Did I complete NaGaDeMon?
Yes and no.
I wrote a game and played it.
The game is Bandit Country and it is incomplete. It is also very promising so I will not be posting it at this time.
Bandit Country is shaping up to be something special. I look forward to posting more about it and sharing how the QTE ethic has influenced my design and writing.
Saturday, 30 November 2013
Saturday, 23 November 2013
Bandit Country: Components, Tools and Apps.
Bandit Country includes four Components, the sections that encompass the rules of the game:
- Character
- Activity
- Recruiting
- Exposure
The Players and GM use two Tools, really just functions of a clock, for resolution, tension and plot development:
- Stopwatch
- Timer
The Players and GM can play Bandit Country with the following smartphone / tablet Apps:
- Notepad
- Clock
- Maps
- Search
Monday, 18 November 2013
What is Bandit Country?
BANDIT COUNTRY is my RPG for NaGaDeMon.
Bandit Country is the RPG of espionage and covert action for-hire. Players adopt the role of contractors in the shady world of freelance intelligence and special activities. Private enterprise, individuals and governments all have conflicting objectives and sometimes they need things done quickly, quietly and with minimal overhead. These stakeholders often operate complex systems of surveillance and digital intrusion but lack the `soft assets’, the human networks that are the ultimate enabler if the agency ever needs to directly interact `in country’. Your job is to identify a need and set up these networks and franchise them off or better yet, find a commission or patron who will provide tasking and a budget to match.
PILLARS OF DESIGN
Bandit Country is the RPG of espionage and covert action for-hire. Players adopt the role of contractors in the shady world of freelance intelligence and special activities. Private enterprise, individuals and governments all have conflicting objectives and sometimes they need things done quickly, quietly and with minimal overhead. These stakeholders often operate complex systems of surveillance and digital intrusion but lack the `soft assets’, the human networks that are the ultimate enabler if the agency ever needs to directly interact `in country’. Your job is to identify a need and set up these networks and franchise them off or better yet, find a commission or patron who will provide tasking and a budget to match.
PILLARS OF DESIGN
- TIME. Time is always counting up and down. Everything that matters is measured by time. Stopwatch and countdown are important tools for resolution and plot progression.
- REAL. These Stories could be real. A Risk economy will be a key component of play.
- MOBILE. The game can be played using the apps on a smartphone. Maps, clock, search. The game will be easily played online so no `components’ required. How does this affect character representation?
- HUMAN. BC is about the human angle. The big players have the sophisticated tools. The contractors have locality, the willingness to adopt risk and specific skill sets.
Sunday, 17 November 2013
Busy Times
No posts over the previous few months but some significant successes to make up for it.
The Drakkeil campaign is going really well and I am learning (and remembering) more about the art of moderating and writing content for a game. You have to be your own editor and that is a difficult task if you don't want to slink about on trope crutches. Jeff has continued to refine 5x5 and it remains my goto game for genre emulation.
I decided to get serious about writing and sent in a sample to a line developer of a new game when I discovered an open call for submissions on rpg.net. This lead to a request to submit an idea for an adventure which I did and was then asked to write it up. I did that and after going through several lengthy iterations it is now with the editor. It has been a great learning opportunity and I look forward to being able to blog further about it.
After reading blogs for a long time I decided to actually look around the web and find roleplaying communities beyond the safe and familiar boundaries of rpgbloggers.com. I discovered /r/rpg and shortly thereafter they hosted their inaugural Weekend RPG Jam competition which I am honored to say I won. I worked hard on my game Flower, I encourage you to check it out and let me know what you think. Over December I am going to teach myself Scribus or some similar layout alchemy and I will prettify and update Flower and release it to the wild.
And my daughter just turned 8 weeks old.
Today I discovered National Game Design Month. Only 14 days to go but hey, I'm gonna economize, I'm gonna rework a game I have been romancing for years but never really wrote in any coherent form. In less than 2 weeks you will locate my secrets, turn my people and evade my security and while the big Agencies are feeling the political leash in this post Snowden age, the contractors are running wild in Bandit Country.
Wednesday, 24 July 2013
The scintillating gait of the Unicorn
I have been playing Robot Unicorn Attack 2. This game got me thinking about Drakkeil and 5x5 because it has a unique way of reinvigorating repetitive play.
Every time you die you go back to the beginning and play through the same level. The kicker is that you are given challenges. Collect so many tears or dash so many stars to get points towards levelling up. Playing the same terrain feels different with new and evolving goals...
RPGs often reward the player for what they have done. By providing goals that give the player levelling agency (more hp, skills or whatever) the enticement becomes a goal in itself rather than a means to an end.
More on this soon.
Every time you die you go back to the beginning and play through the same level. The kicker is that you are given challenges. Collect so many tears or dash so many stars to get points towards levelling up. Playing the same terrain feels different with new and evolving goals...
RPGs often reward the player for what they have done. By providing goals that give the player levelling agency (more hp, skills or whatever) the enticement becomes a goal in itself rather than a means to an end.
Wednesday, 10 July 2013
Direction
My goal for this blog is to use it as a personal springboard for strip mining the smart thinking out of videogame design and cramming it wherever it will fit into tabletop RPGs. This kinda goes against the grain because most of the the blogging that I read about RPGs places little or no value on what video games can teach them.
This has escalated in recent times with my acceptance into the grand and hallowed profession of RPG freelancing and the unexpected start and success of my new campaign.
The freelancing is something that I hope to write more about in the future. Suffice to say that it came to me largely due to the spontaneous intersection of dumb luck and stupendous bravery. Nonetheless, like a petty thief who finds himself running down a back-alley from the sound of whistles, grasping a gaudy and fragile jewell, I intend to keep running.
