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Starting the 2nd prototype.

The staples didn’t hold out long and foam glue is apparently worthless so I am learning to stitch! This skill will serve me well in the post zombie apocalypse waistband so I don’t mind. Found shinier gold for the main plate.

Do you know what I’m really into right now?

Do you know what I’m really into right now? OSR fanzines. I’ve been checking out a bunch of them in PDF, but I would love to have a few physical copies, too. There is an RPG Zine community, which is helpful for finding sellers, but it seems the best place to get your hands on them is at a Con.

Are fanzines on anyone else’s radar right now?

Friday night, our table played two different #Threeforged games. Hopefully the other players involved will chime in…

Friday night, our table played two different #Threeforged games. Hopefully the other players involved will chime in with their thoughts. Russell Benner Daniel Fowler and Gauntleteer Sandra (whom I don’t know how to tag) all played.

First was A Hard Goodbye, a GM-less game about people trying to leave a brutal organization that isn’t so easy to quit.

The game starts off strong, with collaborative creation of the Organization the characters are all members of. Think mob, mercenary companies, gangs, thieves and assassins and the like. You also create a Threat that will cause problems for the Organization in Act II. We went with a Repo Men-like organ repossession corporation that specializes in selling alien organs. Our Threat was the aliens themselves, with shady motives and capabilities.

Character creation is next. I especially like the following: PCs have a Fate-like High Concept, a Hook that makes it difficult for your character to leave, and an Out–which is somebody pulling your character away from their life with the Organization. Character creation is nice and compact, giving your character an excuse for still being with the Organization even if they’re unhappy with it, plus a great excuse to leave.

Gameplay is spread out across three acts. In the first, PCs go on a mission for the Org. In the second act, PCs… go on a mission (or two), this time concerning a shakeup in the Organization brought on by the Threat. In the third, they try to make a break for it, or resign themselves to remaining in the Organization. I like the three act structure, but scenes themselves can be a bit odd.

Before an act’s scenes, players collaborate to come up with assignments for their characters. This would be fine, except it all happens simultaneously. Player 2 is giving an assignment to player one while receiving one from Player 3, who’s getting one from Player 4, who’s trying to listen to Player 1. It’s messy, and could stand some structure. Furthermore, the fact that all of this happens before play means that scenes cannot easily build upon preceding scenes, which seems like a missed opportunity to me.

The game handles its lack of a GM in a strange way. Players take turns being the Active Player, whose character is foremost in the scene. But the Active Player also sets the pace and drives their scene forward, delegating responsibility for helping out or playing NPCs as they like. Without a temp-GM or a Polaris-like division of authority, (and especially combined with the fact that the Active Player helps to collaborate in coming up with their assignment), this can start to feel a bit like hitting a tennis ball against the garage instead of playing an actual opponent. In play, it didn’t work very well. This was my biggest reservation about the game going in, so I wasn’t super surprised. For Act II, we cheated and switched to having the player to the right of the AP act as their adversary, which helped a bit.

Once a scene reaches a tipping point, you go to the conflict mechanics. These are oddly specific, and differ from act to act. They’re so specific, in fact, that if you aren’t aiming for one when you start your scene, it’s very possible that you’ll come to what feels like a tipping point, and then spend a minute staring at the conflict types before relenting and going with something that’s ehhhh close enough, I guess. Each has a different method for determining a dice pool, and a unique effect on the game’s ever-changing stats, depending on success or failure. I like that the stats (those of the Organization and of the PCs) are constantly in flux. It makes it feel like the world is reacting to the characters. But with even one character acting to stay in the organization in Act II, Org stats will likely increase. It seems like it’s a serious stretch to expect anyone to be able to make it out if that’s the case.

A lot of the Act I conflict types seem like things that should have a bit more fictional setup before we get to them. “A Way Out,” “Opening Up,” “Drink to Forget,” “Informant,” “Russian Roulette,” and “Remembering a Friend” all feel a little premature. Like, we just met this person. We could use some status quo scenes before all of this. You can get a bonus for incorporating your character’s Out in a scene, but it seems like it would be difficult to shoehorn them in in the middle of an assignment (unless they are the assignment, which is an option).

