Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Game Design. Show all posts

Thursday, February 21, 2013

In Which The Warlock Advocates Awesome-Sauce...

One of the biggest issues leveled at D&;D 3.x was the concept of "rules bloat". After only a few years, the game was stuffed to the gills with sourcebooks, splatbooks, accessories, and "Complete" guides that were anything but. Each of these books tried to lure in players with promises of new prestige classes, new skill uses, and new feats.

Ugh. The feats.

How many Feats does
a Hero really need?
Feats, in concept, are a glorious idea. An independent sub-system allowing you to customize your skills and combat options? Sounds great! The problem lay in the fact that most feats simply weren't worth taking. They were either too convoluted or too situational to justify regular use or the bonuses they provided were simply bland. Countless feats providing a ubiquitous +2 bonus to two skills took up page after page of text, nearly all of which went unused.

Other games aren't immune to this trend. Savage Worlds has Edges, Ubiquity has Talents, HERO System has Advantages, and nearly every other saga me out there has some kind of feat-resembling mechanic. And that's fine, but rarely do these feats do more than provide basic mechanical bonuses. The "Ace" Edge, for instance, provides a +2 to Driving, Piloting, and Boating rolls in Savage Worlds. Yes, it's a great bonus, considering the default target number is 4, but it doesn't really fill your head with visions of hairpin turns, ramp jumps, or barrel rolls.

When I sat down to write Cold Steel Wardens, I wanted to ensure that an unpowered vigilante could hold their own against a powered metahuman, using their skills, gadgets, and wits. A good portion of that feel came in creating a skill-driven system.  The majority of any character's points in CSW will be sunk into various skills, not the least of which are the three combat skills:  Unarmed, Armed Ranged, and Armed Melee.

Masteries, however, I wanted to be different.  Rather than simple skill bonuses or the like, I wanted Masteries to represent new and alternate uses for skills, opening new combinations and avenues that could provide entirely new methods of crimefighting.

Unfortunately, I fell into that same trap as so many other games.  The overwhelming feedback I'd received about Masteries is that they were simply too situational and not worth the points.  Why take a +4 bonus to picking locks, when you could spend those 3 points to increase your Fine Manipulation skill and reap a +3 on all uses of that skill, not merely lockpicking?  In revising the CSW beta draft, Masteries had to become more than that.

Batman, leaping into the middle of trouble!
Take, for example, The Batman.  I wanted to have a mechanic that represented Batman's ability to leap down into a crowd of thugs, intimidate them all, and start taking them out without dying under a hail of gunfire.  Batman in CSW might have taken the Brute Strength Mastery, which allows him to get a free Intimidation test at +2 dice, any time he succeeds at an Athletics test in front of a foe.  Pairing with that, The Dark Knight could take the Untouchable Mastery, which penalizes those hapless mooks on any attempt to hit our paragon vigilante.  With only two Masteries and two actions, the Dark Knight can leap down from the rafters, scare the crap out of a group of goons, and even start laying into them with his various combat skills.

If I accomplish one thing through Cold Steel Wardens, I hope to make a game that allows players to walk that line between awesome comic-book invulnerability and the emotional weight of their actions' repercussions.  It's been a long time coming, but this book is going to be amazing!

Friday, August 31, 2012

In Which The Warlock Contemplates a Class Change...


One of the neatest things about my real-life day-job is the amount of carryover between being a good GM and being a good teacher.  Believe it or not, the best practices that one carries behind the GM screen often are the same best practices advocated within a classroom setting.  Engagement, active description, differentiation, and varied methodology are all buzzwords that frequently flit about the classroom, but they similarly have a great degree of importance at the game table as well.

As such, game design and game management theory have become a fairly regular part of my curriculum, in terms of addressing macro-educational concepts.

Case in point:  my early days of teaching, at a local charter school.  Paired with an experienced social studies teacher, we often crossed over Risk and Monopoly games to demonstrate the relationship between economics and military strategy.  Students arrange into teams, which must co-ordinate their efforts between both boards, in the hopes to take over a certain set of territories.

