Posts Tagged ‘Role Playing Game’

Marcus L. Rowland has released the eleventh installment of his excellent, shareware Forgotten Futures RPG: Forgotten Futures XI – Planets of Peril. Its currently available on CD and the download version will be available on 20th December 2010. Forgotten Futures XI is a complete setting based on Stanley G. Weinbaum’s 1930s science fiction stories. It includes details of the worlds, asteroids and major moons of the setting. There is a detailed adventure campaign, three long adventures and eighteen adventure outlines to help referees get their game up and running.

Update: Marcus is having some problems updating the FF website so he’s set up a temporary Forgotten Futures site.

So I finally made it to Dragonmeet, its taken me a few years but this time I did it. My planning fu was weak so I’d not decided to go till quite late on so I was staying four miles from Kensington and eight from the centre of London. This did mean I got to see a bit of the tube system and city I’d not seen before but I think next year I’ll try to organise myself a bit earlier. I’d been to Kensington Town Hall for Salute, when it used to be there, so knew it was pretty straightforward to fall out of Kensington High Street tube station.

Now onto the show itself, I hope it won’t sound like I’m complaining too much and that its more constructive criticism. I really did enjoy the show and I know from running a few events in the past just how much effort it is….

I got there pretty much exactly at 10AM and joined the back of the line. I didn’t have to wait long as they called for advanced tickets to come forward.

It would have been nice to have known what was happening from the shows website a bit sooner – if I’d known what seminars were going to be on a bit in advance I might have put myself down to run something or arranged to meet up with people in gaps. Maybe next year?

The convention pack was functional with the Programme and a supplementary game schedule. Both did the job. There was also a rather heavy book on stage magic – I hate to gripe about a free gift but I can’t really see its relevance. I didn’t have a chance to find an alternate home for it before leaving (I didn’t want to just abandon it with the Gideon bible in my hotel room). I hope a lot of cost /effort didn’t go into sourcing the books because if it did it was a wasted on me. I’d much rather have an old game supplement, custom dice, figure or discount voucher for the trade hall.

Anyway less of the grumbling and onto the morning session. Since this was my first trip I didn’t sign up for any games. I wanted to have a proper chance to look at the show. The trade room seemed busy enough in the morning. There was a good mix of traders and probably enough given the number of punters – a couple of general traders, several larger publishers, several smaller ones, a crowd of artists, a dice seller and a jewelery trader. The Bring and Buy had a prime spot up on the stage. I may have been spoilt by wargames shows but the bring and buy seemed rather short of stock. The hall wasn’t too crowded or too quiet – it reminded me of a good year at Bifrost rather than the three deep scrums I’ve seen at Salute or GenCon. You could have a chat with a trader or get Robin D Law to sign Skulduggery without feeling like you were getting in the way of someone wanting to spend cash.

After circling the stalls a few times and bumping into some friends on the way I took a turn by the games room in the basement. It looked pretty busy with all the games looking like they were full to the point of just being manageable. I always think it’s a good sign at a con if the games are busy. I wasn’t really tempted by any of the morning seminars so I wandered around a bit and lurked in the basement listening to games in progress. That may sound a bit odd but I started playing role-playing games  by watching games being played and I’ve always thought you can learn a lot about a game by seeing it played.

After lunch I had a feeling that the numbers at the show had thinned out a bit – not a surprise as you often get a rush at the start of a show who are just coming for the traders. I went to two of the seminars in the Green Room under the stage. Now if you don’t know what a Green Room is or don’t know where the stairs to under the stage are this could be a rather lost location. Fortunately I’d been down there at Salute many years ago and having been involved in shows I know where to look for a Green Room.

Now here’s a tip if you’re putting on a seminar at a convention – pick a theme that’s broader than “my game companies plans for the future” that will get you you’re hard-core fans and a few who are interested in the business. The two seminars that lured me to the Green Room were Investigative Gaming, featuring Gumshoe and Pelgrane Press and Ian Livingstone: A Retrospective. Both of those managed to fill the room and both got to tell us a bit about what they have coming up. Of course that’s probably more important for Pelgrane than Ian Livingstone

The two talks were quite different. I’ll write my notes up from Pelgrane’s talk about Investigative Gaming and post them tomorrow. They announced they are starting a fiction impring Stone Skin Press and gave us some background on that. I picked up some good ideas in that session. Ian Livingstone’s talk about the foundation and growth of Games Workshop and his work in computer games was fascinating.

