It’s been a little while since I posted, so I figured I’d do one of those “random things on my mind” posts.

The Demolished Ones is humming along nicely. We’ve got a Kickstarter going up on September 1st, so be sure to check that out; if you’re interested in the game, it could really use your support. In the mean time, if you’d like to learn about it, there’s a teaser page on Rite Publishing’s website. This features some basic information, some teaser text by yours truly, and some artwork by Hugo Solis and the final logo by Claudia Burgos. It’s all very cool.

Seeing this project develop has been kind of a surreal experience for me. I’ve been freelancing for a while, so I’ve gotten a little bit used to seeing my words in a finished product, but The Demolished Ones is the first project that I’ve had so much creative control over. I’m normally the guy writing the stuff that someone else wants me to write, but with this project, I’m choosing the direction the project goes in, I’m telling the artists what the art should look like, and so forth. It’s bizarre, but in a good way. I’m really excited about this project and I hope it gets green-lit so we can actually publish. I think it’s going to be a pretty awesome game.

On the electronic side of things, I’ve been playing Deus Ex: Human Revolution lately. I was a big fan of the first Deus Ex, and I even liked Deus Ex: Invisible War enough to play it all the way through (though I readily admit that it wasn’t as good as the first). Human Revolution feels very much like the first game, but so much of it is better from a mechanical standpoint. The stealth and gunplay is better, the augmentation system offers more freedom to customize your playstyle, the environments are more complex and convincing, and the hacking minigame blows the original Deus Ex’s hacking system out of the water.

My avatar in the game is a sneaky special ops type who kills when necessary, can cloak himself, and is great at hacking through obstacles. My friend Chris is playing the game non-lethally, and seems to be focusing more on augs that give him access to interesting locations. I like that there’s enough game there to support both of us. Highly recommended.

Finally, Bulldogs! is doing really, really well. It’s been in the top 15 on a number of sites where it’s sold since its release, and I’m hearing nothing but good things about it. Unfortunately, Hurricane Irene prevented me from running my planned demo of it this past Sunday, but I plan on rescheduling it. This is a game that I am really proud to be associated with; it does so many things well, and running it is a crazy amount of fun.

If there’s one thing I took away from running Old School Hack, it’s that less can be a lot more when it comes to character generation. I saw this in Gamma World, too, and while OSH isn’t nearly as random in its character generation as that game is, it still offers very little in the way of character customization.

For those who are unfamiliar (and really, the game is free, so you have no excuse) with the character generation system in OSH, it’s pretty simple. The basics are these: choose one of 7 classes, roll your attributes, choose one of 5 talents for your class, choose a weapon, choose some armor. There are some other choices that you make that amount to role-playing hooks, and have little to no impact on mechanics, but that’s basically it. At first blush, this seems limiting. A level 1 goblin isn’t going to look that different from another level 1 goblin, mechanically; that much is true. But there’s more there than is immediately apparent.

First of all, you can’t have two players with the same class. I actually like this limitation quite a bit, as it does allow for a lot more differentiation between PCs. The real genius is in how open-ended some of the mechanics are. Weapons and armor, for example, are simply generic categories: light armor, heavy armor, light weapon, reach weapon, etc. There are three kinds of armor to choose from, and there are five kinds of weapons. However, you’re encouraged to flavor these choices however you like.

This is an approach I really like: generic mechanics nearly devoid of flavor, so that the players can fill that flavor in, themselves. This is how you wind up with caber-wielding fighters and clerics who use their holy book as their primary weapon. It’s great fun, and leads to a lot of great role-playing situations (like when, isntead of using a torch, the party lit the figher’s caber on fire, which remained on fire for the rest of the session).

Another area where the minimalist approach works is in covering different situations. OSH does not try to come up with rules to cover every situation; it has a few simple rules that can be applied broadly, and some guidelines for coming up with rules for improvised actions. Players, when given this kind of freedom, tend to come up with crazy stuff. Rather than saying, “I attack the kobold”, you get, “I throw my caber at the kobold; after it hits him it ricochets off the wall and rolls back in front of my feet”.

This is reinforced by another simple yet elegant mechanic: awesome points. There’s a bowl of these in the middle of the table; players can reward each other awesome points from the bowl whenever another player does something they think is awesome. They can then spend those awesome points to do more awesome stuff. That’s pretty much it; specifics are not discussed. Instead, it’s left up to the players and the DM to determine what falls under the umbrealla of “awesome”.