You want a GMing challenge?
Try running this for a classroom of ADHD students!
It's at that same school that I experienced the ultimate challenging in GameMastery.  You see, that charter school focused specifically in educating students with ADHD and Asperger's Syndrome, with the majority of the population having multiple diagnoses.  However, as an experiential introduction to a science-fiction unit, I decided to run a simplified session of Paranoia for those students.  And, let me tell you:  there is NO greater challenge in GMing than running game for 16 ADHD teenagers.

However, the challenge of keeping all 16 students engaged and interested, coupled with the greater conceptual goal of addressing paranoia and fear of the "other" as a literary concept, made for a great lesson plan, which students were able to expand upon through essays and a larger assessment project.  I did something similar with a homemade game I called "Grail Quest"--no relation to the actual game-book series--in which students emulated roving bands of knights hoping to find various Arthurian relics, including the eponymous Holy Grail.

An ancient gameboard...
...but one perfect for The Crusades!
This all lead to today, wherein I got to use a game that I've been aching to pull out in a classroom setting:  Risk: Godstorm.  Using the board from Godstorm, groups of my seniors attempted to retake the Holy Land, following the Crusader rhetoric of Pope Urban II.  The activity ran fast and furious, with alliances taking shape over both ideological and political lines--precisely what I was hoping for!  The game ran smoothly, even though time limited us to a 30 minute rushed version of the rules.

As I've been working on expanding The Pendulum Method--y'know, when I'm not teaching, gaming, writing on Cold Steel Wardens, or doing any number of other multitasking--I've been looking seriously at including an essay on this very topic:  the use of educational theory in gamemastery.  Should be fun, children! I'm hoping for it to be out this year or next!

Oh, and this weekend?  We wrap up "The Flood"!  Water's gonna rise, children!

Thursday, August 23, 2012

In Which The Warlock Ends His Convention Run...


This time of year is a really exhausting one for me, friends and neighbors.  With the academic year swinging into gear and the convention season wrapping up, I've been up to my eyeballs with places to go, things to do, and people to see!


The Warlock's swag shot from GenCon 2012!
Two products from The Laundry
Some Savage Worlds and Deadlands
Richelieu's Compendium for All for One: Regime Diabolique
and a new GameWick Games t-shirt!
This marks the third year I've made it out to GenCon, but only the second that I've been running games:  in this case, a Laundry adventure set in equatorial Africa entitled "The Scramble for Buranda".  Investigators trekked through Ghana in search of the fabled Blade of Kings, while avoiding Grand Leader Charles Umtali's  guards and chatting up Black Chamber zombie drones.

This year's adventure was significantly better-written than last year's adventure, which seemed to switch titles off-and-on through the various drafts we were sent!  The pre-generated characters, as well, were significantly more interesting, with tons more role-playing hooks than their predecessors.  All three of my games went off without a hitch, with my players having a blast sneaking through downtown Buranda City and   trolling through the jungles.  Plus, Cubicle 7's games this year were situated in the posh J.W. Marriott, which was a massive improvement over last year's overly-crowded Omni.

Great DC Cosplayers
at GenCon 2012!
I've got to say:  my GenCon experience overall was a massive improvement from last year's.  The construction that plagued the downtown Indianapolis area has finally been completed, with skywalks linking all the major hotels.  My schedule actually allowed me to enjoy the convention itself, with plenty of time to talk to the folks at Pinnacle Entertainment (and even go to their seminar!), schmooze with the gang at GameWick Games, and even check out EEE's booth:  the Mythic Eras of War Games (spell it out...MEoW!).

Cosplay, too, seems to be really taking off at GenCon.  In previous years, costumes have been somewhat of an afterthought in Indy.  This year, though, costumes were plentiful, varied, and of a genuinely high quality.  It's nice to see this part of the con really take off!