My new Campaign is coming together so well it is writing itself. To this purpose I am going to start posting using it as the testbed and proving range for my video game thoughts.
This has escalated in recent times with my acceptance into the grand and hallowed profession of RPG freelancing and the unexpected start and success of my new campaign.
The freelancing is something that I hope to write more about in the future. Suffice to say that it came to me largely due to the spontaneous intersection of dumb luck and stupendous bravery. Nonetheless, like a petty thief who finds himself running down a back-alley from the sound of whistles, grasping a gaudy and fragile jewell, I intend to keep running.
My new Campaign is coming together so well it is writing itself. To this purpose I am going to start posting using it as the testbed and proving range for my video game thoughts.
Thursday, 27 June 2013
There is no Quicksave for D&D next.
I had the recent great and unexpected fortune of having a friend ask me to run a game for him and his housemate. He had never roleplayed and the housemate had a long time ago. He wanted D&D so I grabbed the D&D NEXT playtest packet. I followed my own advice (or Bungie's to be more accurate) and worked up a quick setting with some interesting options.
Come game day I had everything ready to go.
Then we sat down and it took over 2 hours to make characters. This was a really interesting experience because despite playing lots of MMORPGS and video games, neither of them had played D&D. I felt the horror mounting as we followed the printed instructions and trudged through the leviathan task of choosing and then creating a character for both of them. A process that might take 5 to 10 minutes with kewl music and graphics in a video game. Hours of page turning, chart referencing, figuring out the compromises resulting from earlier decisions and contextualizing all of this in terms of the game world I had created for them.
This was no fault of theirs, they are smart guys who happen to not know the rules for Dungeons and Dragons. I don't take any responsibility either, I read through the play package several times and made notes about the stuff that I expected to get caught up on. The real challenge is that there is a whole language of jargon associated with D&D and a massive base of assumed knowledge that you don't realize you require until you have two players who don't have access to either of these things. Sure, there are trainer wheels like using pregen characters and linear plots to get them on-track. But these guys are Adults and I didn't want to game down to them. I wanted to show them how cool D&D is for people who's common experience of gaming is in front of a monitor.
Watching and trying to help these guys get a grasp of the game taught me a valuable lesson: D&D has completely failed new gamers. It is a relic of an age when there was no such thing as disposable multiplayer entertainment. The upfront time and knowledge investment is bizarre to the uninitiated.
Finally we were done and went on to have a great time. As we played I found myself having to search up specific rules frequently and soon decided on the 10 second rule. If I couldn't locate a rule in short order I just made it up. And this had absolutely no impact on their expectations because they didn't know the rules either. The natural conclusion to that line of reasoning was: why bother using these rules at all? Do I need to be an educator, on sabbatical from D&D University to teach these new students? I didn't sign up for that, I want to have fun.
The game that we played that night used a d20 and hitpoints but it wasn't really D&D. And it was the most fun game of D&D I have ever played. My nostalgia for the D&D, massive rulebook, style of play foundered on the rocks of now. A now in which I am smarter, better educated and far busier and a now that is informed by a lifetime of gaming. Video and computer games have taught players that games do not need to be ponderous and that fun resides somewhere in the shadowed intersection of shared interaction, imagination and common tools. The complexity of the tools does not determine the quantity of fun.
So I sent them both an email today asking if they are willing to change over to Five by Five. Thankfully the answer was `we're both in it for the experience and not the mechanics' and that was endgame for D&D next.
Come game day I had everything ready to go.
Then we sat down and it took over 2 hours to make characters. This was a really interesting experience because despite playing lots of MMORPGS and video games, neither of them had played D&D. I felt the horror mounting as we followed the printed instructions and trudged through the leviathan task of choosing and then creating a character for both of them. A process that might take 5 to 10 minutes with kewl music and graphics in a video game. Hours of page turning, chart referencing, figuring out the compromises resulting from earlier decisions and contextualizing all of this in terms of the game world I had created for them.
This was no fault of theirs, they are smart guys who happen to not know the rules for Dungeons and Dragons. I don't take any responsibility either, I read through the play package several times and made notes about the stuff that I expected to get caught up on. The real challenge is that there is a whole language of jargon associated with D&D and a massive base of assumed knowledge that you don't realize you require until you have two players who don't have access to either of these things. Sure, there are trainer wheels like using pregen characters and linear plots to get them on-track. But these guys are Adults and I didn't want to game down to them. I wanted to show them how cool D&D is for people who's common experience of gaming is in front of a monitor.
Watching and trying to help these guys get a grasp of the game taught me a valuable lesson: D&D has completely failed new gamers. It is a relic of an age when there was no such thing as disposable multiplayer entertainment. The upfront time and knowledge investment is bizarre to the uninitiated.
Finally we were done and went on to have a great time. As we played I found myself having to search up specific rules frequently and soon decided on the 10 second rule. If I couldn't locate a rule in short order I just made it up. And this had absolutely no impact on their expectations because they didn't know the rules either. The natural conclusion to that line of reasoning was: why bother using these rules at all? Do I need to be an educator, on sabbatical from D&D University to teach these new students? I didn't sign up for that, I want to have fun.
The game that we played that night used a d20 and hitpoints but it wasn't really D&D. And it was the most fun game of D&D I have ever played. My nostalgia for the D&D, massive rulebook, style of play foundered on the rocks of now. A now in which I am smarter, better educated and far busier and a now that is informed by a lifetime of gaming. Video and computer games have taught players that games do not need to be ponderous and that fun resides somewhere in the shadowed intersection of shared interaction, imagination and common tools. The complexity of the tools does not determine the quantity of fun.
So I sent them both an email today asking if they are willing to change over to Five by Five. Thankfully the answer was `we're both in it for the experience and not the mechanics' and that was endgame for D&D next.
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)