Conflicts use competing dice pools. The handling time is high, but not a deal-breaker. If there were ever a tie, however, then you roll the dice again, rearrange them in descending order–by color–again (which is what the game requires), and then a few other fiddly things. Again. Uuuuugh. Not OK.

Overall, it shows some promise, but still needs plenty of work. Luckily, it’s good thematic fodder for a game, and some of the ideas are very strong.

Next, we played Psychic Detective Agency. PDA is billed as an American freeform LARP, but we just played it as a tabletop game. Take what I say with a few grains of salt here, but there aren’t any mechanics that really require it be a LARP.

Players play either psychic detectives or audience members. There are three types of psychic detectives. The postcog can see into the past. The empath can sense what happens at it happens. The precog can see the future. At any time, anyone can pose a question to the other players. The postcog answers any questions about the past, the empath any about the present, and the precog any about the future. When a psychic is answering one of these questions, they hold their fingers to their temple as if in concentration, or hold their hand to the side of their mouth if it’s out of character. Love that. If a psychic isn’t present in the game (you’re supposed to have one psychic for every audience member player), then any audience member can answer a question that would normally be that psychic’s purview.

Players play out ever-changing scenes, introducing facts and asking/answering questions. The mystery at the core of everything expands outward, and in our case sort of got away from us. With so many facts and names coming up out of nowhere, it’s easy to get lost and forget who this character is, how we learned that they’re dead now, whether or not we know who killed them, and also are they the murder we’re investigating here or a separate killing? It gets pretty crazy, but that can be fun. I think that’s the sort of thing we’d get better at with multiple plays.

What bugs me, though, is that it’s very easy for the game to devolve into nothing but asking and answering questions, leaving most of the actual roleplaying out of it. Again, we’d probably get better at that too, but it feels like something’s missing. Scene structure? A limit on questions per scene or per player? I’m not sure. We had fun, but this one also definitely needs some work.

I need to give the game some serious props for the extras and advice in the rules. It talks about improv fundamentals, introduces cutting and braking, and provides sample questions and settings. It even has lists of detective tropes and names, plus an extended example of play. Kudos. It’s all very welcome.

Do you know what game I really love? The Final Girl.

Do you know what game I really love? The Final Girl.

Great session today: inappropriate in all the appropriate ways; lots of laughter; and a super-ripped DJ named The Circumstance.

And now I’m sad, because today was the last time I got to play The Final Girl with my group. We’ve had so much damn fun with this brilliant, simple, perfect game over the last few years. I’m going to miss it.

I’m having a lot of these happy/sad moments lately. The gaming friends I made in Houston are so special to me, and it’s really hard to leave them behind. Sigh.

When did the act of actually playing games stop being important in the indie game space?

If we get some decent feedback on this thread, I’ll use it for Community Feedback tomorrow. Anyone paying attention is welcome to offer their theory, or to reject the premise entirely and tell me I’m full of shit. I love and welcome both.

Hello!

Hello! Even though I haven’t said much myself since joining, I’ve really enjoyed seeing everyone’s thoughts and insights on this board.

I’d like to share with you the opening of my new store and game space, GeekLife. We’re located off Shepherd in The Heights. We have lots of room for gaming of all kinds and will have tons of events.

I’d love for you to stop by and let me know what you think and what events you’d be interested in seeing take place.

We are also looking for anyone interested in running games. So if that appeals to you, let’s talk.

We’re having a grand opening next weekend, so please stop by and say hi!

On Friday, we played four more games from the #threeforged contest.

On Friday, we played four more games from the #threeforged contest. My table did The Book of Armaments and my own Stage 2 game (only because we finished The Book of Armaments early and I wasn’t ready to run anything else). I’m not going to talk about my own game, but below are my thoughts on the other. Steve Mains will likely do a separate post for the games he ran.

