Scribble

Cthulhu Hack

2008-12-11T08:18:00.000-08:00

At last year's MACE (a gaming convention in High Point NC) I enjoyed playing a session of Call of Cthulhu with a group of strangers. All the while I was playing, I kept thinking that all I really needed to keep me happy was a bit of a positioning mechanism. Probably one tied to a re-roll now and then.

This morning I had a little seed of an idea. Instead of spending points from a limited or semi-limited resource, there is no limit to the number of times you may re-roll your dice. But! Every time you re-roll you have to put a token in a cup that fuels the GM's resources.

I'm not sure exactly how I'd hammer down the details, but I imagine the tokens being counted & used in that standard Cthulhu third act when the horrors eventually show up. The tokens couldn't be just a straight resource, though. If the players know they're just feeding the GM's chances to kill of their characters then the choice to re-roll or not would be too straight forward.

No, those tokens would have to be seriously random and chaotic and story infulencing to be cool. Anyway, there you have it.

Mechaton

2008-12-07T07:07:00.001-08:00

Last night Mark, Andy, and I played ourselves a full-blown game of Vincent Baker's Mechaton. We dug it muchly.

However...

We're hack-addicts. There is no game we can play that does not beg for us to modify it. Mechaton is no exception. In fact, we started right out with two hacks; one intentional and one accidental.

Our first hack was that Mark and I decided not to play with legos. Legos are awesome. But the thought of having to build and rebuild my mecha every time we played just wasn't appealing to me. So we searched out and found ourselves some really cool 1/400th scale Gundam minis.

Our second hack, the accidental one, was with the spotting dice. The rules say that spotting dice must be cleaned up at the end of the round. That just dosen't make sense to us, since it means that the last mech to go, the mech with the best initiative, doesn't actually get to spot anyone if the spotting die he lays out gets cleaned up before anyone can make use of it. Poo on that, we say.

But I don't think we're stopping there. There are a few other bits of Mechaton that either don't make sense to us or just aren't fun at our table. So, here's a short list of things I'm going to propose for our next game:

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1. More Movement
I'd like to see our Gundams zooming around the table. Therefore, I propose that every mech can assign up to two dice to movement. These dice will be added together for a total movement of up to 12.

This change would not only mean a more dynamic field of battle, it would also mean we could do away with that pesky green d8 that keeps getting under my skin. When you can close from direct fire range to melee range in a single move, your laser-axe weilding mecha can totally put the hurt on without needing any special benefits.

2. No Turn Down
I can clearly see why Vincent designed the Blue and Yellow dice to turn down one point every roll. However, I don't think that's necessary. If we make a tie between attack dice and defense dice means a HIT for zero damage, then a 1-point spot suddenly becomes valuable. Removing the turn-down will (I think) have the ultimate effect of making the spotting die more powerful. If this change turns out to make the spotting die too powerful, I won't be terribly surprised. We'll see.

3. Spotting is Special
I'm not sure how Mark will feel about this one, but I'd like to see us play once where only mechs that roll yellow dice can spot.

4. When Spotting Dies
Mark had suggested that, instead of removing all spotting dice at the end of a round, that we turn down each spotting die by one each round. I think that's an okay modification, but probably not a very strong one. I propose that the end of the round has no effect on spotting dice, BUT, when you shoot a mech with a spotting die, that die is removed even if you don't use it. In the fiction you've eliminated your advantage, wether or not it helped you. In the game it means that you don't have to sit there and look at a 5-point spot on your mech for hours on end.

It's not the best solution, but I think it's better than what we've got right now.

5. Screw the d8s
Mark mentioned last night that he'd like to see symmetry by providing for a potential d8 in every color. I think that might be nifty and fun. However, since the game already calls for a metric ass-ton of dice, I'm kinda wary about adding more to it. I propose that we don't need any d8s at all. We haven't played with any rockets at all so far and only Andy has used the optional rule with two weapons in the same range. If we want to keep disposable rocket attacks and doubling-up on weapons, perhaps we can come up with some other rule that doesn't require more dice?

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Finally, I'd really like to come up with some kind of rule about the maxiumum opening size of the battlefield, but I'm just not sure what it should be yet. The current rules allow the attackers to place their stations pretty much anywhere, which... I dunno. It just seems like it allows the attackers to keep their stations out of reach. We probably need more play time under our belts before we come up with a good modification here.

