On Saturday, I went to my friend Mike’s house and ran a Wild Blue session with him and my friend Rich. I thought it was awesome. This was the first time that either of them had been introduced to either Gamecraft 2.0 or Wild Blue (aside from what I’ve shared on this website), so I had to take about forty minutes to explain both before we actually got down to playing. We didn’t finish the scenario I wrote up, but we did get to do a few short, non-combat conflicts, as well as a number of out-of-conflict skill rolls.

I’m pretty happy with the way the system is shaping up, and I got some good suggestions from them. I’m working on allowing assets to scale better (that probably sounds like gibberish to those who haven’t actually played this system with me, and for that I apologize), and I realized one other thing: Gamecraft 2.0 is kind of hard to teach people. Not necessarily time-consuming, and not necessarily that hard to learn or play, but hard to teach, to some extent. I think a lot of this is going to get easier as I explain it more and more; the problem is that virtually everything in the system is interconnected, and it’s kind of difficult to explain one thing without first explaining another. What I need to do is get the system written down in a sequence that makes it easy to pick up, read, and learn; right now it’s sort of mish-mashed, reflective of my thoughts while creating the system, and that’s not necessarily conducive to learning or explaining the system. Once I find a logical starting point, I’m sure it’ll flow easily from there.

As for the session itself, it was a lot of fun. Mike and Rich played a couple of lawmen, big-time lawmen in a small town, investigating recent murders. Mike’s character was a gunslinger, a trained killer, but one with a lot of faith and a deep belief in doing the right thing. Think of the mentality that the Operative had in Serenity: building a better world, but one that he has no place in. That sort of approaches his way of thinking. He knows he’s a killer, and he doesn’t really like killing all that much, but he does it anyway because he believes it’s a necessary evil. Rich’s character was much less moral; he was a rogue and con-man turned lawman, the classic example of using a thief to catch a thief. He drank, he caroused, he insulted people, and generally had a good time, but he also did his fair share of investigating (though a lot of it involved breaking into peoples’ houses to snoop around). They both played their characters to the hilt, and I tried to reward them for that using the mechanics of the game (which is a design goal of mine).

I did more prep work than I have in the past for Gamecraft 2.0, largely because this was a mystery, and I wanted to keep everything straight and not get caught mixing things up. Basically, I figured out what had happened before the players got there, and I came up with short bios on all of the important inhabitants of the town, as well as on important locales. I was careful not to plan out anything that was going to happen though; I let Mike and Rich determine that, and I reacted to what they did, dropping breadcrumbs only very occasionally. It worked really, really well.

I plan on running this scenario again with another group, so I won’t share any specifics until afterward. Expect to hear more about that later.

Monte Cook just did an interesting post on his blog. I must say that I do agree with this position. When it comes to board games, stories are great, but it’s the gameplay that’s the real clincher. I’m a big fan of games with themes, and I sometimes make my decisions based, at least in part, on the theme of the game. Take BattleLore for example. Now, Memoir ’44 uses the same basic mechanics, but I probably won’t buy it. Why? Apart from already owning BattleLore, the fantasy theme of the first game appeals to me quite a lot more than the WW theme of Memoir ’44. That said, though, I’m a huge fan of the Command and Colors system that both games use, and if BattleLore didn’t exist, and I played Memoir ’44 at some point, I’d probably like it a lot and wind up buying it, despite the theme.

And that is exactly why I love it when game designers put manuals for their games in electronic format on their websites. I suppose that you could make some argument against that, invoking things like piracy, but it would be a pretty silly argument. Reading a game’s manual, if that game has mechanics that I’ll enjoy, only gets me more excited to play the game, and makes me want the game that much more. It’s a far more powerful form of advertising for your game than simple, story-based ad copy.

I guess I spoke too soon when I said that the Gamecraft 2.0 skill list was final. I did a little tinkering, and decided to take out the Survival skill. When I created the skill list, I wanted each skill to be general enough to cover a wide variety of uses. For example, Awareness covers virtually everything having to do with sensory perception (or extrasensory perception), including things like danger sense, tracking, and crime scene investigation. Survival was just too . . . narrow. It coved finding food and shelter, both in wilderness and settled environments, but that just seemed like it was too limited in utility, and in practice, playtesters didn’t really use Survival all that much. So, I dropped it. But that left me with eight skills, and that seemed like too few. Nine was a good sweet spot, and I designed character creation around nine skills; any fewer and I’d have to re-examine character creation, and I’m actually quite pleased with how it works now. So that begged the question, what should I replace it with?