Old School Hack is a very simple, streamlined, rules-light game. The whole thing is maybe thirty pages long. It never felt like there weren’t enough rules to handle things, though. And it always felt like people were using their mastery of the rules (which came quickly) to do all kinds of fantastic and interesting things. This is an approach to game design that I have grown to appreciate quite a bit.

The soft launch page for The Demolished Ones, a Kickstarter-funded patronage project on which I am the lead designer, can be found here. The Kickstarter isn’t up yet; that’s due to go up on September 1st. I will let you know when it’s up, and where to go. In the mean time, go take a look and get your pledges ready!

Last night I ran a game of Old School Hack, using a dungeon I had created with How to Host a Dungeon.

I’ll start with dungeon creation.

How to Host a Dungeon, for those who don’t know, is a solo activity (I hesitate to call it a game, though it is certainly fun) in which you use pens, paper, little glass beads, and random tables to generate a dungeon by simulating its creation and subsequent occupation by civilizations, monsters, adventurers, and evil villains. The game is played out in rounds representing seasons in which each faction currently on the map acts according to a script, and in some cases additional factions are introduced. These factions often have interesting rules interactions that force conflict with other factions, which is handled with a simple die roll.

I’ve only played it once, and I got some of the rules wrong (rules clarity in the game could be better), but I had a great time and I fully intend to play it some more. It’s a fun activity (again, not sure I’d call it a game, as there’s really no condition for winning or losing) that takes a couple of hours (probably faster once you’re familiar with the rules). Best of all, when you’re done you’ve got a fully populated dungeon with a backstory you can call upon.

My particular dungeon started with a devastating earthquake. A society of dwarves delved into the depths in search of gold, but soon stumbled upon a cavern that spelled their demise. Shortly afterward, monsters started inhabiting the dungeon. Among them were a one-headed ettin who preyed upon the villagers on the surface, a clan of duergar, some kobolds, some orcs, and a tomb of undead horrors.

Eventually all these monsters drew the attention of the Thought Lords, mind-controlling abominations from beneath the surface of the world. They slowly insinuated their tendrils of control into the nearby monster clans, as well as the bold adventurers who came to stop them. Eventually, they even took the surface world for their own.

Using the dungeon required a little bit of hand-waving. By the end of the game, there were three factions left: the Thought Lords, an adventuring party, and the surface kingdom. All of the monsters had been wiped out by adventurers, and the Thought Lords had taken control of everyone who remained. I repopulated the dungeon with the monsters that I felt would make for good gameplay, and prepped it for play.

That brings us to Old School Hack, which is a fantastic little dungeon crawling game that encourages off-the-wall awesomeness. Also, it’s free. The adventurers who ventured into the dungeon were a burly fighter who wielded a flaming caber, an evangelical cleric of Hubert the Happy, god of jokes (apparently), a “high class” magic user who could talk to doors, and a vicious goblin with a hatred of kobolds and rats. The party seemed to follow the goblin, whose quest was to find and slay the Ur-Rat.

This required a little bit of improvisation on my part (I didn’t have an Ur-Rat prepped!), but it worked out pretty well. There were some great moments; the fighter flung Grobnar the One-Headed (the ettin) off a cliff, the cleric used his preacherly ways to take control of a tribe of orcs, the wizard spoke to every door she encounters and provided valuable intel, and the goblin wound up riding the body of the Ur-Rat down a hole, Dr. Strangelove-style.

We were nearly out of time toward the end, so I reskinned the leader of the Thought Lords as the Ur-Rat, and made it into a giant, tentacled, psychic, mind-controlling rat-thing. It was pretty great.

First, some housekeeping. I feel like I’ve become somewhat satiated on D&D of late. I still enjoy going to Encounters (mainly because I like the people I get to hang out with), but I deliberately did not play any D&D at GenCon because I simply didn’t want to. As such, you’ll you’ll likely see a lot less D&D coverage on this site than you have in the past. Quite frankly, I’m a lot more excited at the moment by the things that are going on in the indie scene; there are a ton of games out there I want to play (some of which I now own, thanks to GenCon), and I’ll probably be talking about them.

Now, on a tangentially related note, I want to talk about something I saw on Twitter this morning. Angry DM, who generally gives some pretty solid advice, said something that I disagree with pretty vehemently. I’m having trouble finding the exact quote, but it boils down to “asking your players to participate in world-building is like asking a demolition crew to help you move your car.”

