the most part anyway).

It’s not in the Hack, but the final commercial version is going to have a setting chapter for the land of Easteros. (Not the only Game of Thrones reference in there, but there’s copious anime nonsense regardless.) It was generally an opportunity to put together a bunch of toys and plot hooks, plus some dumb humor (like a pun-laden list of 100 slime names).

In any case, I’m looking forward to finally bringing this game fully to fruition in a nice book with actual artwork, and possibly putting together some supplements and alternate settings. I’m also planning a Creative Commons release, in the hopes that (not unlike with Dungeon World, though presumably in much lower quantities) people will take the opportunity to design and publish their own Dungeon World weirdness.

 

I Hate You: A Cartoon Game

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Growing up, cartoons were a pretty massive component of my mental landscape. I was a socially awkward loner (today I’m significantly less awkward, but possibly even more introverted), and I largely filled my time by being a media junkie. TV was the major source of content available to me, and as my family graduated from rabbit ears to cable, I watched so, so many cartoons. There was then-current stuff like the Disney Afternoon, Muppet Babies, and the first generation of Nicktoons, but also old Looney Tunes shorts and episodes of shows like Tom and Jerry, Pink Panther, and Rocky and Bullwinkle that stations put on more or less as filler. In high school I got into anime in a big way, and while that filled a whole lot of my viewing time, I never completely stopped watching cartoons. Today we have brilliant stuff like Steven Universe, Regular Show, Star vs. the Forces of Evil, and Gravity Falls, though if I get too much into talking about those I’ll stray from the original point of this post. The major thing I’m winding my way towards discussing is that I’m working on a mini-RPG inspired by old-school cartoons called “I Hate You: A Cartoon Story Game For Two Good Friends.”

Cartoon Precedent

The first RPG I played was Palladium’s Robotech game, but the first one I ever owned was Toon: The Cartoon Roleplaying Game, designed by Greg Costikyan (of Paranoia fame) and published by Steve Jackson Games. I got it by doing a special order from the local B. Dalton Bookseller, which was a store that still existed at the time. (That particular one became a Waldenbooks, then a Borders Express, then finally closed.) Toon is a great game that provided me and my friends with a lot of fun times, but some parts of it hold up better than others. It does a great job of explaining how to play–the “Toon Commandments” are a lot like PbtA Principles–and brilliantly codifies and explains a bunch of cartoon conventions. Kyle Miller did a ton of great art for the books that managed to capture the general feel of old school cartoons without directly aping the styles of existing ones.

toon

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Channel A Returns!

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Back in 2012 I designed my first ever card game, Channel A: The Anime Pitch Party Game. In 2013 Asmadi Games published it, bringing it to Kickstarter backers and then game stores. It’s been well-received, but once the original print run sold out, Asmadi was never quite able to get it back in print. While I’m still a fan of Asmadi Games and Chris Cieslik–and the other Asmadi Games offerings are well worth checking out!–I’m very pleased to be able to announce that Evil Hat Productions will be taking up Channel A as part of their line of board games. It’ll be their first real foray into both anime-inspired games and party games, but Channel A still has some heady company given that it’ll be alongside the likes of the Dresden Files Cooperative Board Game.

EHP is launching Channel A with a Kickstarter, and the game is getting an upgrade in the form of new art (by Dawn Davis, the same artist, who has improved her skills considerably over the past 6 years or so) and around 70 new cards (with Clay Gardner doing the logo designs for the new Title Cards). We’re calling this new version the “Alpha Genesis Edition,” and hopefully new and old fans of Channel A will find a lot to like in what we’ve changed and added. (Also: more normal cardstock!)

If you want to give the came a test drive first, Evil Hat has some cool stuff for that:

There are also stretch goals! The first is a set of stickers of chibi characters, and the second is an expansion called “Channel A: Second Season.” And we have more waiting in the wings! Kind of a lot more!