Based on the numbers in both sessions I’d say the seminars are the one part of Dragonmeet that has outgrown the space it has available. Perhaps it was that I was at the end of a row and in danger of being pushed off my chair by other people trying to squeeze in. It could really do with a slightly larger, more accessible location, preferably where the video projector can be set up to project in the direction the audience are facing!

After back to back seminars I needed a drink and then wandered around for a bit till friends finished up their games. The raffle was called and I didn’t win

The charity auction was going on but we had to head out to get people back to snowed in parts of the country and trains. So I’m not sure how much they raised. Then managed to spend a couple of hours having a quiet drink with old friends before hiking back to my hotel.

£7 wasn’t an unreasonable price to pay. There were a good mix of traders, games and seminars. Ian Livingstone’s seminar was a special treat.  Thanks to all those involved in organising and running it.  I really enjoyed my day and hope I can make it again next year.

Symatt’s posted his Dragonmeet show report too.

I realised I’d not posted a progress report on any of my writing for ages. Its far too easy to update twitter and forget to mention stuff here.

I finished a completely rewritten draft of the Role Playing Game that’s been occupying a lot of my writing time for the last year. The plan was to make it leaner and more focused. This draft came in 7000 words longer and exactly the same number of pages so it isn’t leaner. However it is now more focussed with more detail where it was needed. So I need to circulate it and see what reaction it gets.

I took a look at the reworked opening to NitS that I wrote last year. I hate it so I need to go back to square one. The core story of NitS is written (although it will need a thorough edit at some point) but I’m struggling with the outer story as NitS takes the form of an investigation of the story. Still it’s not a lost cause.

I scribbled down the first few pages longhand of a short story on Thursday night that came to me thinking about some of the pictures in Exposed at Tate Modern. Discovering the book for the exhibition was a lot cheaper on Amazon than at the Tate I’ve ordered a copy as additional inspiration. That’s my excuse and I’m sticking to it.

I’ve a couple of Dirk Dangerous short stories I must post up over on the Dirk Dangerous web site. I must try to find a pulp zine since Astonishing Adventures Magazine really seems to have gone (although I’m happy to be corrected on that). I’ve a good stand alone DD story that needs finishing and I’d like to continue the serial adventure I began by accident to see where it winds up.

I’ve been scribbling some notes on a very old idea for an RPG that has overtones of The Prisoner; The Invaders; and Health and Safety films. The system for it is very lightweight. The big idea is that the setting should be mostly detailed on a large map of the key location with lots of margin notes and scribblings.

The Green Men of Avalon are an order of heroes I created for my 7th Sea game.  Little is known of them except their public appearances as escorts to the Queen on public occassions.  Here tonight for your enjoyment I post their unique weapon and fighting school.

Daneofwar asked a question on Twitter in the middle of Sherlock on Sunday night…

Why are fantasy ideas of settings based on the 19th century always so unoriginal? Steampunk blah blah blah goggles blah blah blah.

I didn’t have time for a long answer then (too busy watching Sherlock) but I think Brian has touched on a more fundamental question.  A question that is important for writers, world builders and setting designers.  Why are so many settings unoriginal? A good answer to that will also answer the question How do you avoid your setting being unoriginal? Or why are so many settings unoriginal?

There are quite a few possibilities.  One of the main ones being settings that are simply rip offs of someone else’s work with the serial numbers filed off.  There is a fine line between parodying a work, producing something in the same genre and simply ripping off the market leader in the hope of making some cash.  Harry Potter, Star Wars, Star Trek and lots of things with Vampires in them rip offs I’m looking at you.  This isn’t the problem I’m interested in tonight.

The problem I’m interested in tonight is the And the Kitchen Sink setting.  There is a real art to knowing not just what to put into a setting but what to leave out.  There is a temptation when building a steampunk setting to include every trope that can be thrown in: flying ships, anachronistic machines, steam mechs, ninja, steam cars, zeppelins, difference engines, mad scientists, clockwork, magic, polished brass, psychic powers, corsets,  gears slapped on everything, monsters, steam powered potato peelers and inevitably goggles.  Of course this isn’t just a problem for steampunk; there are plenty of settings in other genres that have suffered the same fate.

I hate to pick out just one culprit when there are so many around but the game Waste World (Manticore 1997) sticks in my mind for trying to shoehorn as many science fiction ideas into one setting as was possible.