But, as the school year gets started, it's time to focus on the things to come.  The Witt Guild's first meeting is this Friday--come, if you can make it to Shouvlin 203 this Friday evening!--and there's a ton of editing left to be done on Cold Steel Wardens!   Time marches on, friends and neighbors.

Wednesday, July 18, 2012

In Which The Warlock Examines Some Ethical Dilemmas...


A bit of honesty here to begin this entry:  I've been a little bit skeptical of the upcoming The Dark Knight Rises.  While it's been extremely well-reviewed thusfar, 2008's The Dark Knight and Inception only made me more appreciative of Christopher Nolan as an introspective, nuanced filmmaker.

While I'll still be seeing it on Friday with the PlatinumChick before game night, The Dark Knight Rises has massive shoes to fill in the wake of both its predecessor and The Avengers, both of which stand as the crowning achievements in genre-filmmaking in this decade, maybe of all time.

The inspiration for 2008's
The Dark Knight.
The reason I'm so skeptical of TDKR comes from the moral and ethical weight of its predecessor, stemming directly from Jeph Loeb and Tim Sale's timeless Batman storyline "The Long Halloween".  The majority of the plot from The Dark Knight comes from that comic series, as Batman, Commissioner Gordon, and Harvey Dent work towards taking down the mob-influences that infest the city.  However, their uncompromising war on crime comes crashing down through the death of Rachel Dawes or, in the comics, the search for the killer known as Holiday.

The Joker sums this up concisely towards the end of the film.  Dangling upside-down from a half-finished building, he tells Batman: "This is what happens when an unstoppable force meets an immovable object. You truly are incorruptible, aren't you? You won't kill me out of some misplaced sense of self-righteousness. And I won't kill you because you're just too much fun. I think you and I are destined to do this forever."
The Joker:  madman, or simply
demonstrating the flaws in
moral objectivism?
Batman's attempts to do things "the right way" and without loss of life often serves to bring about great tragedy and  heartbreak, simply because he attempts to do what is "just" and "right".  The story could have ended much, much earlier had Bruce Wayne simply stepped forward though, truth be told, negotiating with The Joker isn't exactly something reasonable in and of itself!  That's what makes The Dark Knight such a great film, as well as what puts The Dark Knight Rises in such a difficult position.

Why do I bring this up?  Well, you see, Cold Steel Wardens is deliberately built to allow players to emulate and even play through this continued moral quagmire.  Every Hero in Cold Steel Wardens begins play with a series of Stances, in addition to their more standard background elements (Motivations, Flaws, and Origins).  These Stances represent important portions of a Hero's mindset and comprise their own moral and ethical "high ground" as they fight crime.  Perhaps a given Hero refuses to fight against police, or won't attack what he views as "children".  Maybe a Hero is driven towards vengeance against those who have committed sex crimes or crimes against police.  Maybe the Hero is outright bloodthirsty and doesn't care who gets hurt as they wage their war on crime.  There's room for all these at the table, as they're consistently meant to be challenged.

In addition to providing impetus for great role-playing opportunities, Stances provide a method for Heroes to add dice to the communal Hero Pool.  When the GM of a Cold Steel Wardens session challenges a Hero's Stance, the GM must add a die to the Pool.  However, if the player themself places their Stance into question--let the mafia thug get away, or pick up the gun on the floor and keep him from reporting back to his superiors?--he gets to add two dice  to the Hero Pool!  It pays to role-play!

Stances are simply one way to add dice to the Hero Pool, though they may certainly be the most dramatic.  When Heroes are forced into uncomfortable situations which question their morals, players themselves become engaged with the plot and its characters.  Here's for hoping that we see it  out soon!  With the first draft of Cold Steel Wardens nearly wrapped up--and in the hands of my two editors already--here's for hoping that we hit print in time for next August!

Next time, friends and neighbors--the results of my name-poll and my review of The Dark Knight Rises!

Saturday, June 23, 2012

In Which The Warlock Reveals His Coming Project!