Best of Styx, track 9, preferably rendered by Cartman

2008-07-12T08:42:00.000-07:00

Last year, really just to humor my father, I climbed onto a sailboat for the first time. It was a refurbished Scorpion. And, when I say "refurbished", I mean that my dad had done some mediocre fiberglass work on the hull and patched the sails with large swaths of some old cut-up windbreaker. It's the sailing equivalent of patchy hobo-pants.

I sailed around a little bay in Lake Champlain for maybe two or three hours total over the course of a week. I had no idea what I was doing. I narrowly avoided banging my cranium with the boom over and over again. Eventually, I capsized the thing. Since I had no idea how to get the thing upright again, Lisa had to grab a rowboat to come out and rescue me.

Normally, that would have been it. I've never really been into boats. They bore me. Usually.

But the sailboat was different. There's something totally different about it. Something that I can't really describe. It's a giddy feeling. I love it.

This year, for vacation, my dad had bought a second sailboat. Instead of driving them both across the lake to camp, we put them in the lake about 2 or 3 miles away and sailed them there. I still really didn't know what I was doing, but I'd spent some time reading up on a book or two, so I knew quite a bit more than I had the previous year.

Well, the weather got kinda crappy and a snap storm caused a bit of damage to the Scorpion. With a lot of work and a bit of luck we were able to get the thing back together and got it back into the water with plenty of sailing time left in our vacation. I'd guess I logged maybe a dozen hours on the thing, all told. Not much, but it can still be pretty chilly on Lake Champlain that time of year.

But now back home in the Carolinas, I'm totally hooked. I just can't stand the idea that I've got better weather and no boat. So I bought myself one. And one for Lisa. I've already logged about five hours sailing my new "Phantom" and I can't wait to get it out there again this weekend.

Way down in the hole

2008-06-04T12:09:00.000-07:00

I just got done watching the final episode of The Wire. That totally rocked. In the final montage I was sad for Dookie, chuckling at Daniels and Rhonda in court together, and out-of-my-chair applauding Bubbles sitting down to dinner with his sister.

Now that's some good TV.

I can't help myself!

2008-05-23T18:09:00.000-07:00

Last week Lisa and I got together with Andy and Shane at It's a Grind. Amongst many other things, we briefly discussed our Sombra Console game. It'd been a while since we'd played, and each of us was eager to get back into it when time allowed.

I asked Andy and Shane if they were happy with the system. They both agreed that they thought it was doing the job. No need to re-work the thing.

Naturally, this week I've started writing up a new system for it. From scratch. Mostly.

I guess I really just can't help it. I start thinking about the things in the system that are bugging me and my pen starts scribbling. I mean, sure the system I cobbled together from bits and pieces of the ol' Shadowrun 2nd Ed game works just fine. But it could be better. Much better.

So, when do I stop hacking and leave well enough alone? I mean, players don't want to have to re-learn a system every month just because the GM is a habitual system hacker. That would suck. I suppose I'll get comfortable with a system again for long-term play someday. It'll probably be when the benefits of changning up the system fail to outweigh the aggravation. Hopefully sooner.

Or maybe, one day, I'll just get tired of writing and re-writing systems and get back to what I used to really love. Creating gobs and gobs of rich setting to immerse the players in. That would be pretty cool.

City of Villians

2008-04-04T05:52:00.000-07:00

Yup. That's where I've dissapeared to.

Lisa and I picked up the City of Heroes / City of Villians game last month and we've been playing it constantly since. It's pretty groovy. It's a nice, casual MMORPG, and that's exactly what I was looking for. I can log in, play an hour or two, and log out feeling like I've accomplished something. I like that.

I'm still working on game projects here and there. We played RBH just last weekend and made some really good changes to the rules. But other than that I haven't felt particularly creative recently. The down-time at work that I usually fill with game design scribbles has been consumed by a short list of paperback books. Usually crappy ones that folks leave onboard for me.

I figure I'll probably get my design mojo back in a couple weeks or so. Give or take.

Thunderstorms in CLT

2008-02-26T06:43:00.000-08:00

Today was supposed to be a short day. Up at 03:30 and done by 12:30. In the hotel room and getting ready for a tasty steak lunch by 13:00. Today's steak lunch brought to you by Capt. Bill and his Wife of Awesome Income.

