Hi folks. I’ve gotten an early version of Hidden Menace up. It’s pretty bare bones, but the rules are complete and there’s a brief intro in place. I’ve also got the Lua version of my combat sim program up here. Things have been a bit busy on this end, so I’ll probably be posting smaller scattered snippets over the next few weeks as I figure what to focus on next.
Project Update
Hello all. I things have been a bit busy on this end, but I’ve still got some projects going forward. The “Hidden Menace” playtest has been trimmed down to a lean 6 pages. I’ll likely pad that out with some intro text before release, but we’re still looking at less than a dozen pages. Given it’s small size, it’s likely that system will be released as a free, open source project.
While that’s in the works, I’m teaching myself Lua by building a monte carlo style combat simulator. That will let me test things like the effectiveness of certain tactics and abilities. Once the script is ready, I’ll share it through the site so you folks can do you own tinkering.
Between these bigger project, I may start putting up some setting material I’ve been tinkering with. It seems like it might work well with the Fate system, as there are certain elements that work nicely with compels.
Project Progress
Hi folks. I’ve been doing the first round of playtests for the Hidden Menace game. So far the results have been promising, though I want to refine my cheat sheets a bit more. We’ve had a lot of fun with it and the rules are simple enough I’ve been able to share it with my oldest kid. Granted, she also plays a mean game of Gamma World if you handle the reading for her. Hopefully I’ll be able to refine this over the next week or two. It looks like the final product will be around the size of Lady Blackbird, so it should be a good pick up and play game.
On a side note, it looks like the Coles are starting up a Kickstarter for an adventure rpg game (http://www.kickstarter.com/projects/1878147873/hero-u-rogue-to-redemption). Those are the folks behind the spectacular Quest for Glory series. Seeing as that one of my favorite series growing up, I’ll definitely be backing this. In fact, it’s probably my favorite series in that genre. How about you folks, any adventure game favorites? I did enjoy Kings Quest and Leisure Suit Larry, though I haven’t made it through Space Quest yet.
Shifting Gears
I’ve was talking over some rules ideas with my wife when it hit me that some of the most dungeon delver style fun I’ve had lately was actually with a little rules light system called Old School Hack. A lot of the things that appeal to me, such as custom weapons and improvisation rewards, are already worked into the system.
That’s got me thinking that instead of doing taking things from a “rebuild for past editions” angle, I may want to try essentially hacking a hack game (either Old School Hack or it’s predecessor Red Box Hack). I’ve also found interesting tidbits in games like Donjon, The Dying Earth RPG, Lady Blackbird, and Fantasy Craft. I may mix those with bits of 4E inspiration and see what the resulting brew looks like. It’s a slightly different different tack that than I’ve taken before, but with how stressful things have been around here lately a sloppier “cobble things together” approach over a more calculated “find the pieces I need” may be just the thing for me right now.
In any case, I’ll be putting things up as they get ironed out. My wife has shown interest in giving this a while, so that may help speed things into internal playtests that much quicker.
On the Move
Hi folks. I just wanted to let you know I got a job in another state. That means I’ll be moving over the next few weeks. Seeing as it’s hard to do internal playtesting during the move, Against the Inevitable will be put on hold while I settle into the new location. In the meanwhile, I may be putting up some rpg musing for existing systems, most likely 4e given the sudden surge of tinkering the D&D Next announcement has set off.
Project Update
Sorry for the long delay folks. I’ve been doing a lot of the duller number crunching bits of design lately, so there’s been less to post. I will say that the full rules outline for the Against the Inevitable system is fleshed out and will be doing its first rounds of in house play testing this week. Hopefully I’ll be able to roll out a public playtest version sometime in the coming month.
Adventure Flow
I’ve decided to take a step back from the mechanics today and look at the experience I want to provide in my next game. Here’s a rough sketch of how I’d like the game to play out. Any suggestions on improving this or pointers to systems that already do this are welcome.
Getting Started
To start a new adventure, follow these steps.
- Pick a Premise: Decide what the adventure is about. This should include:
- Setting: Where does the adventure take place?
- Protagonists: Whose actions are the players following?
- Conflict: What are the protagonists striving for or against?
Seventh Sanctum has an excellent example of these here. Despite being geared for action films, that generator does a good job of establishing the setting, conflict, and heroes in a single sentence. I may want a similar system in place to build adventure kickers.
- Build Cast: Write up a few sentences about some of the characters that might show up in the story. This may be assisted by random generators. The focus should be setting up quick hooks and interesting bits of flavor.
- Choose Sides: Each player can choose which side of the conflict they want to support. Each player starts neutral and can pick another side at any point during play. Here’s how the sides breakdown.
- Nemesis: Nemesis players put conflicts in front of the protagonists. If there are multiple nemesis players, each can pick an element of the game world to specialize in. They can also convert characters to villains. Each such character must have a motive that sets them in opposition to the heroes.
- Neutral: All players start out neutral. Players that stay neutral may select an element of the game world to specialize in.