Sorry about the delay, but real life has taken its toll once more.  However, this time around, it's in a good way:  the PlatinumChick and I just bought our first ever new vehicle.  As in, not used...brand new!  Our new Kia Soul(+) had just 11 miles on it when we drove it off the lot earlier tonight!  Exciting, to say the least!

But, that's not what you want to hear about.  Rather, you want to hear about my latest project!

As I mentioned in my last entry, I've been retooling the mechanics and concepts behind my first attempts at a board game, Dungeon Slam!, into a new genre with some streamlined mechanics.  While I don't yet have a name for my concept, here's the elevator pitch:

As a budding super-scientist, you've been putting in 80+ hours at the top-secret Twin Valley Research Facility for the past month and a half.  It's Friday, and you've scheduled Monday off:  three days of nothing but sweet, sweet sleep.  That was before your superiors rang down, saying that you have to finish up that big project you've been tinkering with.  No one gets to go home until their project is done.
That was before the rift opened in the main reactor room, leaking in otherworldly energies and strange monsters.  Surely the security team can lock down that leak, right?  All you've got to do is find your three Prototypes and make your way to the time clock before the lab gets locked down entirely!

Much of the essence is the same:  avoid or kill monsters, kill or steal from other scientists, and assemble your "MacGuffins" before the others to win the game.  While I've eliminated much of the complicated advancement mechanics of Dungeon Slam!, I've kept elements of item upgrading, which is now framed as "mad science" advances:  your crowbar can now be Tesla-powered or Irradiated! 

Dungeon Slam's character sheets were originally incredibly complex, with six stats on slider scales, Health and Mana pools, and at least 4 abilities for each archetype.  As you can see below, I've trimmed that down massively!


Preview for my yet-as-unnamed Lab Tech board game!

Each scientist is down to four stats--Speed, Combat, Science! (yes, with an exclamation point!) and Health.  Rather than 4 laborious special abilities, each scientist gains one, focusing on their expertise. 

While I have yet to run a playtest--any takers out there, by the way?--I think this game really has some promise.  Idiomatically, it appeals to that mad-science/steampunk/Portal-loving crowd, with homages to games like Half-Life, Portal, and Bioshock.  I have yet to see a real board game cover this idiom/genre well, so it's untold territory that's waiting to be taken up!

Here's for hoping that it'll go over well!

Oh, one more thing, friends and neighbors!  The PlatinumChick and I are heading out to go camping in Ohio's glorious Hocking Hills this weekend.  So, with no internet out there, there's no weekend entry this week!  I'll catch up with you guys on Wednesday!  Cheers!

Wednesday, July 27, 2011

In Which The Warlock Muses on Mechanics...

Since returning from our trip to Pennsylvania two weeks ago, I've been plugging away at Cold Steel Wardens to the tune of 3,000 words a day, on average.  Occasionally, I'll take a day off--usually to play in Will the ManMan's Deadlands game or to take in one of the summer blockbusters--but my 5,000-6,000 word-per-day spikes more than make up for those. 

Writing all of this from scratch has actually made me a little more respectful for the role-playing game authors who have come before.  The vast majority of modern games--D&D, for instance--has entire teams of writers on staff, which allows individuals to focus on individual sections, then exchange those sections for revision and editing.  That's precisely how things worked, with my fellow Cubicle 7 freelancers--after one of us finished a piece, it was uploaded to a private GoogleDocs group, for others to read and offer suggestions.

However, I don't have a team for Cold Steel Wardens.  It's just me.  And that's led to me to realize quite a few things:

