John and I have been talking back and forth about what a game based on Hellboy’s Bureau of Paranormal Research and Defense might look like. Hellboy comics usually start with an investigation, which is Gumshoe’s core strength. They also usually culminate in some over-the-top action, which Fate is quite good at. So what if we grafted some Fate onto Gumshoe? FateShoe anyone?

What I’m talking about specifically are aspects. The way I see it, in FateShoe aspects are ways to access a pool of points, something that I’m alternately calling the Fate Pool or the Action Pool. Action Pool sounds a bit more in keeping with the tone of the game, so I’m leaning toward that one. The Action Pool is a pool of points that can be spent like your ability pools in Gumshoe except that it’s a universal pool: 3 points can sub in for a point from an investigative ability, and you get general ability substitution on a 1-for-1 basis. Aspects are how you access the Action Pool.

You can invoke an aspect on a test; each aspect invoked allows you to spend up to 3 points from your Action Pool on the test. The only thing required to invoke the aspect is to explain how it’s relevant to the task at hand. The only way you refresh your Action Pool during a mission is to accept compels from the GM. Accepting a compel gets you a 2-point refresh, refusing a compel forfeits that refresh and costs you 1 point.

You’d want to keep the number of aspects pretty low. I’d stick with three: a High Concept, a Trouble, and a Background. I’m also toying with the idea of having relationship aspects that are shared by two characters that draw from a Trust Pool; either character could call upon it, but only on actions that involve both characters in some way. Going one step further, it might also be cool to have a mission aspect that everyone on the team can call upon in order to draw from a Mission pool.

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about the role of failure in RPGs.

Here’s the thing: I’m fine with failure. I think failure can be good for a story and I think that, in certain kinds of games, it’s a necessary component of building tension.

But.

Failure, particularly in more traditional RPGs, is often boring. Rolls act as binary responses: does something interesting happen or not? The player gets to attempt interesting things (which is good) but often botching a roll means a null result (which is boring). If failure in your game often amounts to nothing in particular happening, then you need to reexamine your game.

Failure, when it’s used, should always be interesting. It should be at least as interesting as success. Note that I’m not saying “at least as good”. I’m not saying that you shouldn’t hurt your players’ feelings, or that you should insluate their characters from bad things happening. I’m saying that, if I roll to hit some bad guy and my d20 comes up a 2, something should happen. Often in games this is not the case; your turn is wasted and the game moves on to someone else. That’s boring and frustrating, especially if you’ve been wating for a while for your turn. It’s not fun. Worse, it’s a completely wasted opportunity for something interesting to happen.

Some games go to an extreme and say that players simply can’t fail at things they’re good at. I think this is fine for certain kinds of games; heck, I wrote one not too long ago (go check out Runners for a game where a botched roll never means failure). Something to keep in mind about games like this is that lack of failure does not equate to lack of consequence or lack of cost. Sometimes success at a cost is really interesting; sometimes it’s more interesting than failure. It’s often more fun (and really, it’s a game; we’re all playing it to have fun, right?).

The fact that I like games with no failure (and that I wrote one) shouldn’t be taken to mean that I dislike failure. You’ll note that, at the top of this article, I say think failure is fine and sometimes necessary. In fact, this whole line of thought brought me to design a game that takes the opposite approach: failure is the expected result in most cases. You have to fail–a lot–in order to eventually succeed. The game’s not quite done yet, but it will be soon and it’ll be free on this blog.

Failure, success; both of these things are means to an end. What we want out of a game is action, drama, tension, and fun. Null results produce none of those things. If your players are allowed to fail, make sure that failure means something. Play big or go home.

Another brain ferret to exorcize. I was thinking about the mechanic of hit locations, thinking back to the various incarnations in games I’ve played in the past. Most of them were complex affairs involving hit location tables, hit points for each individual part of your body, complex rules for what happens when you lose a hand and start bleeding out, and so forth. More complex than I typically prefer these days. But does that mean that the idea of hit locations as a mechanic doesn’t have value?