The Evil Hat folks have generally been great to work with, and their huge enthusiasm about the game has been pretty inspiring to me. Fred is a fan of the game and it really shows!

channel a ehp
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D&D is Weird, and That’s Fine

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Even though back in my Yaruki Zero book I had an entire section about D&D, I’m still grappling with it. There are a lot of reasons for that, the biggest being that it continues to dominate RPGs, even as there are new developments in how people relate to RPGs. Podcasts and other online media have given us actual play shows with a heightened level of polish, to the point where they can develop their own fandoms, but I still find myself feeling the need to remind people that RPGs other than D&D do in fact exist. D&D is also genuinely a very deep an interesting topic though, and we’re belatedly starting to get a clearer picture of its history.

Despite its position of dominance and its massive cultural reach, D&D is a very strange game, even within the weird niche that is tabletop RPGs. It’s not a bad game, but it is an incredibly specific one, in countless ways. It’s situated in a “dungeon fantasy” subgenre that it created, and despite its massive popularity, in many ways it sits outside the mainstream of tabletop RPG design.

Wargame Origins

D&D evolved out of wargames, and there were more transitional forms than people realize. Wargames are roughly divided into miniatures and board wargames. Board wargames typically come complete in a box, with maps and cardboard chits, whereas miniatures wargames were a surprisingly informal and creative hobby, even though in the 60s and 70s they’d attracted a fanbase that looked down on anything not based in historical warfare. The vagueness of miniatures wargames caused a lot of disputes during play, which led to experiments with having a human referee. The referee role existing led to the referee making rulings on the fly, so that players could conceivably try things that weren’t in the rules. The rulebook might not have anything to say about whether units can ford a river, but a referee can make a ruling and the game can roll on. I think that’s a really interesting development for wargames, and in general it’s rare to see anything remotely like it in tabletop games other than RPGs. These days, while wargame rules aren’t always as clear as would be ideal, they’re closer to board games in that they generally allow for straightforward play without recourse to a referee. (And the most played wargames today are ones with copious fantastical elements.) While this was of course before the internet, the wargames scene communicated more broadly through zines, letting these gamers communicate these ideas around the country and beyond.

white box
…And Some Friends and Polyhedral Dice Even Though They (The Dice) Are Hard To Find Because It Is 1974

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Tools for Dreaming: Publishing

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Apart from some appendices that aren’t really ready, this is the last chapter of Tools for Dreaming, which is advice on how to go about getting your game out to the world, with an emphasis on self-publishing (since that’s by far the most practical way to go about it these days). Much like with the previous chapter, it’s basically stuff I’ve figured out through trial and error, and I’m sure someone with more experience could fill in some stuff.

There was a time when publishing an RPG meant you had to either find an existing publisher or take out a second mortgage. Nowadays publishing is vastly easier, and can range anywhere from putting a PDF up on a website for free to running a Kickstarter and doing a traditional print run.[1] Turning a game into a fully realized book can be really satisfying (though a lot of work), but don’t feel obligated to go that far. I’m generally of the opinion that (almost) anything worth making is worth sharing, but you don’t even have to do that if you don’t want to. If you do want to share it, you can do any number of things less involved than a fully-illustrated book.

One of my self-published games is called Raspberry Heaven. It’s the result of a decade of off and on struggle to figure out how to make an RPG for charming slice of life stories about schoolgirls in the style of manga like Azumanga Daioh and Hidamari Sketch. I went through three radically different versions of it before Jonathan Walton’s game Restless game me the inspiration I needed to finish it. The result is a game that comes as a set of 6”x6” cards, and it’s a weird story game with no GM or stats involved. It hasn’t sold a lot, but it’s more important that I achieved something as a game designer, and now I have a fun game I can play with friends. Continue reading Tools for Dreaming: Publishing →

Tools for Dreaming: Games Given Form

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This chapter is my attempt at providing advice on stuff like layout. It’s something I’m still working on myself, but I’ve at least distilled what I’ve learned (with a lot of trial and error) here.

The next chapter gets into the details of publishing per se. This chapter is about how to take an RPG you’ve created and make it into something you can show to the world.

Titles

Like a lot of things in most any creative endeavor, there’s not really any single way to decide on a title. It depends a lot on your particular project and the audience you’re going after. For a retroclone intended to evoke old-school D&D, an alliterative title with an ampersand in the middle could be a good way to communicate what you’re about. Titles like Dogs in the Vineyard or Thou Art But a Warrior may not grab your average geek, but that’s totally fine if you’re going for a different crowd.