- Heroic: Heroic players can promote supporting characters to heroes. Each promoted character must have a motive which ties them to the central conflict. Bonds to an established enemy or hero can be used to fulfill this requirement. Heroes can be directly controlled by a heroic player. If a heroic player controls no heroes in the current scene, they can act as neutral players.
At least one nemesis and heroic player are needed to play the game.
- Set Opening Scene: Set up a scene where the starting group of heroes gets together and makes a commitment to taking on the main conflict.
Progression
Any time a character wants to accomplish something significant, they can start a challenge. By default, challenges consist of a single check with a minimal reward on success and no notable penalty for failure. Once a challenge has been attempted, the character can not normally retry the challenge.
Players can modify a challenge in a variety of ways.
- Taking Chances: The higher the chance of failure, the greater the reward for success.
- Raise the Stakes: Increase the penalty for failure to raise the reward for success. The reward bonus scales up with the “taking chances” reward. Higher stakes may also let heroes tap more of their bonds and motives during the challenge.
- Add Complications: A complication must be defeated before the challenge it was added to can be completed. Treat this like a secondary challenge where reward points transfer over to the main challenge.
- Extended Challenge: An extended challenge requires multiple successful checks to beat and has either a time out condition or inflicts a penalty the longer it takes to overcome them.
On succeeding at a challenge, its point value can be cashed in for various rewards. These can include:
- Second Chance: Retry a previously attempted challenge.
- Find a Lead: Bank reward points for a future challenge. Banked points can not be spent until the linked challenge is completed.
- Damage: Weaken or take out a character or obstacle. The cost scales up with the importance of the target and how severely the damage limits their impact on the story. By default, heroes can not be permanently removed from the story until the final confrontation.
- Recovery: Rewards can be spent to buy off previous damage.
- Resources: Challenges can provide extra descriptive text to help with future challenges. Any resources that help the character overcome their opposition increases the character’s threat rating.
Confrontation
Once the heroes have overcome enough challenges, they can go on to the final confrontation. This works much like a challenge with the following special features:
- No Holds Barred: Characters can risk almost anything during the final confrontation (possibly limited by how much build up was needed to reach this point).
- Worthy Adversary: The final challenge is always guarded by a extended challenge obstacle. A common example is a final enemy, though other options are certainly possible. This obstacle is always scaled to be as strong to slightly stronger than the heroes. They’re meant to be at a disadvantage in terms of normal tools and resources, but should be at a net advantage if they tap their motives and bonds, essentially overcoming the obstacles with spirit and will.
Conclusion
Once the final confrontation has played out, the winning side gains narration rights, though the losing side can mitigate this with their leftover reserves.
If there are any further challenges, they should yield less of a reward. On the other hand, leftover reward points from the final confrontation may be spendable at any point without even needing to complete another challenge first.
Project Update
I know it’s been a while since the last post, so I figured I’d bring you folks up to date on what I’ve been working on.
On the Mezzo front, I’ve got two projects in the works. First off, I’m working on a “choose your own adventure style” tutorial adventure. That should be a big a big help with getting folks started, but it is a bigger project and may take some time to get out.
The second Mezzo project is a one-shot scenario for playtest games, probably with a murder-mystery styled theme. The seed deck and emergent character approach seems well suited to revealing things about characters in play.
Long term, I do have some material planned for a new setting as well as a world creation game. If anyone’s interested in more details on those let me know.
On the D&D front, I’ve been focusing more on getting people ideas for what they’d like to see in the next edition of the game. The latest topic I’ve posted is on racial classes, which can be found here.
I’m also tinkering with a combat tester which will show the advantage of various tactics and abilities. While I can do that by hand, having a program which can handle the calculations will be much faster.
If there are any of these you folks are particularly interested in, let me know and I’ll put more emphasis on that project.
Seed Deck Added
Alright, I’ve added the Seed Deck idea in an Extra Options section on the main playtest doc. If there’s interest I’ll see about building some sample decks. In the meanwhile, I’ll probably just use an existing deck like Munchkin, Drakon, or Once Upon a Time.
I’m also going to make some calls about setting up a playtest game of my own, though figuring out the timing is going to be tricky. I may end up just going with play by post for now.
On another note, playtesting has left this blog a bit quiet. I’ll see about putting up some more Delver Evolution posts this coming week. I’ve had some time to go over the essentials releases so I may have some comments up on that as well. Until them, game on.
Bare Bones or More Flavor?
I’ve noticed the playtesting seems to be off to a slow start. I had planned on doing the playtesting in rounds. The first pass would be the core rules. Second pass would test out extra options that add some more meat to the system. After I have the rules down nice and sound I figured I’d release the setting based material.
It seemed like a nice logical progression for testing everything. However, given the scant replies I suspect that making the first pass as bare bones as possible my have hurt the game’s initial appeal. What do you folks think? Is flavor important in early playtesting or is just testing mechanics a good idea?
What I may start doing is putting up bits from the setting I’m working on up here. This is the setting I originally had in mind when working on Mezzo. I’d just planned to test the mechanics first.
Schemes of the Dancing Chimera 