  • Writing equipment sucks.  In all seriousness, it's a giant table.  You'd figure that it'd be easy, right?  Wrong.  It's tedious, doesn't fit well in a Word document, and there's always some aspect of it that you're forgetting.  You want to offer enough options to keep "hardcore" gamers happy, but be streamlined enough to avoid the problems of a game like Stargate SG-1 d20, which has pages upon pages of equipment rules.
  • Options create complexity.  The more options you have, the more complex the game becomes.  Makes sense, right?  Problem is, gamers want options.  Even in seemingly simple games like ICONS or even Call of Cthulhu, players crave the ability to have different abilities and different focuses.  After all, no one wants to play the same character time after time, right?  However, for every additional option that I input--for every Mastery that alters a Skill's use or Optional Effect for a base Power--things get more complex.  That makes writing difficult, to say the least.
  • If I pull this off, I'm going to expand the rules-set into a "generic" system for investigation.  The MAFIANAP mechanics that I've created are really streamlined and hand-built to focus on low-powered, street-level supers, and criminal investigations.  A sourcebook, similar to the Savage Worlds--Explorers' Edition, would be spectacular in this regard--something to put out the mechanics, minus the setting info and the like, in a way that would be useful for games meant to emulate shows like 24, Burn Notice, and Leverage as well as comics like Sin City
  • The biggest test for me is going to be a matter of replicating the characters that were an inspiration for this game:  Green Arrow and Black Canary, The Question, Huntress, Batman, Daredevil, Marv and Dwight from Sin City, Captain America, and several others.  If I can build them accurately with this system, I know I'll have done a great job.
  • Balance is an illusion, until it hits play.  I've done my best, so far, to keep options balanced.  A Hero in CSW with no powers will have more points to spend on Vitals, Skills, and Masteries than a Hero with quite a few Powers.  However, I know that the real test of balance comes in playtesting.  I'm hoping to have the rules-set playable by the end of August, in time for an alpha-test campaign at Witt this semester...
But, it's all coming together, and that's what important!  Here's for hoping that someone wants to publish my little brainchild once it's done...

Saturday, July 09, 2011

In Which The Warlock Ponders Parallelism...

It's no secret that I'm a writer.  I'm up to nearly 300 entries on this blog, to say nothing of my writing and editing within the gaming world.  But, even beyond that...I'm an English teacher full-time, with a full Bachelors' degree in English Literature.  What you may not know is that I got my start at revision while in undergraduate at Wittenberg.  As a member of the Wittenberg Writing Center, I worked part-time assisting other undergrads with their academic papers and the like.

As such, I had to be on top of my game.  One of the biggest offenses in most of their writing was something referred to as parallelism

Parallelism in math...
Parallelism in writing...
Any kid who's taken algebra or geometry should know what parallel lines are--two lines that continue on indefinitely through a two-dimensional plane, in such a way that they will never cross.  Parallelism in writing is similar, yet not quite so finite.

Under usual circumstances, parallelism comes on the individual sentence level.  To use the example from the Purdue Online Writing Lab,--one of the more pre-eminent writing centers in academia: 

Incorrect:
My degree, my work experience, and ability to complete complicated projects qualify me for the job.
Correct:
My degree, my work experience, and my ability to complete complicated projects qualify me for the job.

The 'correct' example uses the same structure throughout the sentence, which is more correct from a grammatical standpoint and is more appealing when read aloud.

Now, what does this have to do with gaming, you may ask?  Well, you see, while most RPG manuals are fairly well-edited, parallelism doesn't just stop at the sentence level.  Rather, it can (and should!) be continued on a paragraph and even on a piece-length scale.


But what about parallelism within actual game structure? 


4e D&D was unique for its verisimilitude between classes.  While each individual class received its own class abilities at level 1--Fighters got a Weapon Talent and Combat Challenge, Warlocks got Shadow Walk and Warlock's Curse--every class worked in the same manner:  2 At-Wills, Encounters on levels that ended with 3 and 7, Dailies on levels that ended on 5 or 9. 

Many gamers critized for 4e for this maneuver, saying that classes were "too similar", but from a written standpoint, the design was flawless.  But, it made me wonder whether parallelism in design could provide a driving force behind a game mechanic....which explains some of the reasoning behind my work on Cold Steel Wardens

Part of the "MAFIANAP" mechanic--the fundamental system that I'm writing to drive CSW is built on parallelism--players have 8 Vitals, four of which govern Mental faculties and four of which govern Physical ability.  The 25 skills are arranged into five groups of five--Physical, Investigative, Social, Knowledge, and Technical. 