The Book of Armaments

I liked it. The game is focused on a weapon, forged in a certain era, and its details are settled on before play. We chose to do a fantasy thing, but you can also do weapons for modern or historical settings. It’s a strictly three-player affair (despite the game’s advice on how to make it work for more than three), played out over several rounds. On a given turn, one player is the Wielder, one player is the Weapon, and one player is the World. The Wielder describes himself and how he came in possession of the weapon. The Weapon player’s job is to constantly advocate for when the weapon might be of use in a conflict. The Word player is basically the GM, and frames scenes for the Wielder. Each player has a deck of cards, and the idea is you use these cards to set the difficulty of challenges (World) or to overcome challenges (Wielder and Weapon). The Wielder’s cards are for when he uses means other than the weapon to get past the challenge. The Weapon cards are used if the Wielder accepts the Weapon player’s advice and uses the weapon to overcome it. The round ends when one of the players is out of cards, and whoever that was determines if the overall story arc for the Wielder was successful, and if the weapon passes to another character in history. The player roles shift and you begin anew, possibly with a new Wielder character. Rinse and repeat until you feel satisfied. There is also a competitive thing you do between rounds, which I will discuss below.

The game is fast-paced and fun. There are a couple of things in the rules that don’t quite work as intended, but they would be very easy fixes (and if the authors of the game are reading this, they should definitely get in touch for details). Our particular game got a little gonzo halfway through, but I think that’s because we went with a magic weapon, which allowed the Weapon players to get a little crazy with our armament’s capabilities. I think a game in a historical or modern setting would avoid that tendency, and I’d love to try it again in one of those modes. Overall, though, I was happy with the pace of the game and the ease with which we were able to tell these stories. I also liked how the stories changed between rounds, particularly when the sword passed to a new Wielder. It felt a little like In a Wicked Age in the way you get to see different slices of history focused around a core character (or, in this case, a weapon). In fact, I think the rules should be changed so that the Wielder character is always different between rounds. I’m not sure it would be as interesting to do two consecutive rounds with the same Wielder character.

The one big issue I had with the game is this inter-round competitive procedure in which each player makes a judgment about whether they think the round’s story saw the weapon having a greater impact on one of the following three things: the deeds done with the weapon, the soul of the Wielder, or the souls of those affected by the weapon. Each player has a different combination of two from which they can choose (which is an incredibly weird design decision; why can’t each player just choose from all three?). You make your choice and put a card representing it facedown in front of you. You reveal the cards and, depending on the combination of cards revealed, one of the three players gets a token. Whoever has the most tokens at the end of the game gets to decide the final fate of the weapon.

I understand this procedure is supposed to allow the players to reflect on the consequences of various choices made in the story, but I can’t overstate how flat this part of the game is. It added nothing to the proceedings, particularly because the distinctions between the three choices are so fuzzy. I think there is a more interesting way to get to the outcome the designers were aiming for. But, truly, you could remove this part entirely and the game wouldn’t be missing a thing. You’d just have to come up with an alternate method of deciding the weapon’s final fate.

All in all, though, I liked this one a lot. It’s definitely one of my favorites from the contest.

Anyone heading to PAX South this year?

Last night, we ran two tables of #threeforged playtests.

Last night, we ran two tables of #threeforged playtests. My table played Children’s Radio Hour and Fear of the Dark.

Children’s Radio Hour

Wow, this game. This is another one that I love, in theory, just because it’s such a unique idea. All of the players are actors on a children’s radio show. Each player has a different agenda that they are trying to subtly push through the story while still keeping it, on its face, nothing more than a light children’s tale. The game has a strict one hour time limit and you aren’t allowed to break character, except for during a handful of commercial breaks. In general, when it’s working, it works well. Our radio play was fun. I’m led to believe that it’s got a similar vibe to Puppetland, in that you can’t just narrate what your character is doing in third person, it’s all kid-friendly first person narration, e.g. “Now, I’m casting a magic spell on you. Abracadabra!”

To help out with your improvising, you’ve got a stack of index cards with prompts for “characters”, “locations”, and “things” in the middle of the table that you can pull from when you want to incorporate something new into the play. In the beginning of the game, before you start the timer, every person creates one of each, but you should be writing more constantly since writing leading prompts is the best way to get your agenda into the play.

Here’s the problem though: there are so many things going on in real-time that it’s almost impossible to do them all and bring your A-game to the roleplaying. Here’s a short list of what you should be doing / holding in your head at all times:

* Roleplaying your character (or, more likely, multiple characters)

* Keeping track of who the other players are roleplaying (multiple characters each)

* Writing prompt cards (don’t forget to incorporate your agenda when writing them). This is super important; we kept running out.