While keyword optimization can be kind of obnoxious, it pays to google potential titles to see if there’s anything else out there already, and generally if it’s possible to find your game online. Even if you’re unlikely to get into legal trouble, a name that resembles something else makes it harder for people to find your game even if they do know the name. I like the title of my card game Channel A overall, but it’s also the name of a Korean TV channel, so to find it online you have to search for something like “channel a card game” unless you really want to dig through posts about Korean pop stars.

In the 1980s Steve Jackson Games developed a multi-genre RPG—not the first of its kind, but one of the most notable—and in 1986 they published it under what had been a placeholder title, “GURPS,” short for “Generic Universal RolePlaying System.”        That in turn made acronym titles kind of a running gag in the RPG world, with the likes of FUDGE (Freeform Universal Donated Game Engine),[1] TWERPS (The World’s Easiest Role-Playing System), CORPS (Complete Omniversal Role Playing System), SLUG (Simple Laid-back Universal Game), and there are more but we don’t have all day. Some are old favorites, some are well-supported small press games, and a lot are joke games. I won’t say you should never go for a title like that, but I wouldn’t personally unless it was a particular kind of satire or I had devised an agonizingly clever pun. Continue reading Tools for Dreaming: Games Given Form →

Tools for Dreaming: Combat and Conflict

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This is my attempt at exploring different issues relating to combat in RPGs, with an emphasis on alternatives to the traditional methods of handling it. Some parts are more developed than others. The “Shared Narration” bit is something I want to experiment with in a game (I’m working on a short RPG called “Zero Breakers” that’s basically a proof of concept for that), and I feel like tactical combat merits a longer and more sophisticated discussion, perhaps moreso than I’m really equipped to provide.

Perhaps because they grew out of wargames, combat has always been an important part of most RPGs. In actual play, they’re often not as combat-centric as the considerable page count devoted to combat rules might suggest, but RPGs that don’t make violent action a key component of gameplay are still the exception to the rule. Violence is so prevalent in the medium that it’s hard to remove or even alter the amount of violent content in a game without it feeling at least a little bit like a political statement.

Geek culture in general tends to have a disproportionate number of narratives that involve a great deal of violence, as well as games where it’s the most developed and enjoyable part of gameplay. It’s hard to pinpoint where that came from. A lot of the early greats of science fiction like Isaac Asimov and Arthur C. Clarke didn’t have much violence in their stories, but then they were more on the intellectual end of SF, and the likes of Star Wars and Star Trek were what became iconic franchises. I’m not going to advocate for eliminating violence from pop culture or geek culture, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt to look at it with a more critical eye.

In real life, violence is chaotic, intense, and too often horrifying. Primal instincts sear it into your memory. Sometimes it arguably can serve a righteous purpose, but in violent conflicts between human beings, at least one side is doing something immoral. Fantasy violence is nothing like that. It’s often an exhilarating clash, as much about the stories and principles at play as the details of attacks and defenses. Continue reading Tools for Dreaming: Combat and Conflict →

Tools for Dreaming: Defining Characters

Tools for Dreaming

This section is basically about how we write up characters in RPGs, and how designers create processes for doing that. Some parts of this chapter aren’t quite there yet, but overall I think it’s coming together pretty well.

Given that the word “role” is in the name, we can assume that an RPG calls for having defined characters. The question is how we go about providing a way for players to effectively define their characters. It’s in the nature of RPGs that character creation is generally a combination of dreaming up a fictional character and assembling an abstract mechanical construct. These two aspects of RPG characters necessarily interrelate and have decidedly blurry edges.