The little string of things going wrong started yesterday. Our First Officer (copilot to the uninitiated) twists his ankle stepping off of the aircraft. It's those damned Dash 8 doors. They've got that extra long no-step area. So, that evening he hits the doctor's office and gets grounded. Well, that means we need a new First Officer. But it's already late, so Schedueling decides to pull a reserve guy, put him on a continuous duty overnight, and have him work with us today.

Where Schedueling went wrong is when they decided to let the reserve guy work more than just that first flight back to CLT. Big mistake.

See, there's two important things you've gotta know to understand why it was a mistake. The first thing is that pilots are only alowed to be on duty for a certain number of hours at a shot. I think the FAA's limit is 16 hours and the pilot's contract further limits them to 15 hours. The second thing is that a 'continuous duty overnight' is pretty much just like it sounds. The reserve First Officer had so little time to sleep last night that he couldn't be considered to be on 'rest'. So he's been on duty continuously since 21:40 last night.

We flew from our overnight to CLT. That's when the reserve would have been done for the day if Schedueling weren't greedy. But greedy they are, so they decided to have him work a trip to Wilmington NC and back with us. That would have had him finishing his duty at about 11am. That's 13 hours and 40 minutes. Only an hour and twenty minutes shy of his limit.

Guess what? We're just starting to board to leave Wilmington to head back to CLT when Capt. Bill tells me that we're delayed due to weather in CLT. It's a big enough delay that he wants to send the passengers back into the terminal. We won't know anything more untill 11:00 or so. If we dont' take off by (I think he said) 11:04 then the First Officer isn't allowed to fly an aircraft with passengers on it.

Ha!

That'll mean we'll have to cancel the flight and 'ferry' the plane back to CLT. We are booked at 50 out of 50. We're supposed to be full. That's 50 folks who'll need to be rescheduled on other flights. Are there 50 free seats leaving Wilminton NC for anywere today? I bet not.

Good job. Ya greedy punks.

I graduated from the Forge

2008-02-23T05:02:00.000-08:00

In a few recent threads here and there at Story Games, folks have mentioned that the Forge would be a great place to do the work they're talking about doing. It started me thinking about my relationship to the Forge and why I don't really go there very much any more.

I think it's because all the hard lessions are done. I learned how to shed my baggage there. Not just the baggage I brought with me, but also the baggage I accumulated while I was there and the baggage that I occationlly pick up here and there. I learned how to think critically about games. Not just the text, but also how I play. I learned how to be polite on the internet at the Forge. Ok, so I don't allways apply that lession, but I still learned it at the Forge.

I could go back to the Forge to learn more. There are constantly new folks coming in with new ideas. I could totally pick up lots from chatting with them. Or I could go back and take up space as someone willing to dish out the limited wisdom of my own experience. There are a couple folks doing an excellent job at that very task right now.

But I'm not much of a teacher-type. What I need right now is a studio of creative folks who are there to design and have allready gone through all the basic lessions. I need a post-graduate space.

Jumper

2008-02-22T12:47:00.000-08:00

Lisa and I used our free movie passes to check out the new movie Jumper today at Southpoint.

I enjoyed it. It had an intentional comic book feel to it. I cannot reccomend it, because it also felt like it was just the first three issues and no one seems to know if there will be anymore.

The plot wasn't particularly deep or anything, but it failed to wrap up pretty much every single loose end. Except, of course, the lead character's shitty relationship with his dad. That got wrapped up with the bad guys showed up and offed the old man. Now he can't resolve that issue. Which kinda sucks.

I left the theater with the feeling that I had just watched a particularly expensive television pilot. There was plenty of set up for more story line, but precious little finished off.

Oh well. I wasn't expecting much more than ninety minutes of action and special effects. I did get that.

Comments

2008-02-21T05:55:00.001-08:00

I received a long and thoughtful reply to my post about publishing. It was not abrasive or confrontational. However, it was a rebuttal. Rebuttals have no place on this blog. This is not a place for discussion. If you would like to discuss something with me, drop me an email. If you'd like to discuss it in public, then call me out at Story Games.

I considered disabling the comments on this blog, but decided against it. Instead, I'm making comments invisble to everyone. So if you disagree with me about something and you want to put in your two cents worth, that's fine. I'll see it. But I will not respond to it.