But, what I'd like to consider the most crucial bit of parallelism to CSW is the "Strain" system.  Every hero can take a specific abount of Strain, before bad things begin happening to them.  This occurs in both the Physical realm (through fights, wounds, and physical exertioin), but also in the Mental realm (through stress, fear, and mental trauma). 

Don't reach your Breaking Point,
or you'll be taking a MAFIANAP!
In either case, every CSW Hero has a "Breaking Point" on each Strain track.  The Breaking Point represents a threshold, at which the Hero's resilience has finally broken down.  At the Physical Breaking Point, the Strain no longer represents"bumps and bruises", but rather broken bones, shattered ribs, and grievous bodily harm.  At the Mental Breaking Point, the Strain no longer represents everyday stress that can be wiped away with a good night's sleep, but rather damage to the Hero's psyche, resulting in psychoses or other mental disorders.

If CSW comes out as planned, the game should be streamlined and easy for newbies to understand, with mechanics that fade into the background during investigation and social encounters.  We'll see, though!  Next up:  Powers!

Wednesday, January 05, 2011

In Which The Warlock Makes a Semi-Obscure 80s Movie Reference...

Even our New Year's Eve party--complete with the aforementioned Bacon Weave--isn't totally without a dose of nerd-dom.  From the usual gang clustered around the coffee table to play Battlestar Galactica, to others tossing down drinks to a game of Red Dragon Inn, we had quite the dice-chuckin' lollapolooza going.


Catan.  We meet again...

However, after a few drinks, I made my way back to our game room where four of our friendly neighborhood geeks were gathered around one of my perennial nemeses:  Settlers of Catan.  "Ugh," I said to myself.  Not again.  To this, Board-Game-Karen scoffed.  Naturally, she's of the opposite opinion.  She even spent four days at last year's GenCon playing through the Catan National Qualifying rounds.  Needless to say, she's a much bigger fan of Catan (and Eurogames in general) than I. 


 I've blogged before about my problems with Eurogames in general, and Catan and its numerous expansions are the granddaddy at the top of that heap.  So, while watching the game unfold in amongst refereshing snacks and the like, I was stricken by a novel concept: 
While Catan, at its core, is a passive-aggressive sort of game...it doesn't have to be that way!
Rather, it would make so much more sense if the Settlers on that happy little island actually decided to take matters into their own hands and blow their adverseries off of the map!  And, to do so, all you'd have to do is make one little house rule...


Two Brick + Two Ore = Nuclear Silo!
Simply put, you just have to add one additional build option to the typical Road/Village/City/Card combo.  The addition, naturally, would be a Nuclear Missile, and would cost a mere 2 Brick and 2 Ore.  When a player builds the Nuclear Missile, they must immediately choose either a rival Village, a rival City, or two adjoining Roads.  If targeted at a Village or Roads, they are "destroyed" and removed from the board.  If a City is targeted, it is reduced back down to a Village.

However, some restrictions should be put on this.  I would add that a player cannot be reduced below his starting number of Villages, simply in order to keep the game competitive.  I would also add that a player can only play a Nuclear Missile once per turn, so that they can't simply go on a killing spree, attempting to demolish all of the other players simultaneously.

On a casual--and totally unplaytested--level, this seems pretty balanced.  On a traditional Settlers of Catan board, there are one less Brick and Ore producing tiles than the other three resources, which makes them somewhat more difficult to get.  Ore is most often used in the end-game for building Cities and buying Development Cards, while Brick (which is really important early on, as Roads are a priority) gets put to the wayside.  Essentially, it rewards a player wiling to invest in Brick on a significant level, while simultaneously providing an opportunity-cost conundrum:  do you build the City with that Ore, to build up resources and victory points, or do you nuke your nearest opponent, reducing his ability to catch up to you?

So, what do you think, fellow gamers?  Would you like to play a game?  :D