While answering that question, I came up with and discarded a number of options. The main problem with virtually every single one was that, while they each covered things that the other skills didn’t, they weren’t universally applicable to different settings. A realistic modern urban setting doesn’t need a Magic skill, and a high-flying Wuxia setting has little use for Pilot or Drive. So what then? The answer was staring me in the face: Skill X.

Simply put, Skill X is a create-your-own-skill slot. The idea is that, when you create a setting for use with Gamecraft 2.0, you decide what Skill X is, and tailor it to the needs of your setting. In a fantasy campaign, you might have Magic, while in a cyberpunk setting you could have a Cyberspace skill. If you want the Survival skill back, it would probably be pretty useful in a post-apocalyptic wastelands-type game, or some other setting where living off the land and finding shelter is important. I’ve already decided that, for Wild Blue, Skill X is Sorcery, and this decision allowed me to create a much better, more flexible magic system than I had originally designed.

I’ve decided to announce my candidacy for President of the Universe. No, not really. Happy April 1st.

This past week was my spring break, and I got a chance to do some gaming and watch some really good movies. In no particular order:

• I got to play some Runebound this week, which was great. I haven’t played Runebound in a while, but I thoroughly enjoyed playing it again. The first couple of times that I played this game, it took 4-6 hours to resolve each session, if not more. My friend Chris and I have built in some house rules (more starting gold, soft knockouts, lower experience costs for levelling up, and more gear in the towns) that bring this down to a very respectable 2-3 hours, without detracting too much from the feel of the game. If anything, it makes you feel like more of a badass even sooner, as you’re starting to cleave through yellow encounters fifteen minutes into the game.
• The last time this week that we played Runebound, we played with the Sands of Al-Kalim expansion pack. Highly recommended. One problem that I always had with the original game was that it was, at its heart, a competitive game, but it felt very much like a cooperative game until the last half hour or so. Let me rephrase that; it felt like it should have been a cooperative game. Thematically, it doesn’t make a lot of sense to me that the various heroes of the land would be competing with each other to be the first to save the world from Margath and his dragonlords. Shouldn’t they be cooperating with each other, fighting the greater evil? The theme was somewhat at odds with the mechanics. This problem is pretty much alleviated in Al-Kalim; players are competing to be the first to gain fame, glory, and immortality by embarking on and completing four legendary quests. They’re not trying to save the world, they’re doing it for their own aggrandizement which, while less noble, causes the competitive mechanic of the game to make a lot more sense. Besides that, it’s an excellent expansion with some truly cool and fun additions to the core gameplay. There are day/night mechanics, a new ‘story step’ that you can do when you’re not adventuring or exploring a town, and the legendary quests themselves are actually a lot of fun to undertake. It’s an excellent expansion, and I highly recommend it.
• The Pursuit of Happyness was very, very good. Will Smith continues to amaze me with his talents (I mean, he was the Fresh Prince, after all), and the storyline grabs onto you from start to finish. There’s a real sense of desperation during this movie, and a real sense of relief when he gets just a little bit of a break from time to time.
• Speaking of movies, I also saw Children of Men, which was also excellent. The movie does a great job of painting a very bleak, yet very believable future, without too many sci-fi bells and whistles that might have detracted from the feel of the movie. The acting is superb, the special effects are flawless and, for the most part, very low-key, and the last half hour or so of the movie, I think, kept me from breathing. Great stuff.

Anyway, that’s it until next time.

I recently upgraded to the most recent version of WordPress, and it seems to have nozzed up my Feedburner feed. Thus, the numbers are no longer accurate. Don’t you love it when you’re rewarded for doing what you’re supposed to do?

[Edit: For those of you who don't read the comments on this blog, please update your feeds here. Thank you.]

I did more playtesting over the weekend for Gamecraft 2.0. I’m not going to do a full session report like I did last time because, frankly, not a lot really happened. I got to put the conflict system through its paces (at least, so far as physical combat is concerned; I still want to use it for social and mental conflicts), and I got to see how easy the character generation system is for other people to use. I can bang out a character in about 10 minutes, but I designed the system. I playtested with the same people I did last time, but last time they got pregen characters and this time they made their own. It took us more than an hour to put them together, but I think that a lot of that was rules explanations and coming up with stuff that went with their concepts, but would be useful in the scenario we were playing.