Statistics

Most RPGs give characters some kind of numerical values, variously called stats, attributes, ability scores, etc., to represent how effective they are in various areas. Some games make the actual numbers for characters’ stats substantially larger or smaller than others. In my mind this is another case where designers have been a little too willing to base things on tradition and the apparent feel of things rather than what function they serve at the game table. D&D traditionally had stats that ranged from 3 to 18 (coming from a 3d6 roll), but in earlier editions they didn’t distinguish characters mechanically all that much, and in later editions the ability score modifier mechanic meant that they were a step removed from the smaller numbers you actually used in play.[1]

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Tools for Dreaming: Randomness

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This is the all-important chapter on randomness. I feel like it needs more detail and rigor about statistics, but that’ll require me learning more about statistics and probabilities. Right now this chapter is a lot about how randomness fits into the overall experience. There’s a short section I want to do but haven’t yet on “other uses for dice,” with things like using them as counters, stacking, roll-and-spend (a la Dogs in the Vineyard), etc.

The vast majority of RPGs make extensive use of randomness, and most of those use dice to achieve that randomness. Randomness isn’t a necessity, but it’s deeply ingrained and legitimately useful. It introduces a level of controlled unpredictability that can keep gameplay popping. However, it’s important to also think about where the randomness slots into the overall experience, and be aware of what the actual odds are.

Doing the Math

If you’re going to make a game where probability plays a role, you need to understand the math involved and make it work as well as you can before you even begin playtesting. Games tend to have enough moving parts that it’s hard to anticipate everything, but that’s all the more reason to begin with a sound theory. My own preferred approach is to keep the math simple and the numbers low. That’s partly because I don’t have that much of a head for numbers, and partly because it makes it that much easier to figure out what’s going on and fix things that aren’t working right.

A traditional RPG has an action resolution system, which is to say a set of rules to determine whether a given discrete action succeeds. From 3rd Edition onward, D&D’s action resolution system has had you roll a 20-sided die and add whatever applicable modifiers you have, and you succeed if your total matches or exceeds a target number. In the case of an attack, you add your attack bonus, and you hit if you can reach the target’s Armor Class, while for skills you add your skill bonus and need to reach a Difficulty Class. That mechanic itself is simple enough, but the things that go into it get a bit complicated, since a character’s attack bonus comes from a mathematical formula involving around 2 to 6 different numbers. Thus, the designers at Wizards of the Coast have the rather complex task of making sure that the bonuses that characters get add up to something that leads them to have a suitable ratio of success to failure.

There are many different types of dice (and other randomizers) that RPG designers have used over the years. The most important distinction is between flat and curved probabilities. If you roll a single die, each possible result has an equal chance of coming up. On a d20, the numbers 1 through 20 each have a 5% chance of coming up on any given roll.[1] On the other hand, if you roll two or more dice, it creates a probability curve, and results in the middle are more likely to show up because there are more combinations that can produce them. If you roll two six-sided dice, you only have a 1 in 36 chance of rolling a 2, but a 1 in 6 (or 6 in 36) chance of rolling a 7. This is because there’s only one combination of two dice that can add up to 2, whereas there are six different combinations that can add up to 7.

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Tools for Dreaming: Structures of Play

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This is probably the most important chapter of Tools for Dreaming, as it delves directly into the core structures of RPGs and role-play. Particularly in some of the later parts it still feels underdeveloped, but I feel like I’m definitely on the right track in terms of what ideas it is that I’m grappling with.

Role-playing is an activity that you can do without rules. A group of people can decide what characters they’re going to play and in what situation, and just start role-playing. There are a lot of areas where people do just that. In terms of the sizes of their followings, freeform fandom RP, therapeutic role-playing, educational role-playing, and improv each dwarf tabletop RPGs. Saying that these activities lack rules is misleading, but what “rules” they do have are structures and parameters rather than the kind that involve numbers or dice. We’re now seeing a flowering of a niche of RPGs that are closer to these other forms of RP, but these forms are also a useful tool for better understanding how things work even in traditional RPGs.

One non-definitive way to look at RPG rules is as a labor-saving device, a means to shape role-playing to achieve a specific type of play more easily. Freeform role-play forms a baseline, and an RPG is in a sense a set of modifications to that. From that point of view, the question of RPG design then becomes “What modifications do I need to make to help achieve the kind of experience I want?” You might be surprised just how minimal an RPG’s rules can be and still foster compelling and flavorful play, though of course more complex rules have their own merits, provided the complexity is purposeful. While the die rolls are important to how an RPG works, the broader structures of play are vital.

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