On the contrary, I think it might. What I have in my head is rough and not playtested at all, but here it is. You’ve got a diagram of a body on your character sheet, a paper doll. That doll has four distinct locations: head, body, arms, and legs. Each of those four locations has three boxes that can be checked off. That’s the basic diagram. The three boxes each represent consequences of increasing severity. The first is a minor consequence, something that’s primarily narrative with maybe a little mechanical kick in certain cases (a gun being knocked out of your hand, getting the wind knocked out of you, getting your bell rung). The second box is a major consequence, which has teeth. These are injuries that stick with you: a bullet in your leg, some broken ribs, a concussion. They have more mechanical bite and they stick around longer. The last box is a severe consequence, and represents irreversible harm to that body part. Maybe your arm has been severed, maybe your leg has been shattered so badly you’ll never fully recover, maybe you’re dead.

When you take damage, it comes in the form of a hit to one or more body parts. Many hits are 1-point hits, forcing you to check off a box from only a single location. Others might force you to spread the damage out amongst different locations. Still others might require you to stick to a single location but check off multiple boxes. In any of these cases, you get to choose what parts of your body sustain the injury, and you get to decide what form that takes.

And that’s it; that’s what I have. Not sure how much merit it has, but I thought I’d put it out there and see what kind of discussion it generated. Have at it.

[Edit: for the love of Jeebus, where did all the carriage returns go?)

Rob Donoghue gave me an idea for a resolution system. Here we go.

If you have a skill, you can complete a task using that skill. You’re always successful, but there are degrees of success. Some of this is cribbed directly from Rob’s post, and some of it is extrapolated.

There are four axes of success:

Stylish/Clumsy
Fast/Slow
Elegant/Obvious
Benefit/Drawback

When the GM sets a difficulty, he’s telling you what the defaults are on these axes (each is neutral by default, netting neither result). So for example, let’s say you’re tracking goblins through the woods a few days after they’ve been through. The GM tells you that this will be a Slow, Obvious roll, meaning that it’s going to take a while to find those tracks and you’re going to make kind of a ruckus doing it (so the goblins might spot you coming).

Then you decide how many Fudge dice to roll, between 1 and 4. Rolling 1 die is more predictable; you minimize your chances at mucking things up, but your chances of getting a better than default result are also smaller. More dice makes stellar success more possible, but makes a complicated success more possible too; it’s swingier.

Roll your dice and interpret your results. Each + allows you to move one of the axes into the positive column (Stylish/Fast/Elegant/Benefit), whereas each – forces you to move one into the negative column (clumsy/Slow/Obvious/Drawback). You can’t spend a – on something that’s already a negative, and you can’t spend a + on anything that’s already a positive . . . with one exception.

The Benefit/Drawback axis stacks. If you’re already getting a benefit, you can put a + there to get another benefit. If you’re already getting a drawback, you can put a – there to get another. These are important when you’ve got extra +’s or -’s that you have to use up.

Neutral results on the die are, of course, ignored.

[Edit: Tim Rodriguez sent me this nifty visual representation of the idea.]

I realize I didn’t do posts for my last two days of GenCon, and that this one’s a little late. There are mitigating factors, I swear. Sleep deprivation, food poisoning, and simple laziness conspired to keep me from finishing the series, but here I am, ready and able, finishing it all up in one post.

When last we spoke I was bragging about an award or something. Other stuff happened since that point. I don’t remember the exact sequence, so I’ll just go stream of consciousness for a bit if you don’t mind (and even if you do).

I got my mind blown a couple of times when I met people I admire and they totally knew who I was already. This happened with Jason Morningstar, whose games I adore, and Mick Bradley, whose podcast was integral to my indie games education way back when. There were also moments of mutual star-struckedness with numerous people I follow (and am followed by) on Twitter, which was cool.

I met Monte Cook, who is a very cool dude. He shook my hand, held Bulldogs! aloft whilst getting his picture taken with me. It was pretty dang cool.

I played in John Adamus‘s Assassin’s Creed hack of Night’s Black Agents (Night’s Black Assassins), which was fantastic and fun and highly lethal. I got to play Fiasco with some friends and watched as our poor characters spiraled into depravity and, eventually, imprisonment/death/worse things. I got to participate in a Fate Core setting creation session with Lenny Balsera, John Adamus, Jeremy Keller, and Shoshanna Kessock (Fate Core is going to be awesome, by the way).