Now, before you say it, I know Angry DM’s schtick. I realize that his tongue is planted at least a little bit in his cheek. I’m not saying that this quote makes him a bad player or DM.

That does not, however, mean that it’s not worth discussing, because it does raise some interesting points.

First off, a lot of DMs/GMs out there are hesitant to approach collaborative world-building. Many probably feel a sense of ownership over the world, and fear the exact thing that Angry DM is satirizing here. A lot of DMs/GMs probably feel a very real sense of antagonism, maybe stemming from a sense of not being appreciated.

If this is you, take a breath. Player agency isn’t the enemy; it can help supercharge your game if you let it. There’s a lot of imagination in the room when you sit down to game, and if you can harness it you can make your game that much better.

It’s perfectly okay to start small. The next time your PCs enter a room and you tell them there’s a fresco on the wall, point to one of the PCs and ask, “What does it look like?” The next time some oracle murmurs a portentious prophecy about one of your PCs, ask, “What does she say?”

This is scary, and I understand that. Giving up control is very scary when you’re used to having it. But it’s their world, too, and coming to that realization can make the game better for everyone.

The second issue that the quote raises is the game being played: D&D. System matters when it comes to player agency and narrative control. It can be done in D&D, but one of the reasons it’s so scary is that there’s nothing in the system that supports it. There are no mechanics that speak to players gaining narrative control. There is no collaborative world-building mechanic.

A good way to learn to utilize these techniques if you’re not familiar with them is to read, and then play, a game that does support these kinds of concepts. I don’t mean just a game where those kinds of things are possible; I mean a game that explicitly grants players narrative control, a game that explicitly shares the world-building load. There are a ton of them out there: The Dresden Files, Mortal Coil, Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I’d be remiss if I didn’t at least mention Bulldogs! here, though you’re likely tired of hearing about it.

Branching out from D&D to try things that take more mechanical risks can help your D&D play when you return to it. Once you grow more comfortable with sharing the narrative load with your players through rules systems that encourage and even require it, you’ll find it that much easier to implement such techniques in games like D&D, which do not speak to those kinds of mechanics or techniques.

After reading through Zombie Cinema, I started getting ideas. I’d like to put one of them up here, because I really want to get it down on paper (so to speak), and I’d like to try it out sometime. If any of you wind up trying it, I’d like to hear about your experience.

The premise of this hack is to create a Zombie Cinema game that is similar in tone and feel to the movie The Thing, by John Carpenter. The Thing has themes of isolation and paranoia; you don’t know who you can trust, and you’re trapped in a secluded location with a dangerous creature that can look like any of your allies. Because Zombie Cinema focuses on intra-party conflict, it’s perfect for this kind of game.

It does need one or two small tweaks to get it working, though. In terms of physical items, you’ll need the following:

• A copy of Zombie Cinema (naturally)
• One copy of the game board for each player, plus the one that comes in the box. Photocopies would work just fine.
• A screen for each player, to keep each player’s private game board secret from the others.

To set up the game, put the main game board (the one that came with Zombie Cinema) in the middle of the table, and put the zombie pawn on it as per the normal rules. Instead of representing the pervasiveness of the zombie threat, this represents the threat of the Thing; how powerful it is, and how many people it’s infected. Then, each player puts his or her own pawn on his or her own copy of the game board, and keeps it secret behind his or her own screen. Optionally, you can also hide all but one of your player cards, making only the most obvious one visible.

Then, play the game as normal, with the flavor of The Thing (or something similar) rather than the flavor of a standard zombie movie. Keep your position on the board secret, and keep track of where you are in relation to the zombie pawn. If it catches you, it eats you as normal. When this happens, you have been infected by the Thing. Don’t tell anyone this. Continue to play as normal, but now it’s your job to subvert the group and try to make sure that other people get infected, too. This’ll be a bit of a guessing game, as you don’t know where they are on the board, but if you use the conflict system to keep pushing people back on the board, eventually they’ll be infected, too.

Something you can do with conflicts is call for blood tests. Doing so is like any other conflict, but if you successfully convince someone to take a blood test, they must reveal whether or not they are infected.

Finally, even after you are infected, you should keep track of your position on the board. Once infected, you cannot become uninfected again; however, you can still escape (the Thing wants to escape, to infect more people). The game ends when everyone escapes.

Today I’d like to talk about some awesome things, all of which (for me, to some extent or another) originated at GenCon this year.

