That’s right, Becoming has its own site now! You can find it at www.becomingrpg.com. It’s a little bare-bones now, but it’ll fill out with time.

The idea is that the site will be the destination for any news having to do with Becoming (any future posts on this blog that are related to Becoming will also show up there), as well as the destination for new content for the game (once it’s out), both official and user-generated.

The new site is the next step in making this game a reality. I’m excited about the journey, and I hope you are too!

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After an interesting discussion on G+ about how to model Jedi powers in Fate, I came up with another way to do it, one I like a bit better than my Wild Blue method.

There are two costs for being Force sensitive: first, you reduce your refresh by 1 (in a Jedi game, you’d probably want to increase base refresh to 5 or 6 in order to give players enough points to spend on cool Jedi powers). Then, you choose a high concept that reflects your Force sensitive nature: Impulsive Padawan, Grizzled Jedi Knight, Force Sensitive Mercenary, and so on.

Being Force sensitive gives you a few baseline benefits:

• You can use Will to move small objects telekinetically, in your zone or an adjacent zone. This allows you to overcome obstacles and create advantages, but isn’t powerful enough to attack or defend with.
• You can use Notice to detect other Force sensitive beings in the immediate area.
• You can communicate short telepathic messages to people in the immediate area or, for a fate point, communicate a short telepathic message to anyone anywhere, as long as it’s someone you know well.
• You can invoke your high concept on nearly anything, provided it’s something the Force could help you with.
• You can call upon the Dark Side for power.

The Dark Side is modeled by its own stress track, which has a 1, 2, and 3 box. There’s no way to increase it. You can call upon the Dark Side deliberately, taking a 1-stress hit to gain the benefits of having invoked an aspect (a +2 or a reroll). You can do this as many times on a single roll as you want to; each invocation increases the size of the hit by 1.

You can also take Dark Side stress by performing evil acts, and by abusing the Force (using it for direct attack or pure personal gain at the expense of another person). When this happens, the GM decides the severity of the act (between Average (+1) and Great (+4)), which sets the difficulty for your defense roll using Will. Take stress as usual.

Dark Side stress doesn’t go away at the end of the scene like other stress does, and Dark Side consequences can be a bit stickier. Instead, when you perform an act of significant attonement, you can do one of the following:

• Clear the highest box on your Dark Side stress track.
• Reword a Dark Side consequence to imply recovery.
• Reduce the severity of a Dark Side consequence in recovery.
• Erase a minor Dark Side consequence in recovery.

If you’re taken out by a Dark Side hit, you fall to the Dark Side. Rewrite your high concept. Also, if you have any Dark Side consequences, those become permanent aspects, replacing some of your existing aspects. The Dark Side has remade you in its image. Clear out those consequence slots and clear out your Dark Side stress track. If you’re taken out by the Dark Side again, it consumes you body and soul. You’re a shell of what you once were, and no longer a playable character.

Finally, a Force sensitive character can take Force stunts. All Force stunts have a baseline use and an extra-special use that costs a fate point. An example:

Force Mobility: You can move 1 extra zone for free on your turn, and you get a +1 bonus to Athletics rolls made to run and jump. If you spend a fate point on your turn, you can reposition yourself to any zone in the conflict without taking an action to do so. This doesn’t allow you to move through walls or other physical barriers, but it does allow you to jump over them if such a thing is possible.

Some of these stunts are labeled as Dark Side stunts; simply using them is considered a Dark Side transgression (with a severity determined by the GM). An example:

Force Choke: You can make physical attacks with Will against your target’s Physique. These attacks are Weapon: 2, and you can make them against any target in your zone or an adjacent zone. If you spend a fate point, you can automatically kill a mob of up to 6 nameless NPCs; against other targets your attack is Weapon: 4.

The post Alien vs. Jedi: Another Method for Fate Jedi appeared first on 2d6 Cents.

So for a while now I’ve wanted to take my Alien vs. Jedi idea and port it over to Fate Core, but the sticking point since the first iteration of the hack has always been, “How do you model the Dark Side?” In my initial draft of the hack, the Dark Side was basically a way to get free invokes at the cost of being compelled a lot (without getting a fate point for your trouble). It mucked with the fate point economy a bit too much and, in a con game, there wasn’t much incentive to restrain yourself from pulling as many free invocations as possible from your darker nature. So I need a new solution.

I was thinking about it today after a brief twitter conversation and all of the sudden I got the idea to model the Force and the Dark Side with a modified version of the rules for Gifts and Costs that I put in Wild Blue. A Force-using character would choose from a specific list of Powers: one for Light Side and one for Dark Side. A Jedi or Sith might get three of these Powers (or maybe they cost refresh, like normal stunts); the down side is that they’d also get three Costs (or a Cost for each Power), also specific to Light Side or Dark Side and chosen from a list. Powers and Costs work as their counterparts in Wild Blue work; they give you auto-success against passive opposition and nameless NPCs and they provide a stunt-like bonus when you actually have to roll a skill (though I’d probably tone down the bonus of each Power because you’re getting three of them, making them slightly better than a normal stunt but not as good as two stunts). Some examples:

The Force allows me to . . .