The shame of publishing

2008-02-20T17:39:00.000-08:00

The Infected is in print. Has been for a little while now. I'm asking $10 for a copy of it through Lulu. I get to pocket a bit less than $4 of that.

It is not a four star game. It's not even a two star game. It's workable. It can be fun. But it's far from awesome. I even did my own weak-assed layout work. That doesn't help the quality of the thing, I can tell you that. It's one more weak derivative work on the market.

So, who's that hurting? No one, I thought. But apparently I'm amongst a growing crowd of game designers who's gone and taken a shit in the breakfast burrito of the RPG community. The vibe is that crappy games with price tags are fucking up the world for everyone to live in. I'm not quite sure how it works, but it would seem that my game (or possibly it's price tag) is ruining someone's D&D game somewhere. Something about butterflies in China I think.

Look out everyone. I'm going to do it again real soon.

Television

2008-02-19T17:12:00.001-08:00

I just finished watching the second season of Life on Mars. That completely rocked. Seriously. I spent the whole of the penultimate episode trying to guess what the secret answer was. When I thought I had it figured out, I felt dissapointed. When I considered if I would like the other possibility better, I didn't think I would. Then they hit me with the real ending. A complex ending. One that leaves you guessing and smiling.

Too many years of crappy formulaic television had me all cynical. Now I can add Life on Mars to my top ten list of best TV ever. Right on top of Dexter.

No Country for Old Men

2008-02-15T17:50:00.000-08:00

Spoiler Warning

This evening Lisa and I went to see No Country for Old Men. We'd heard a whole bunch of folks talking about it, and I read some really nifty reviews, so we were off. And I really enjoyed it too. Right up until Llewellen died. From there everything was downhill.

It's not that all the scenes after Llewellen's death sucked under their own power. They could have been good. It's not that I was upset that he died. I figured he didn't have much chance against the assassin. That fucker was intense. The shit is, when Llewellen was denied a chance to do anything, I was pissed. I was invested in him. I wanted to see how his story would end. Instead I get some lame ass shit about the Mexicans killing him. The Mexicans? Seriously? They were just foils. And they killed the lead character? Off screen?

Fuck that. I hated that movie.

On the up side, the sound was occationally crapping out. So I got Lisa to complain about it and demand some free passes. We'll try again with something else on Sunday.

[Sombra Console] Saving them wasn't enough

2008-02-13T13:37:00.000-08:00

Something interesting happened in our last session of Sombra Console. Something I really did not expect.

If you're not familiar with it, Sombra Console is my clumsy hack of Shadowrun 2nd edition. It's fun, but far from elegant.

So, we were on our third session. We've just about acclimated to the setting and the rules, and we knew we were at the climax of the first mission. The 'runners had tracked down, called out, suckered and captured the bad guy. We started the session by talking about what they were going to do with him now that they had him. The players quickly settled on taking him to a little safehouse for some interrogating. Cool.

For a brief moment I mentally blanked and forgot that the mission was to find out what was going on. One interrogation roll and one hacking roll later and the 'runners had finished the mission. Whoops. It was only maybe thirty minutes into play. Not the greatest pacing job I'd ever done. So what was I to do? Escallate, of course!

That's when interesting thing number one happened. By way of a phone call from an associate, I reveal that the city blocks the characters were investigating was about to turn into a mini war zone. The PCs hurry over to get involved. When I describe the scene I go one step to far. Suddenly the situation looks completely out of reach for the PCs to do anything about. The players pull back and I can tell that I've accedentally gone and GM-blocked them.

Damn. Jumped the shark.

We resolved the situation by pulling back and getting all meta. We talked about what options seemed reasonable for their characters to pursue. Do nothing and go collect their money? Reasonable. Storm into one of the buildings and be the spear-head of the counter insurgency? Reasonable. Get on their stealth boat, sneak up to one of the aging military submarines, sneak onboard and take that sucker over? The lights go on again. Situation averted. A submarine is stolen, jacked into, and intentionally crashed into another submarine. Rock on.

Interesting thing number two was the aftermath. The PCs had not only figured out who was doing the dastardly deed, but they also got involved and stopped it. About ten thousand low income orks and trolls keep their homes. Mr. Johnson shows up and drops some bonus cash on them. They collect their sideline cash from the fishmonger who'd have gone out of business without the troll customers. I figured that would be the final curtain on that mission. A job well done and cash in hand.

I was wrong.