Thing the first: The Awesome Die. The core of this idea was originally posited to me by frequent commenter mbeacom. I’m simplifying it a little bit here. I bought an Awesome Die (a d30) at GenCon, specifically so I could use this trick. The idea is, whenever a player does something really awesome at your table, that player can roll the Awesome Die instead of a plain old d20. Obviously, this works best with games that use a d20, like D&D. A couple of implications go along with using a d30 rather than a d20. First, success is considerably more probable; this is the intent. You want to encourage awesome things at your table, and making those awesome things more likely to succeed will do that. Another implication is that, if it’s an awesome attack, it’s much more likely to crit, since you can roll a natural 20-30 on this die. Assuming 4e D&D, your crit chance jumps from 5% to around 30% for that attack. That’s significant. As a result, you might want to limit how often you hand out the Awesome Die. This, in turn, will have the effect of players trying harder to get it, in all likelihood, provided you make it clear that it’s available and hand it out at least once early in the session.

Thing the second: How to Host a Dungeon is a fantastic game to read; I haven’t even played it yet, but I totally want to. On its own, it seems like a lot of fun to simulate the life cycle of a dungeon. But wait, there’s more! You can use that dungeon in a game if you want to. In a game like D&D, this can be a lot of work. That’s fine, if you don’t mind the prep, and it’s a great way to get a convincing dungeon with a lot of backstory for your game. But if you want to dive right into the dungeon with little to no prep, there’s another game you can use . . .

Thing the third: Old School Hack. I heard about this game at GenCon (it won an ENnie, even), and it is indeed awesome. OSH is an indie game inspired by the original D&D Red Box, but with much simpler and more modern rules that encourage a lot of crazy, off-the-wall actions and cool character concepts. It’s also free. And elf is a class. Awesome. At any rate, it goes with How to Host a Dungeon extremely well, so much so that I’m going to print it out on card stock and drop it in the same folder as HTHAD, and basically treat them as two linked games. I can’t wait to make a dungeon, then run some unsuspecting party through it. It’s going to rock.

My last day at GenCon was good, if short. I started by going back to Games on Demand to see what was on the menu. I got a chance to play TechNoir, a cyberpunk noir RPG with really elegant character generation and conflict resolution rules. The session was so-so; the GM hadn’t been planning on running anything and decided to at the last minute, so he wasn’t really prepared. I can’t really fault him for that. The session did sell me on the game, though. I’m definitely buying this one.

That was the only game I played. I did, however, go to the IPR booth and pick up a copy of Dread (a horror game that uses a Jenga tower as its primary resolution mechanic). There I ran into Amanda and Clark Valentine (Amanda edited Bulldogs!), and we got to talking (about games). Tracy Hurley (Sarah Darkmagic), Thadeus C., and Tracy Barnett (Troll in the Corner) also stopped by, and we had a nice conversation.

Shortly after I went to the airport, where I started killing time by reading some of my games.

Zombie Cinema is short to read (took 15 minutes or so, all told), but it seems like it’ll be a lot of fun, especially as a zero-prep pick-up game. How to Host a Dungeon looks like a great one-player game, and I have a hunch it’ll go well with a game that I heard about today called Old School Hack, which I’m going to research tomorrow. I’m halfway through Mortal Coil, and every freaking page is giving me ideas. It’s great.

So now GenCon is over, and I’m a little sad. Still, it’s nice to be back home, and it’s not like I won’t be gaming. I’ve got D&D Encounters this Wednesday (new season, new character), and I’m also planning on running at least one demo of Bulldogs! at my FLGS. I may run some other indie games, just to get a chance to play them. Huzzah!

I spent a lot of time on the dealers’ floor on my second day. The dealers’ floor really is a fantastic place to walk around; it’s like being in the world’s largest and most comprehensive game store. The main issue is that there was a lot of stuff that I wanted, but I had to check myself in order to prevent myself from spending too much money and bankrupting myself and my wife. It would be easy to do there.

I did score some nice purchases, though. I’ve bought a lot from the IPR booth this weekend, it seems. Today, I picked up Don’t Rest Your Head (I already had the PDF, but really wanted the print version), Zombie Cinema (which I didn’t think they had, but they did), and The Shab-al-Hiri Roach (which I’ve wanted to try for quite a while). I also picked up a t-shirt for myself, and one for my wife, and a die or two.