In the end, the session was pretty valuable. I changed how certain things work based on the session, but I think I’m getting closer to what I want each time. I still want to playtest social and mental conflicts, and I’d like to try playtesting with a different group at least once, just to get another set of eyes on it, so to speak. At any rate, one thing that hasn’t changed as a result of either playtest is the skill list (though how skill specialties functions has changed, for the better I think). So, by way of preview, I’m posting a PDF of the skill list. As with everything else on my site, this is released under a Creative Commons license. Note that the license that I actually release the full system under will likely be a little different; I’ll probably lift that ‘noncommercial’ restriction, largely because I want people to be able to use my system in commercial products if they so choose. For now, though, because this is just a preview, the restriction stays. Enjoy.

Gamecraft 2.0 Skill List

A lot of people who read Iron Heroes bemoan the fact that there isn’t a class devoted to mounted combat. I didn’t really have a problem with this; you could pretty easily make a decent mounted fighter out of the man-at-arms class by picking up the Mounted Combat feats. However, when I started crossing Iron Heroes over with Eberron, I noticed that there really wasn’t a class that did what I wanted as far as the Valenar elves went. What I wanted was basically a harrier, but on a horse; however, all of the harrier’s abilities function while on foot. So, I created a class template. A class template functions a lot like a monster template, except that you apply it to a specific class and it modifies that class, changing its abilities and focus somewhat. What I wound up creating was thematically very similar to the harrier, and with many very similar abilities, with the exception that they all depend on the character riding a horse instead of being on foot. I give you The Outrider.

This Treasure Tables post puts me in mind of a session I ran way back when. I think it might have actually been the first 3rd Edition session I ever ran. It was a somewhat short-lived solo campaign, myself in the DM’s seat and my friend Mike playing a human fighter, accompanied by a roster of NPCs. Among these NPCs was a rogue named Japhed (the first time I ever used this name, which I use all the time now), who was the best friend of Mike’s character. At any rate, they went into a dungeon infested with kobolds and started hacking their way through it (there wasn’t actually that much setup, as I recall, just a simple dungeon crawl to start things off). About halfway through, they ran into a kobold sorcerer who really gave the party a run for their money. This was where I first discovered the joys of mage armor. The kobold had a 19 AC, difficult for a group of 2nd-level characters, to be sure. They won, but not before the kobold summoned a viper which managed to actually kill poor Japhed. I think that’s probably why the name sticks with me, after all this time. He became a much beloved character in that campaign, and returned in various pseudo-dream sequences.

Anyway, the kobold sorcerer was considerably tougher than I had originally intended, and this was exacerbated by the fact that the (higher level) human cleric that I had created as the ‘end boss’ of the dungeon was killed in two or three rounds, despite his use of a potion of invisibility and more than one cure spell.

Now, I realize that, at best, this probably only qualifies as unintentional session padding; that kobold fight lasted a lot longer than I thought it would. And I guess it was sort of canceled out by the rather quick (and anticlimactic) final battle. However, this was what first sprang to my mind when I read the aforementioned post.

As to session padding in general, I’m for it and against it. The term carries some negative connotations with it, but it’s not necessarily a bad thing all the time. There’s something to be said for not having everything planned out in advance, and if you go into a session figuring that you’ll have to pad it a little, you can use what the PCs are saying and doing to generate some really great role-playing situations based, in whole or in part, on their own personal goals and agendas. What I’m against is throwing in monsters for the sake of drawing out the session, or because the party isn’t beat up enough, or because they’re not getting enough XP. I think that doing that can give your session a more generic and arbitrary feel, and it’s definitely something your players will notice.

[Edit: fixed title.]

Your results:
You are Wash (Ship Pilot)

You are a pilot with a good
if not silly sense of humor.
You take pride in your collection of toys.
You love your significant other.

Click here to take the Serenity Personality Quiz

Interestingly, my wife took the test, and she’s Zoe. Go ahead and take the test, yourself.

[Edit: Apologies for the wacky format of this post. My wife, the famous web designer, couldn't figure out how to get it to work right. WordPress keeps adding crap in, apparently.]