. . . move at great speeds and leap great distances.
Benefit: You get a +3 bonus to Athletics rolls made to run and jump.

. . . sense the presence of other Force users.
Benefit: You know when other Force users are near, and can make a Notice roll to determine a specific Force user’s identity, if you’ve felt their presence before.

. . . deflect and redirect energy-based attacks with my lightsaber.
Benefit: While you’re wielding your lightsaber, you can defend against energy-based ranged attacks (like a blaster shot) with Fighting. If your defend roll beats your opponent’s attack roll by 2 or more shifts, you can use the shifts you gain as an attack against a target in your zone or an adjacent zone. The target can defend as usual.

But . . .

. . . the Dark Side always tempts me with power.

. . . I rely too much on the Force, and am helpless without it.

. . . a Jedi uses the Force for knowledge and defense, never for attack.

A Dark Side user might look like this:

The Dark Side gives me the power to . . .

. . . hurl bolts of dark lighting at my foes.
Benefit: You can hurl Force Lightning, allowing you to attack an opponent in your zone with Will. If you attack a single opponent, you deal +2 stress on a successful attack. You can choose instead to attack multiple opponents in your zone by dividing your attack up, but you do not deal the extra stress.

. . . fill myself with the strength of hatred and rage.
Benefit: You can choose to get a +2 to Fighting rolls made to attack and a +2 to Physique rolls made create advantages through brute force, but you take a 1-stress mental hit during each exchange in which you use this Power.

. . . choke the life out of others with the power of the Force.
Benefit: You can use Will to attack a character in your zone or an adjacent zone. You deal +3 stress on a successful attack, but any defense rolls you make while using this Power are made at Mediocre (+0).

But . . .

. . . I am a slave to its will, and it compels me to ever greater acts of depravity.

. . . one day it will consume me.

. . . others can sense its presence within me, and they recoil from it.

The post Alien vs. Jedi: Wild Blue Jedi appeared first on 2d6 Cents.

There’s a discussion on G+ that got me thinking about game balance as it relates to RPGs and what master it serves.

It’s easy to think of balance as making sure everyone gets to spend the same number of points on their characters, making sure all the options you can take are roughly equal, making sure that no one character generation option is clearly “better” or “optimal”, and those things are certainly part of the equation. But why are we doing those things? Why are they important?

The answer is simple: we worry about those things because they factor into screen time. If one character is just better at everything than everything else, that character’s going to get more opportunities to shine, more opportunities to steal the limelight, more opportunities to steer the story. The corrolary, of course, is that the other players get the short end of that stick.

Balance isn’t making sure that all characters can deal equivalent damage or succeed the same percentage of time (or at least it’s not only those things), it’s making sure that each character gets an equal share of the screen time and narrative decision-making power. If that’s not the master you’re serving when you’re worrying about balance, then you’re worrying about balance for the wrong reasons.

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This idea is inspired heavily by something Quinn over at Thoughtcrime came up with for Marvel RPG. His idea, which he calls “pull lists” is that he querries his players, asking them each for three scene seeds they want to see sometime in the near future; he then uses these scene seeds to plan future sessions. Simple, elegant.

It got me thinking: this could work pretty well for an on-the-fly one-shot at a con or something. It would need to be a game that gives you plenty of improvisational tools, like Apocalypse World or Technoir or even Fate. You’d probably also want to give the players some authorship over their characters, whether you’re allowing them to design their characters from the ground up or providing them with partial pregens that they get to finish.

Once you’re through the character stuff and everyone knows more-or-less who they are and how they fit into the world, hand everyone three index cards each. Ask them to write one awesome thing they want to see happen on each index card. Shuffle the index cards up and, at intervals throughout the session, draw one, read it, and start guiding the scene in that direction. For bonus points, draw one face-up and lay it on the table, then let your players help you get there.

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I’ve had this idea for a while, and there’s a better than even chance I’ll turn it into something in the future. It’s a diceless conflict resolution system for an RPG, the schtick being that you get to choose whether you succeed or fail at a given task. Here’s how it works.

The system revolves around tokens. I don’t have a specific name for them yet, so for now let’s call them Plot Tokens, because that’s suitably generic. You don’t start with any of these.