In terms of things actually played, the number is really pretty small. I started off by playing The Legend of Drizzt, WotC’s new D&D Adventure System board game. I’m a big fan of these games; I own Castle Ravenloft and love it. That said, it’s going to be hard to go back to Ravenloft after playing Drizzt. There’s more complexity in the game, but it makes the game much more interesting rather than bogging it down. This has gone from a maybe for me to a definite purchase, at some point.

I also played a game of Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple with none other than the author, Daniel Solis. Do is a simple and elegant little game, and plays pretty quickly (we finished a session in 45 minutes). It’s more a collaborative story-building game than a role-playing game, but very enjoyable. It would be a fantastic gateway game for younger folk to get inducted into the hobby.

Later, I played a 20-minute demo of Mansions of Madness, Fantasy Flight’s new Cthulhu-themed board game. I’m not sold on it yet. I feel that a lot of that is because it’s hard to get a sense for a 3+ hour game in 20 minutes of play, but it kind of felt like there wasn’t a lot to do. We never saw a single monster during the demo, which strikes me as a failing of the demo more than the game. I’d like to play a complete game start to finish before making a purchasing decision on this one.

Later still, I ran another game of Bulldogs!, which was pretty awesome. One of my players, after the game, said that he didn’t remember laughing quite so hard at a role-playing session before. Bulldogs!, I feel, is like that. Every game that I’ve played has been pretty funny, and some have been downright hilarious. I built these characters with humor in mind, so I’m glad that came through. It’s also gratifying that I’ve heard nothing but good things about the game, particularly from people who had just played it.

My last game of the night was another game of Drizzt, which was just as much fun as the first.

There were some minor disappointments today. I had been hoping to meet up with some of the people I follow on Twitter, but it was not to be it seems. Perhaps tomorrow.

As far as tomorrow goes, I plan on spending a little more time in the dealers’ hall, and probably a lot of time at Games on Demand. I’d really like to try Fiasco before I leave, and there are other games I want to play, too.

My first day at GenCon 2011 (and also my first day at GenCon, ever) has drawn to a close. Sadly I missed the actual first day of the convention, but there was still plenty of fun to be had on Friday.

The day started with me getting up at 3:30am to catch my flight; I was dropped off at the wrong terminal, went through security, found out that I was at the wrong terminal, went to the right terminal, went through security again, and managed to get on the plane. Once I got to Indianapolis things got better, though.

The hotel wasn’t ready for me, as I had gotten there at 9am (I really hadn’t expected it to be). I dropped my stuff off, loaded my backpack up, and headed to the convention center.

The Will Call line was short, consisting of just me, so I got my badge and tickets in short order. I exchanged a few tickets for generics and started wandering, not really knowing what to do with myself. I wound up in the dealers’ floor, which was a great place to start.

The dealers’ floor is like the world’s largest game store, with tons of people offering you demos and freebies. I plan to spend more time there tomorrow. I got my copy of Bulldogs! while I was there, and also scored a copy of Mortal Coil and How to Host a Dungeon (which I can’t wait to try). Oh, and some really badass Fudge dice, which I used later in the con.

I also stopped in and saw the people at the This Just In From GenCon podcast, and they did a brief interview with me (as a first-timer) that’ll go on their site.

My first real gaming experience at GenCon was Conquest of Nerath, which lasted about four hours. We had to call it at the end because of time constraints; it could easily have gone on for another two hours.

I’m not generally that perturbed by long games; I like Akrham Horror just fine, for example. But there are two things that can ruin a long game for me: over-reliance on luck, and lots of down time. Nerath, unfortunately, has both. Strategies can be laid waste by lucky die rolls and good card draws, and in a four-player game I waited easily 15-20 minutes between turns. When I was doing something, it was fun; most of the time I wasn’t doing anything, though. Probably won’t be buying it, though I wouldn’t be averse to playing it again, maybe in a two-player game.

Then I headed off to the Ennies reception where I mingled with the likes of Fred Hicks, which was cool; also, a lot of people had great things to say about Bulldogs!, which was even cooler.

Speaking of Bulldogs!, my next appointment was to run a session at Games on Demand, which I did. I had four players (one of whom had to drop out at 10pm; the game went until about 11pm), and it was an absolute blast. I used my new Fudge dice, and I have to say I think I killed it in there. It helped that I had some really great, super-enthusiastic players at my table.

And that’s my first day. Tomorrow I hope to spend some time doing demos on the dealers’ floor, and maybe get some games in at Games on Demand; I’d also like to try the new Legend of Drizzt board game. Until tomorrow. Or, later today I guess. Or something. God I’m tired.