Starting Out

Posted by on April 20, 2011 2 comments

My first ideas when starting a new game design have the biggest impact on the whole process. It’s something to be careful of and respectful of.

Let’s say I get this cool idea for a dice mechanic. Say, step dice attributes + dice pool skills. There’s a lot of assumptions in that little formula. The first is that there are dice at all. The second is that we’re going to have attributes and skills. That means that, if this is our core mechanic, we’re testing competency more than anything else. That probably  means this is an adventure game rather than a story game.[1] So we’re already on the road towards legacy GM/player roles.
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  1. [1] Going by Ryan Macklin’s definitions found here ↩

What Doesn’t Kill You…

Posted by on April 18, 2011 9 comments

I’ve been reading Dashiell Hammett off and on over the last few years. I’m a big fan of Hammett-inspired films like Miller’s Crossing and Brick. This is hardboiled fiction at its best as far as I’m concerned. One of the elements that defines a hardboiled protagonist—besides the cynical attitude—is a willingness to face danger. To get hurt, beat up, or even worse in order to do the job. Generally they get punched in the face a lot.

Hardboiled is an influence on cyberpunk, but it is something I am emphasizing even more so in Technoir. In cyberpunk RPGs there is a tendency to spend a couple hours planning in order to get in and out unseen, unscathed. Hardboiled protagonists walk in the front door. They make their presence known. They make people nervous. They shake the tree and see what falls out. The best way to infiltrate enemy headquarters is to walk up to one of their goons, get tasered unconscious, and taken prisoner.
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Kickstart My Heart

Posted by on April 15, 2011 No comments

It’s payday for me today, and I’m going to head over to kickstarter.com to support a couple of projects I’m interested in. Kickstarter seems to be a pretty solid model for funding independent or small-press creators. I’ve never actually backed anything before, so I figure today is a good day to start.

Unless you read my blog through some vector that miraculously doesn’t intersect with any of the Evil Hat crew, you already know about Do: Pilgrims of the Flying Temple. I’ve been watching this game’s development for over a year through Daniel Solis’s blog. It looks like it’s going to be nothing short of gorgeous. Daniel used Kickstarter previously to great success with Happy Birthday, Robot! and Do is already well over its goal. For the various milestones it has passed, Daniel and Evil Hat have been adding to the goodies you get at different backing levels. What’s also super cool about this particular kickstarter is that Evil Hat has found a way to allow retailers to get in on the action as well.

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Player’s Guide

Posted by on April 13, 2011 9 comments

In my previous post about hack points, I mentioned a Player’s Guide for Technoir. The Player’s Guide is a 16-page booklet that contains barebones rules for protagonist generation, inflicting Adjectives on other characters, and recovering from those Adjectives. It also has a list of Training Programs, descriptions of the nine Verbs, many Adjective examples, an overview of the favors that Connections can perform, and an Object catalog with a glossary of all the Object tags.

You can likely glean most of how to play the game from this document alone. What it is lacking is information for how everything flows together: how the protagonists, through their Connections, link to the node map and the plot; how the plot nodes relate to each other and how the node map is generated; how inflicting Adjectives can be sequenced into the conflict resolution system; how the Push economy plays. These will all be dealt with in the core book (which is essentially the GM’s guide). Read more »

Hack Points

Posted by on April 11, 2011 1 comment

One of Chronica Feudalis‘s first ever fans, Nathan Frund, emailed me the other day. He had been following my posts about Technoir and was curious about how easy it was to hack it. Nathan knows his hacking: his blog (Platonic Solid) features the first fantasy hacks for the Chronica system.[1]

I told Nathan about some key areas where Technoir was really easy to hack. In our discussion, Nathan called these “hack points.” So I’m stealing the term from him.

Being hackable has been part of Technoir‘s design from the start. Here are a few examples of easy ways to modify the game:

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  1. [1] Nathan also has some intersting thoughts on using Agile software development techniques for game design purposes. ↩

Shells and Seeds

Posted by on April 6, 2011 6 comments

I notice this tendency while I am designing RPG rules to create shells. That is, game mechanics that have a certain size and shape but require player interaction to fill it up with something. It’s a set of requirements. And when those requirements are met, the player is rewarded.[1]

Consider Wushu‘s core mechanic. For each detail you give in your described action, you add a die to your pool. FATE’s Aspects are shells at the time of character creation. Come up with a phrase about your character then you will have this trait to use in gameplay.

Shells are good design tools. Shells fight blank page syndrome by giving players smaller, less-intimidating pages to write on. Don’t worry about your whole action, just tell me the next detail. Don’t worry about your whole character, just give me one phrase about her.

As good as shells are, I’ve been working on a different approach when it comes to game design: seeds. Seeds are low-mass game elements that use player interaction to become something bigger than they started as. Read more »

  1. [1] The terms I use in this post, like shell, probably have a different definition to others in the gaming community. So consider my terms and definitions herein useful only in the scope of this post and any discussion of it. ↩

Progress

Posted by on April 4, 2011 2 comments

A few months ago, I posted the first design element of my new game: it’s character sheet. The game didn’t have a title then, but with some help it has since been dubbed Technoir. Much of this game has been designed by the process of creating the character sheet. So, as it has been revised, its evolution is reflected in the changes of the character sheet over the playtesting process.

Here is the revision made soon after that previous post:

revision 1 Read more »

TransMission

Posted by on March 10, 2011 3 comments

I keep mentioning on twitter and other places this thing called a TransMission I’m working on for my new game. I figure I should talk a little bit about it so people know what the hell I’m talking about.

First off, the game is a hardboiled near-future RPG called Technoir. You play characters embedded in a criminal underworld who use high-tech cyber implants and other gear to exploit opportunities to try to get out of it.

A TransMission is a GM tool. It’s a short booklet of game content that is designed for GMs like me. That is, GMs who don’t like to prep, who like to improvise their adventures at the table, but often get stuck with blank page syndrome when it comes time to do so.
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The Shape of Things to Come

Posted by on December 30, 2010 5 comments

So, I’ve been working on a new project recently. This is what it’s starting to look like…

Untitled Cyberpunk Character Sheet

This is the character sheet for my new–and as of yet untitled–cyberpunk game. It’s not finished, and some of the terminology has already been changed.

Don’t worry Chronica fans; Noblesse Oblige is still in the works. Its progress is just not in my hands at the moment, so my attentions are turning towards other things.

Noblesse Oblige Video Blog: Overview

Posted by on October 4, 2010 8 comments

I’ve recently finished the 37,000 word first draft of Noblesse Oblige, the lordship supplement for Chronica Feudalis. And, well, instead of writing more words about it, let me just tell you what it’s all about.

Sorry about all the ‘uh’s and ‘um’s. I’ll get better at this, I swear. If you want to track what I’m saying about it on twitter, follow me (@jeremyjkeller) or search for the hashtag #NobOb.