Cooking RPGs – Size does matter

Roleplaying games come in different shapes and sizes: Some are huge and complicated, some are small and easy to read. Some games need hours of reading and preparing to be played, while some games are designed to be easily accessible with almost no effort at all.

This division is very arbitrary and most games don’t necessarily fit in on either one of the groups. But I think that it might prove useful to make a tool that helps game designers to better categorize their games. For this purpose, I have come up with following terms: Full course RPGs and Snack sized RPGs. The definitions are my own and up to debate.

Full-course RPGs are games that are designed and written to support long campaigns. They contain a lot of information, such as a setting for the game and a thorough set of skills and abilities for almost unlimited number of possible character concepts and ideas. These games are to build a strong set of tools for the GMs to create interesting stories and campaigns to play in, and so the games are written as such. Most traditional RPGs such as Dungeons and Dragons, Vampire the Requiem and Call of Cthulhu would be these full course RPGs because they don’t emphasize any specific kind of campaigns and have a lot of potential for different kind of characters and stories.

Snack-sized RPGs on the other hand are more focused and have usually a predefined amount of resources such as time or player aids. Most snack sized RPGs have a certain kind of story they want to tell, and focus on doing that very well. These games usually incorporate specific mechanics that direct the game to a certain direction. For example, The Mountain Witch is a snack sized RPG that has a clear setting: a group of ronins go to Mount Fuji to kill the Mountain Witch. The game also has a few specific mechanics (Trust and Dark Fate) that encourage a certain kind of a way to play the game. On the other hand, The Mountain Witch is a game with a very specific setting, and it doesn’t work very well in clearly different type of settings, but it really doesn’t even try to do that.

So the main point of my rambling is that there are two clearly different kinds of RPGs: Those that are designed to be a set of tools for the GM to create his or her own story, and those that are designed to do one thing, and do it very well.

Another important thing to notice is that while these Snack-sized RPGs can be very fun and entertaining, they tend to become a bit repetitive over time. Even if I like The Mountain Witch very much, I couldn’t imagine playing only it for a couple of years. The Full-course RPGs are more suitable for those long, epic scale campaigns that consist of different storylines and can be played even for years. But I think that the Snack-sized RPGs deserve our attention, because they offer something different and new to the otherwise very homogenic group of RPGs.

This is something that I’ve been working on for almost a couple of years, but haven’t been able to write down clearly. I personally don’t think that either one of these games is better than the other, but merely that it is important to recognize their differences and design games (and campaigns) accordingly.

Game Chef 2011 – Ideas and mechanics

After a couple of days of pondering, I’ve come up with some ideas about my entry for year’s Game Chef. I’m not very familiar with Shakespeare, because here in Finland his works aren’t read so vigorously as they are in English speaking countries. But I think that despite my lack of knowledge about Shakespeare and his plays, I know enough to pull of a great Shakespeare inspired game.

The ingredients (Daughter, Exile, Forsworn and Nature) don’t give me that many ideas about the setting, but I’ve come up with a narrative storytelling game that uses a regular deck of cards to create interesting stories.

The basic mechanic works as such:
- Each player is dealt a set amount of cards from the deck (initially I was thinking about dealing 13 cards for each player, because 52/4=13)
- The story is built in 13 scenes (or less if necessary), and each scene has a predetermined structure (Scene 1 introduces the main characters etc.)
- After each scene has been set up, each player chooses one card they have been dealt. The most common suit of the cards tells the nature of the scene (Spades  = Drama, Clubs = Tragedy, Hearts = Romance, Diamonds = Comedy).
-  The player with the highest card then narrates the scene according to the genre.
- Ace is the highest card, but also defines the nature of the scene despite what suits the other cards are.
- In case of a tie, the cards are resolved in following order: Spades, Clubs, Hearts, Diamonds.

Other than this raw gameplay mechanic, I’ve come up with nothing worth of mentioning. I hope that I figure out something soon so that I can start writing.

Game Chef 2011 announced

The king of game writing contests, Game Chef, is about to begin this year. The whole “write a completely playable game in a couple of weeks”-concept has always been very interesting and challenging. The rules of the competition can be found in here: http://gamechef.wordpress.com/2011-contest-rules/.

This year the contestants have 10 days to write up a 3,000 words long game that fits into the theme of Shakespeare and three of the four ingredients that are yet to be announced. I’m super excited and wish good luck to my fellow chefs!

Cyber Android Warriors – Playtest results

Today we had our fourth playtest session for Cyber Android Warriors. Although I have been generally pleased with the game thus far, and the last session is looming in the horizon, there are some things I will have to adjust before having another campaign.

The campaign has focused on a group of terrorists titled “The Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse”, who started terrorizing the city of Neo Metropolis X. As one can figure, the first terrorist robot to be encountered was Plague, who was then followed by War, Famine and finally Death. Now, the brave Cyber Android Warriors have only one final encounter to await: Apocalypse himself. The game has been lots of fun, although I must admit that I am not a very good in handling combat heavy games like this.

The character creation and upgrading has worked very well despite some very gaping flaws in the game balance, which I try to fix as soon as we find them. But I noticed that the basic dice mechanics don’t work at the moment.