There wasn't even a heartbeat of a break between the narration of the cash handover and the discussion of how they were going to publically ruin the company that was responsible for this little bit of attempted racial clensing. Cybereye footage of the interrogation and bits of video that implicated the company were immediately sent out into cyberspace. News media were alerted. The Crimson Maple Leaf of Canada had their reputation on the island completely thrashed in about thirty minutes of game time.

In retrospect, I'm not sure how come I never saw it coming. I made those suckers out to be pure bastards. But I didn't, which made it even more sweet when we played it out.

Sombra Console is shaping up to be pretty damned interesting.

Ice in LEX

2008-02-12T06:58:00.000-08:00

Apparently airplane de-icing fluid doesn't have an indefinate shelf-life. I did not know that. Also, I knew there were multiple types of fluid, but I didn't realize there were different types for different amounts of snow and ice. Makes sense, I just didn't know it.

So, it seems that the Bluegrass Airport in Lexinton doesn't carry the heavy stuff. It's too expensive to keep around for an every-other-year occurrance. So, here I am, sitting in the airport eating an omlette that's way too expensive for what it's worth, and waiting to see what I'll be doing today and tomorrow. Will any flights get in? If so, what will they do about my schedule since I was supposed to be in Charleston, West Virginia by 2pm? If no planes do come in, when will schedueling get around to releasing us back to our hotel?

I love being a flight attendant on small aircraft. Seriously. No sarcasm intended. I couldn't work a 9-5 job. No excitement.

Tiny book binding

2008-02-10T07:06:00.000-08:00

I don't have a huge collection of indie games, but I do have a pretty good selection. Something I noticed the other day is that I really hate perfect binding on little books. Dogs in the Vineyard, The Shab-al-Hiri Roach, and The Mountain Witch are all perfect bound and relatively hard for me to read. I guess it' because the pages won't lie flat. Drives me nuts. On the other hand, My Life with Master and In a Wicked Age are much easier for me to get into, just because they're saddle-stitched.

I had the Infected saddle-stitched on a whim. I'm really glad I did. All my published designs will be saddle stitched in the future.

It's on!

2008-02-08T08:33:00.000-08:00

Brandon has signed up for the long haul. RBH here we come!

Success!

2008-02-05T09:19:00.000-08:00

I dropped a line to Mark about filling up the rest of my month with RBH. He's in and excited about it. Excellent. Now I just need to hook one more player...

More please

2008-02-04T08:14:00.000-08:00

I want to play more. I wanted to play this past weekend, but I couldn't get enough folks together to do anything. Or maybe I just didn't try hard enough.

I'd really like to get something kinda long-term going. Well, I do have Sombra Console. That's pretty cool. Everyone seems to be really digging it. But I think that schedueling is gonna keep that thing down to one session a month. Which makes sense. Andy is one of the core members of that group, and he has an unbelievable amount of shit going on. I'm not going to press him to play anymore than he already is.

I think I'm going to do something right now about getting more game on. Watch me go.

Cthulhu Hack

2008-02-03T11:11:00.000-08:00

I like Call of Cthulhu. I really do. But it has so much dead weight and wasted potential. Where's the fun that could be inherent in going mad? Why does the character sheet have skills like accounting and zoology? Does zoology really come up that often?

So, naturally, I wrote up my own version of the game. You might be tempted to look at this thing and say that it's not a hack. But I stand by the lablel. This is a hack of my actual play experiences with CoC.

It's pretty rough. There's lots of unaddressed issues. Like what kind of mental disorders might eventually become part of the game. I'll work on that stuff when and if the time comes. If you'd like to take it and do something with it, then please, be my guest. It's all yours.

I'm back

2008-02-02T11:12:00.000-08:00

A few months ago I had a total fit about my blog. I was frustrated with it. I was frustrated with game design. I was frustrated with gaming. But mostly I was just sleepy and grumpy after a long week at work. So I deleted the thing. It was kinda like the cyber version of breaking something. It felt good. Little tantrums that don't cause any real damage usually do feel pretty good.

But I've found myself wanting to have another place to post up my little ideas. The stuff that I may not finish, but I'm not ready to throw away. This will be the place.

I want to doodle more too. Lisa likes my doodles. Maybe you will too. I think I'll shoot for a doodle a week. I probably won't meet that goal very often, but it'll be a nice goal to have.