The thing that struck me about GenCon this year was that socializing seemed to far outweigh gaming. Don’t get me wrong; I did a lot of gaming. But the socializing took up more of my time and is what sticks in my memory now that it’s over. I met some really cool people (you all know who you are; I loved meeting each and every one of you), I got to see people I’d seen before but don’t get to see all that often (it was great seeing you again!), I picked up some new freelance jobs (can’t talk about either of them yet; sorry!). I even got to spend Sunday night as a supplicant, drinking at the feet of the Macklin.

So yeah, GenCon was awesome this year. Even awesomer than last year. Next year promises to be awesomer still.

I just got my pre-release copy of Dungeon World (I’m a backer) and I think I’m in love with this game. I’ve read a good chunk of it at this point (the moves, the classes, some of the GM stuff) and I can’t wait to play this thing. It’s delightfully old school in its tone and feel but the mechanics are like nothing I’ve ever seen before (yes, I understand that this is a hack of another game; no, I haven’t played or read Apocalypse World yet).

I’m really hoping to get into a game of this at GenCon. I don’t think I’m ready to run it yet, but I really want to sometime soon. I think getting to play the game would give me what I need to figure out how to run this game effectively.

Anyway, that’s all I wanted to say. As you were.

Edition warring confounds me to some extent.

I can understand the desire to spread the word about a game you like. I can even understand the desire to express your discontent about a given game. What I don’t understand are people who are so vocal — and so vitriolic about it — that it seems like their own sense of self-worth is bound up in someone else’s opinion about Game A or Edition B.

So I’m honestly asking the question here: why do people get so entrenched in edition warring? What’s the appeal?

I’ve talked about the Jedi Rule in the past. To sum it up: whenever I’m reading a new RPG, I tend to look for ways to turn it into a Star Wars RPG. Until recently I had no idea why I did this; I thought it was just some weird OCD thing that I did for no particular reason. I’m beginning to realize that this is not the case, though.

Not entirely the case.

I’m starting to realize that my implementation of the Jedi Rule is a part of the process that I go through when reading a new game because it helps me to grok it. I’m a tinkerer, which is probably why I design games. When I read new mechanics, I like to take them apart and see how they work, put them back together in a slightly different configuration. I hack in order to understand and internalize.

As for why Star Wars . . . well, why not? I suppose it’s a convenient touchstone, something that I can easily access and communicate. Plus, you know, lightsabers.

There are two models of video game distribution that are working with varying success levels that have piqued my interest recently.

Episodic games, like The Walking Dead by TellTale, use a model where you buy the game in two-hour chunks or pay for a “season” beforehand and get a new two-hour chunk every X weeks. In The Walking Dead’s case, drop $25 and you get one episode per month for five months.

Another interesting model is free-to-play, where you download the game for free and play it for free, but you can buy items or other content using microtransactions. You pay for the content you want, and spend what more-or-less what you think the game’s worth.

These two models are interesting by themselves, but I’m waiting for some enterprising game company to combine the two. Most free-to-play games are multiplayer-only. I think this is a good thing because I don’t want to have to buy items in my single player game with real money; I feel it would pull me out of the experience. However, I like the idea of a multiplayer game with microtransactions for multiplayer items and content that also allows you to buy single player episodes of content if that’s what you’re interested in.

Just something I’ve been kicking around.

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I have this thing that I do whenever I read a new RPG: I think to myself, “How would I do a Jedi in this game?”

I wouldn’t go so far as to say that this is how I judge games but I’d be lying if I said it wasn’t a factor. And I’d also be lying if I said I didn’t do it with every single game I read. Maybe I’m weird and in the minority here, but somehow I don’t think so.

I did it when I read the Marvel Heroic RPG and was pleased with what I came up with and with how easily it was done. And then I saw this picture:

Vader vs. Aliens

And my head exploded.

I thought how cool it would be to watch that movie, and how disappointing it was that it would never happen. And then I remembered the Jedi Rule.

Long story short, I’m hacking Marvel to make this thing happen, probably at DexCon. Thinking about it makes me giddy.