Its very easy with this approach to creating a setting to cram lots of cool stuff in without working out what its impact on the world really would be.  It can become a thick layer of makeup caked over the setting’s pretty face.

Personally I think a sounder approach is to build a setting up in small steps.  Heinlein’s Future History stories are a good example of this approach most add a few changes to the world with each step forward.  To pick four of the stories:

• The Roads Must Roll – Rolling Roads
• The Man Who Sold the Moon – Space Travel
• Delilah and the Space Rigger – Women in an all male environment
• The Long Watch – Moon based nuclear weapons

There are some that do add more.  If_This_Goes_On— has a post religious revolutions America, scram jets, social engineering and other stuff.  However it  was a novella so had more space to play with the ideas and there were three unwritten stories between it and its predecessor in the series The Menace from Earth.

My personal experience is that its easier to avoid adding stuff than it is to take it out.  Its also easier to take stuff out earlier in the development process than to do it later.  Avoiding adding something in also avoids wasting time on research and writing unnecessary material.

Plus if you’ve left something out and you wind up with a success on your hands you can follow Heinlein’s path and add each new thing in as you go along.

In The Danger of Difficulty Despair – With Graphs I talked about the risk of a game suffering from boring encounters if the difficulty progression was always identical.  I showed, with the aid of graphs, how linear encounter difficulty combined with character improvement at the end of each adventure could create a universe which sees the player characters improve but never lets them experience the improvement.  I’ll come back to that problem in a future post.  First I’m going to suggest a few alternative difficulty variations that can be used for adventures.

To quickly recap the linear difficulty encounter adventure is an adventure where a series of encounters occur starting with an easy one and building up to a harder one.  The difficulty of each encounter is roughly similar.

Capability and Linear Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

A common variation on this is the Swooping difficulty adventure where the difficulty starts out at a level, drops down and then rises for the climax.  My notes included a mention of the “extreme” swoops favoured by one of the DMs we played with who used a lot of very easy encounters and then towards the end things got really tough.

Swooping Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Extreme Swooping Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Another type of progression happens in dungeons built of areas (which may be levels) where several encounters of similar difficulty are grouped together followed by an area with harder difficulty and so on till the final, climactic encounter.

Stepped Dungeon Style Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Last time I said I’d talk about one of the worst games I ever played in.  I’d played in games run by the DM responsible before and he was usually pretty good.  Then came his experimental phase.  First a game where he let two of us generate nominally evil (really just not good) characters and then decided he wanted only the cleanest of clean characters.

Then came what I think can be best described as his attempt at a game combining psychedelic elements from 60s TV shows, American film musicals and Dungeons and Dragons.  He topped that strange combination off with difficulty so varied that I think it can be best described by this graph…

If you've read this far already you shouldn't need any explanation for this graph

It was just as frustrating for the players as the linear progression of difficulty.  Here the frustration came from the feeling that the world didn’t make sense.  It might be “realistic” but it lacked drama.  Players never knew when to heal and when to use their limited use abilities until it was too late.  We suspected there was a lot of dice fudging by the Dungeon Master going on so we didn’t get wiped out.  We stuck with the game for about five sessions and then, to our relief, it came to an (unsatisfying) end.

I was going through some very old gaming files from when I was at college and came across some notes on designing the difficulty of encounters in a tabletop role playing game. A few weeks ago I questioned if Role Playing Games Need XP and the notes reminded me that in a game with experience the characters can effectively not develop. That sounds like a contradiction but it can happen and it can be a problem. It happens when the difficulty faced by characters increases at the same rate as the characters improve and this can be frustrating for players.

In most table top RPGs experience, and character development happens between adventures characters’ capability develop something like this:

Character Capability against time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

A game with linear encounter difficulty is one where as the characters abilities increase so does the difficulty of the encounters they face. The characters may gain some advantage; they may hit their enemies harder or more often and may have more hit points. Unfortunately their opponents also now hit harder, more often and have more hit points. In its purest form every encounter has the same chance of their succeeding, as the last for characters. In fact, apart from a little colour in their encounters, they might as well have not improved at all and their opponents could have remained at the same power too.

Linear Difficulty over time (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

So difficulty and capability always keep step with each other…

Capability and Linear Difficulty (blue vertical lines represent the end of adventures)

Some games virtually encourage this style of adventure design by including charts or advice to allow referees to work out the ideal encounter for a group of X players of level Y to face. Charts and tables like that serve a useful purpose in helping new referees and those unfamiliar with a game to find their feet when designing encounters. The risk of building an encounter that will obliterate a group or underwhelm them is significantly reduced without having to resort to dice fudging or deus ex machina. There is a real risk of boredom if this type of difficulty progression is slavishly applied.