The characters have 4  different pieces of hardware that define the character and his Attributes:

• Head: Accuracy
• Torso: Hit Points
• Arms: Power
• Legs: Agility

The characters also have 7 slots for software, which can also include an AI upgrade.

The basic dice mechanics have thus been “throw Xd6, where X is your relevant attribute, and add the dice together”. This mechanic has spawned a lot of problems, including balance issues with low attributes and high attributes. While this mechanic works well for damage, it doesn’t work very well with task-resolving. I tried “3d6+X” but my players said that it wasn’t a good idea to have a different mechanic for combat and task-resolving.

To avoid the issue with inconsistency between low attributes and high attributes, I decided to try an alternative, “2d6+Xd6″-system, which stabilises the results better. But I still don’t like the idea of having two different ways to count the number of dice, so I’m trying to come up with a better dice mechanic.

The only thing I like about this current mechanic is the balance with damage. Androids with more Power or Accuracy do significantly more damage, which is something I kinda wanted for this game. But I’d rather ditch the decent mechanic for something all-around better working system.

“Cyber Android Soldiers” – An old school RPG-project

A few days ago I had a great idea for a tabletop RPG. Imagine the future: year 20XX. Robotics and cybernetics are common and humans live luxurious lives with their robotic and cybernetic servants. That is, until the attacks from a Robotic Terrorists begin. A new counter-terrorist organization called Cyber Android Soldiers is formed to eliminate these robotic terrorists and bring peace.

So basically the idea is:
- A cyberpunk world inspired by AstroBoy, Metropolis and especially the MegaMan-games
- Mission-format adventures with old school dungeoneering vibe
- Mechanically simple, yet with vast amount of customization for the characters

I already have some ideas on the mechanics, but I think I’ll test them before writing them down.

Little Game Chef Announced

The little brother of the original competition, Little Game Chef has been announced officially.

The competition isn’t as competetive as it’s brother which makes it more easier to jump in. I think I will participate if I come up with a good concept for a game. Comedy isn’t my best forte, but I think I have some cool ideas up my sleeve.

All Quiet on the Western Front

Despite the vague reference to the novel of the same name, the title is also a reference to the state of the current Game Chef competition.

Game Chef 2009 started in last September, and it had four deadlines: 7 days, 14 days, 30 days and one year. The three first deadlines have passed long ago and everyone seems to have forgotten the whole competition already. Which is a shame, because the Game Chef website doesn’t even list the games finished for the 30 days deadline.

My Game Chef entry, The Knights of the Lily, has not had any progress after it’s beta version either. I haven’t actually even thought about it in a past few months, but that might prove to be actually a good thing. When I get back to writing, I might have some new ideas and a better vision on what I want the game to accomplish.

Like many of my fellow ‘Chefs, I’ve decided that I’ll continue blogging despite the hiatus on the Game Chef competition.  I think I’ll mostly ramble about game design but maybe also about something completely different.

Beta version finished!

It’s been a whole month already and the game is almost complete. After another round of playtest I figured that the Setting for the game might need some work. But the game mechanics worked fine, although I did a few changes compared to the second draft.

• A full new layout with columns and A5 sized pages
• Academics-skill was replaced with more useful Investigation-skill
• Some more information about the Branches, the Order and the game in general

The beta version can be found here and the character sheet can be found here.

Any comments are more than welcome.

Second Draft

The second week went incredibly fast, mostly because my studies actually began. But I found time to playtest the first draft and made some changes:

• Stress-mechanic which serves as a penalty for failing tasks
• A minor tweak in the amount of skills
• An improved character sheet and slightly adjusted layout on the main book

The second draft can be found here and the character sheet 2.0 can be found here.

Any comments are more than welcome.

Ideas for the next version

We did one playtest and the game ran smoothly. Character creation had a few difficulties, but nothing major. I might need to give the characters a few skillpoints more and emphasize the zodiac signs a bit.

The Mission we played was the one I wrote on the first draft. The players had fun planning how they were going to capture the politician and get him out of the hotel. The only problems we had were:

• If the character has a skill of zero to begin with, would he fail automatically or try it with just one die and a DV of 6?
• What happens if you don’t succeed?  Originally I had visioned that the skills get penalties (similar to Dust Devils) and when a skill reaches zero, the character needs to abort the Mission.
• How do contested rolls work? For example, if a character wants to hide and a NPC character wants to find him, how does it work?

So I started thinking about these questions. I think I’ll give the character more skill points, and in an unlikely situation that they need to use a skill they don’t have, they can roll a single die against DV 6.

Another new idea I had was Stress points. After an unsuccessful skill test, the characters Stress raises by one point. For the duration of the Mission, the character suffers a one die penalty in all his skill tests. As soon as the character gains his third Stress point, he must abandon the Mission.

Contested skill tests aren’t such a huge problem, it just needs to be written to the book. If the contest is an Obstacle, then it is used against the Obstacles DV. In any other case, the Overseer determines the difficulty value necessary. A good guideline is that DV 4 is somewhat easy task.

The setting worked fine, but it needs a little bit more details. I might make some adjustments on it, but I’ll focus mainly on getting the mechanics working.