* Pushing your agenda in the roleplay

* Listening for other actors to say things that help with your agenda and giving them a token when they do

* Every time a new character is introduced, note it on the master name list so you don’t reuse the name

* As the Station Manager, watch the clock so you can let everyone know when commercial breaks begin and end

* As the Station Manager, listen for people breaking character or causing lulls and throw dead air tokens

Holy Cognitive Load, Batman! That is just too much. It would probably get a little better on successive playthroughs, but it’s still going to be too much to keep track of to really be engaged in the roleplaying to the extent that you should be. The really onerous requirement is writing the prompt cards during play (each card has multiple parts, also, like 3 details for a character or a location name and two details about it). We decided that either writing a ton of prompts in the beginning or dividing the players into actors and writers (who had their own agendas and just wrote prompts the whole time) would probably go a long way to making this game more approachable. As it is, we threw in the towel at the halfway mark. It was fun, but everyone was just mentally exhausted, we’d already burned through all of the index cards that we had at the table, and we had sort of lost the thread of our play.

This one joins Timelines in the pile of games that are great ideas but really ask a lot of the players. After the singularity, once our brains are all uploaded to computers, I’ll play this one again and it will be great.

Fear of the Dark

I really like this one. It’s about kids, who are supposed to be in bed while the grown-ups do mysterious grown-up things in another part of the house, sneaking out of their beds to try to accomplish little mundane tasks that are preventing them from sleeping.

Accomplishing these tasks, though, will force the kids to creep through the dark house, where they imagine all sorts of things that are out to get them. It’s delightful. There’s a definite joy in describing mundane things as if they are horrible monsters. The tree-branch shaped shadows outside the window? That’s clearly a monstrous octopus. Creepy doll in the attic? OHMYGODRUN!

One really smart design choice in this game is that it’s on the kids to scare themselves. For example, the GM might describe a generic, easily-explained noise, then ask the players what they think it was. When the players describe whatever horrible thing they imagine made the noise, the GM agrees and goes from there. It creates a really fun dynamic where as players, we pretty much all know the actual, mundane explanation as to what’s going on, but simultaneously, we are holding onto the kids’ fantastic, scary interpretation of it and acting on that.

Any time the kids push themselves to confront their fears, there is a nice, simple card-based resolution mechanic to determine if they succeed or not. If they fail, they have two options. First, they can choose to react in a kid-like manner, e.g., running to the adults, screaming for help, running back to their beds. Alternatively, they can choose to be “touched by the darkness”. When kids are touched by the darkness, they actually see through their fear and realize that the thing they were so afraid of wasn’t anything scary after all, e.g. “Oh, it was just a tree branch after all.” If a kid gets touched by the darkness too many times, they outgrow their fears but in the process they lose the ability to see the world with as much wonder as they once did.

Once this happens to a player, they start working with the darkness to help scare the remaining children.

So yeah, I really like this one. There are a couple small things that seem a little unnecessary. For some reason, the game runs for exactly one hour. I’m not sure that adds anything. We ignored the timer when it ran out and finished out our story. Also, there’s a notion of a winning player, but it has literally no function other than saying “Great, you win!” at the end. We forgot to even check who won at the end of our game and no one missed it.

I think for me, this falls right below Field Work on my list, but it’s solidly in second place. I’d happily play it again.

On Sunday we playtested three more games from the #Threeforged contest: Field Work, In a Week of Sharks, and It is…

On Sunday we playtested three more games from the #Threeforged contest: Field Work, In a Week of Sharks, and It is Forbidden. My thoughts will be brief, but my co-conspirators (Daniel Lewis Russell Benner Steve Mains) should share their opinions in the comments.

Field Work

In Field Work, you play tech workers who go out to the homes and businesses of clients and assist them with network connections, router problems, computer issues, and so forth. But here’s the kicker, and it’s an excellent one: about a year or so ago, supernatural occurrences became a regular part of life. So, for example, you might go out to repair a client’s computer, only to discover the reason it isn’t working properly is because it has been possessed by a demon. Or maybe the cable lines are down because zombie vultures have been chewing on them. In addition to dealing with mundane and/or supernatural tech issues, you also have to do debriefs with your employer, as well as a scene in which you hang out with your co-workers during lunch hour. The overall vibe is InSpectres by way of Office Space, and it is very well-realized in play.