Others virtually rule out easy adversaries – I read one rulebook recently (forgive me I can’t remember which one) that said all “easy” encounters where the characters were guaranteed success should be role played rather than roll played. While I agree with that generally (although I hate the phrase roll play and its derivatives) doing this all the time means the players can never feel how powerful they are in a crunchy way.

I’m going to leave this here for now but I’ll be back soon with some other kinds of difficulty progression and some thoughts on one of the worst game I ever played in.

Update: Part 2 is now available Variations on the Difficulty Theme.

When making rules for a role playing game there is the ongoing balancing act between narrative and simulation.  Both of which ultimately need to create fun.  At one extreme you’ve a game like Over the Edge with very lightweight rule system and at the other end you’ve got rules heavy, simulation game like Rolemaster.  Both have their place and both have advantages and disadvantages.  A rules light game can be as hard to run (harder in some ways for a novice) than a rules heavy game.

When I wrote Under Stairs Over Stairs I deliberately decided that character development should be based on a character’s age not on how many fights they had been in.  However over the years some of the feedback I’ve had suggests some players would prefer an experience system.  They’re just more comfortable with games that keep the elements most games have like Statistics, Skills, Combat Rules, Experience Rules and buying equipment with cash.  The further a game moves from the comfort zone the less they like the sound of it.

Simulating an episodic TV shows before the story arc era of shows like Babylon 5 and Buffy the Vampire Slayer presents an interesting dilemma.  In that era, where episodic and serial TV shows were clearly separate, characters didn’t develop much from one episode to the other.  There were good reasons for this: channels could show the episodes in any order and repeat them in any order without having to worry about it.  Writers didn’t need coordinating so the story line maintained continuity.  Crucially it was felt the audience could miss an episode and then start watching again.

So in the game I’m running I’ve been talking to the players about how we can simulate this narrative style in-game since the setting is style after episodic TV shows.  Traditional experience systems see XP awarded and characters improving from adventure to adventure.  The game has that kind of system at the moment.  Episodic TV didn’t see characters changing and growing.  They usually began as fully formed heroes, at least once the pilot episode set them up, and then carried on in the same way for the rest of their dramatic lives.

I’ve been considering a few different approaches to take to this.  The first is simply to not bother with XP.  The second is to not bother with XP but to allow players to reshape their characters a little between episodes by moving skills or stats round till they are happy with the balance.    A slight variation on these possibilities is to give the players more points when creating their character’s so they start out better.  Many games are designed with the idea that the characters will become more powerful and thus deal with bigger challenges as time goes on so this would balance that out.

Another thought is to use XP but instead use it to buy prominence in an episode’s story or to buy central casting in the next episode.  I’ve seen this in a few games – role buying in Hong Kong Action Theatre springs immediately to mind.  I’m wondering if a system that allows the players to buy into the story could work. A little XP would net them a part in the adventure’s B plot.  A bit more would buy them a connection with a character in the story or being in the right (or wrong) place at the right time.  A really big spend in advance of the adventure would let them buy a pivotal position in the next adventure.

So would throwing out XP or using it in a different way make you less likely to be interested in a game?  How would you feel about buying a bigger role for your character in a game?

I’ve been writting the next adventure for the role playing game I’m occassionally running today.  As well as the traditional overhead map of one of the key locations I’m considering using elevations of the streets to help players visualise their surroundings.  The small sample above is a section from a trial elevation I sketched tonight.

I can’t remember ever seeing elevations used in any roleplaying game.  So I thought I’d throw the example out there to see what any gamers reading this thought.

I’m wondering if I should add textures to some of the surfaces or leave it as line art.  If I leave it as line are I’m thinking I’ll use different pen styles / weights to enhance the look.  I’m also wondering if I should include people and cars on the drawing.  Do you think I should add in postboxes, lamp posts, pedestrian crossings and other street furniture.  One detail that’s missing from the example: I’ll be including labels on the final elevations.  Is there anything else you’d suggest?

In the dim and distant past (well circa 1996), when I had my first web site on mudhole, I had some pages about SLA Industries a British, dystopian, science fiction, table top role-playing game.  Last night I revived some of those pages from back-ups.  So for the first time in quite awhile (well probably 8 or 9 years) some of my completely unofficial, fan material is back.  More to follow later.