Posts Tagged ‘Role Playing Game’

The rebuilding and post launch work on impworks is now pretty much done which means I can get back to other projects.  tonight I’ve taken an editing chainsaw to a 120 page text which is the core design for a game and so far I’ve cut it to 60 pages.  Now I’m at the hard part: cutting stuff I want to keep, stuff that took hard thinking or hard research.  I’ve a simple incentive.  I know that if I get this right and this text ends up in print then there is a chance I can see the cut material in print as supplements.

So tomorrow its away with the chainsaw and out with the pruning knife.

I wrote an article on heist movies, You’re Only Supposed to Blow the Bloody Doors Off!!! , for Valkyrie issue 25 several years ago. I’ve been working on game ideas related to that and to a detective based game for quite a while either as a role playing game or as a wargame. I’ve been struggling to find a way to resolve the problem of finding a clue hanging on a single dice roll. While I like Gumshoe system’s solution of no random chance to finding clues I don’t think it would work well in a wargame setting where players are pitted against each other.

Well tonight while I was watching Have I Got News for You an idea came to me and I’ve got three pages of scrawled notes. Hopefully tomorrow I’ll type them up and they’ll make some sense…

I started another blog a few days ago. At the tail end of last year I picked up the new edition of one of my favourite role playing games, Conspiracy X. I’m not a believer in conspiracy theories tending towards the cock up theory of history. However I do think conspiracies can make for interesting fiction and gaming. I’ve not had a chance to try it out yet but I’m hoping to sometime soon.

Anyway I’m corbett away from the point which was that I’ve set up a new blog, Disavowed-1010, to collect potential resources and inspirations for when I do get round to running a conspiracy theory game again. I don’t intend to post there with any particular regularity. I’ve made a few posts to it so far and I’ll post when I find something worth adding.

Edit: I’ve now abandoned that blog because I just wasn’t finding time to add anything to it.

I’ve been revisiting my notes for Serious and Organised after enough time for the ideas to mature a little more. After a bit of editing to cut fluff I got down to writing a background to go with it drawing on the classic 70s and 80s cop shows for inspiration. A bit more polishing and it should be fit for a play test.

So I want to do stuff for the new web site. I’ve got several stories underway. I should come up with a game idea to work on too. For years I’ve been playing round with an idea for a game that can be used as both a role playing game and a wargame without any changes. I’m going to take another crack at that.

So start with a few important decisions about how it’s going to work. It needs to be simple so it will play fast but not completely devoid of detail. I like the games from Wessex Games using GUTS. They use only a single number for each character. This makes the game fast but being so simple there isn’t any detail on the characters. I also want to separate how effective a character is from how injured they are as I find that systems that link the two completely can become one sided once a few effective hits have been scored.

I want a game that uses a few dice. No buckets of dice being rolled here. I’m going to try to keep to 3 dice in any roll. There should be little maths required in order to keep things quick: addition and subtraction at most. There should be few rolls. No roll to hit, save against the hit then roll for damage. One roll to do the whole lot.

For wargamers I’m going to lean towards 25mm figures because I have quite a few already but so its easy to work in other scales I’m going to list the real world dimensions as well as the scaled version.

I’ve also got to decide on a genre/setting/time frame for the game. It may just be Life on Mars influencing me but I’m going to go for a game set in the recent past something covering the 1960s onward. There were lots of iconic British action fantasy TV shows like The Sweeney, The Professionals, Dempsey & Makepeace, The Avengers and Spooks. I’m going to lean towards the grittier end of things to start with, away from the less believable Bond franchise and The Avengers, but they should be easy to cater for later (hopefully).