Each player also has a number of Skills or Schticks or whatever; maybe it’s straightforward stuff like “Fighting” and “Athletics”; maybe it’s more descriptive stuff like “Scary as Fuck”; or maybe it describes an occupation or role, like “Freelance Investigator”. The important thing is that, when you attempt an action that falls under the purview of one of these things, you can choose to succeed at no cost. Maybe they can be used a limited number of times per scene or per session, maybe not; I haven’t quite decided yet.

Whenever you attempt an action that falls outside the purview of one of your Schticks/Skills/whatever, you have a choice: succeed and spend a Plot Token, or fail and take a Plot Token. The key here is that both results have to have teeth. If you succeed, you get something concrete out of it; if you fail, something bad happens to complicate your life. Also, in regards to failure, “retries” are not allowed; if you choose to fail, you’ve failed. That opportunity has passed and you fucked it up.

The fact that you don’t start with any Plot Tokens means you’ll have to fail a few times in order to succeed later (unless you’re doing something relating to your Scthicks), which is intentional.

And that’s pretty much it. I have a setting for this system in mind, but I’m going to hold that back for now. I’m still working on these mechanics, but I’d very much like to get your input.

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Yesterday at Meetup of Doom we played a session of Becoming. It played out pretty much how I wanted to, which I take as a good sign. At this point I think there are one or two minor tweaks I want to add to the rules to cover a couple of edge cases, but aside from that I feel like playtesting is done on the game.

So what’s next? Now I finish writing the thing. Some of you have read the playtest document; that document will form the basis of the first chapter of the game, the chapter that covers the rules of play. Chapter 1 will be more expanded and fleshed out than the playtest document, and will include more examples of play, but the bones are there.

Chapter 2 will cover Quests. This chapter will contain four Quests, all using the basic rules but tweaking them slightly to emulate their various genres. I plan on covering a few different genres, from fantasy to sci fi to horror. The intent is to give you a variety of examples that you can either use whole cloth or treat as the basis for creating your own Quests.

Chapter 3 is where things will really get interesting; it’s the chapter on hacking and drifting the game. The intent here is to talk about various ways to change the default assumptions of the game, from messing with the number of players to inverting the Hero/Fate dynamic to playing without a pre-written Quest at all. Each hack will include a Quest as an example of that hack, which you can play through on its own or use to make your own stuff.

And that’s Becoming. When I’m done writing the thing, it’s time for art, editing, layout, and the Kickstarter campaign. I’m pretty excited about this thing; I hope you are too!

The post Becoming: The Way Forward appeared first on 2d6 Cents.

You read that right. If you go over to the Fate Core Kickstarter and back for one dollar, not only will you get the current draft of Fate Core, you’ll also get the current draft of Wild Blue. That means you have rules and a setting for a dollar, and you can start playing right now.

Best get on that.

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The Citadel

Issue: A Place Apart

The Citadel’s where you’ll be going when your training’s done, when you’re a Warden. See, we train here in Ressen but the main force of the Wardens proper live and operate out of the Citadel in Cobalt. It’s our offices, our base of operations, our home. When you become a Warden, you give up your old life; you’re not the person you were and you can’t live that life anymore. The life of a Warden is a hard one, and sometimes a lonely one, but we stand between these lands and those who’d destroy us.

The Citadel itself is a . . . unique building. It’s a fortress, a tower, but it sits atop a piece of floating rock, tethered to the ground by great chains. It floats a couple hundred feet above the Queen’s Sound, casting its shadow down onto entire neighborhoods of the city.

Inside the Citadel you’ve got living quarters, training grounds, meeting rooms, stores, places to eat, and just about anything else a growing team of Powers needs to stay fully functional and keep protecting the Blue Lands.

The whole thing is run by the Lord Warden Windhammer. He’s one part steward, one part military captain, one part lawman, and one part bear. Seriously, the guy’s huge. Stands about a head taller than any other man I’ve ever met, stacked thick with muscle, huge bristling beard, and hands like great rock hammers. With all that power you’d think he’d be slow, but that’s where his gift comes in. See, Windhammer’s fast, fast like you wouldn’t believe. That’s what makes him dangerous. The muscle, the girth . . . that’s all smoke and mirrors, misdirection. His enemies get an idea of what he’s like in a fight from what he looks like, and that’s usually the one and only time they make that mistake, one way or another.

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At midnight on the 3rd the Kickstarter for Fate Core went up. Fifteen minutes later it was funded. As I’m typing this, we’re at $25k of our $3k goal. That’s just plain awesome, and you guys made that happen.

But it’s far from over! We’ve got 56 days to go and, though we’ve met our goal and unlocked six(!) stretch goals, there’s more to unlock! Go check out the Kickstarter page and scroll down to the bottom, to the list of stretch goals. Check out all of the awesome stuff you can get for a crazy low investment. It’s worth it, trust me.

Oh, also, if you back it for at least $10, you’ll get a PDF of Wild Blue. Rock on.

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