The rules in this one are very near perfect (one or two minor quibbles, but nothing major). They got us to the outcome promised on the front of the box, and, as you may know if you listen to our podcast, that is the best compliment I can give a game. The way it works is you go out to the job (individually) and the Mundane GM (the player to your right) sets the scene and explains what’s going wrong. You engage in a little freeform RP and then roll a pair of dice, one black and one white. If the white die is higher, then the problem is a mundane one and can be solved with a mundane solution. If the black die is higher, then the Supernatural GM will explain how there is actually a supernatural issue in play. The player can then decide whether to handle it with a mundane solution or a supernatural solution. And this is where the game shines. You keep rolling dice in an attempt to solve the problem. Sometimes you solve it right away, but often the problem gets worse, or a mundane problem suddenly becomes a supernatural one. The player has a certain number of moves in which to solve the problem. If he is having a tough time, he can spend a Bond with another tech to get help from them. If he doesn’t solve the problem in time, he just leaves and heads back to base, where he will probably get chewed out a little bit during debrief.

What my explanation of the rules does not capture is how GOOD this game feels in play. The comedy level is really high, and flows pretty naturally from explanations of the die results, and the various complications that occur on the job. We were laughing and having a really great time. The rules were doing their job, but also getting out of the way enough for us to let our RP breathe. I loved it.

This game is definitely my #1 for Threeforged right now.

In a Week of Sharks

Props to these guys for the In a Wicked Age/Shark Week title joke. I got a good chuckle out of that.

You know, I have mixed feelings on this one. I don’t think I liked it as much as the rest of the table, but I still had a lot of fun. The rules work pretty well, though the game has a few odd features. The biggest one is the division of characters between Protagonist and Antagonist, and the fact that the characters are all on-sight for different reasons (or entirely different stories). It wasn’t game-breaking or anything, but it was just weird. It was unclear to me what the purpose was for dividing the characters up in this manner.

The Rock/Paper/Scissor thing (called Fin/Teeth/Tail here) was cute, I guess, but I didn’t feel like it was adding much to the proceedings. It felt a little weird that you do it before you play out the scene in order to determine how the scene will resolve. I’m curious why they didn’t go with the more typical “play out the scene to a point of conflict and then go to conflict resolution.” Again, not a game-breaker, just a design decision I couldn’t understand.

All-in-all, it was fun, but while playing it, the only thing I could think about was how fun it would be to do The Final Girl in this setting, or to re-skin Zombie Cinema for Jaws.

It is Forbidden

I had mixed feelings on this one, too. It tells a Dog Eat Dog-esque tale of two peoples, natives and newcomers. Except, in truth, it doesn’t really tell a tale at all. It is closer to the The Quiet Year in that it isn’t really a roleplaying game as much as it is an exercise designed to explore a theme. You can play the game in a more RP-focused manner, but we chose not to play it that way because 1) the rules seemed to heavily imply this was an optional style of play and 2) it looked like it would have a problem similar to Microscope, in which the RP seems disjointed and out of place.

This one has a set-up process in which you answer questions about each team’s respective people. As I have mentioned before, I love set-ups that involve answering a list of questions, because it forces you to think critically about the setting, and this one is admirable in that way. The actual gameplay is a little less interesting, being played out over three rounds in which each player describes their people taking an action, and someone from the other people explaining how they stop them from doing it and then declaring a law by saying “It is forbidden to do X because . . .” You end up with a series of laws on each side, and then have a discussion as as group about whether the two people will go to war. It works fine, but each individual scene is not particularly exciting because the outcome for each turn is pre-determined, leading to no actual tension.

In the end, there just isn’t much here. Everything works fine, but it’s all a little underwhelming. It took us less than an hour to play an entire game, but we didn’t really feel like we played a game. It felt more like a really complete set-up process for some other game. Again, nothing offensive here, and everything works ok; it just needs to be fleshed out.