So, right, back to Planet Fucking Crazy. I was talking about game systems that would be appropriate for doing games set on PFC in my last post, so come up to speed there if you’re lagging behind.

A number of people posted replies, and I think it’s probably a good idea to start by answering some of their questions in the main context, then moving on to the larger issues.

merb101 and jake_richmond both bring up Classroom Deathmatch¹, which is a fine, fine example of a game which definitely borrows elements of PFC. In CD, you essentially enact the events of Battle Royale, playing out the actions of a number of students forced to kill one another until only one is left. This is definitely a suburb of one of the main cities on PFC, without question. Where there’s a bit lacking is in the fairly limited scope that CD allows you to game out. It’s a very, very focused architecture and if you really want to do something beyond Battle Royale, there’d be a lot of work waiting for you.

Beyond the focus, there’s another, more metatextual² reason to avoid Panty Explosion / CD for PFC setting games. One of the big mechanical hooks of the PE system is the idea that your character has a Rival and a Best Friend; your Best Friend narrates how you succeed in a conflict and your Rival narrates your failures. This is wonderful, brilliant design. Absolutely incomperable in many ways, but one of the effects is to focus on your character’s interpersonal connections to other characters as a mover of narrative power. Additionally, the size of the die you roll in conflicts is directly tied to your character’s social popularity. Again, an awesome reification of the high school experience³, but it’s not entirely appropriate for the bulk of the PFC experience since character social leverage is often directly at odds with their narrative influence. In fact, in many cases it appears the further you are outcast socially from core culture on PFC, the more influential you are.

This may be because everyone on PFC is, indeed, fucking crazy. The quiet next door neighbor, the friendly cop on the corner, your best friend, your parents?! All of them absolutely, unequivocably, entirely bugshit nuts, possibly only requiring the slightest nudge to boil up girlfriend-face stew or believe their grief makes them physically invincible.

As much as I love PE/CD, guys, it’s better grounded in a setting that’s not wholly on PFC. The more FC you want, the more you need to lean on the social-focus strengths of the system, and they’re at odds.⁴

As Jake says, “Plus, Classroom Deathmatch is free!” which is its own advocation. I suggest going to check it out, and having a good time with it even if it is only in the same solar system as Planet Fucking Crazy.

_grimtales_ suggests Feng Shui which, while it’s one of my favourite mid-crunch games, I’m just going to have to say “No” to. Yes, you could run around on PFC in FS, the problem as I see it for that solution is one of insufficient insanity and a tendency toward over-mechanification. So much of the things your character can attempt and be successful have to be pre-considered and worked into the sheet that it doesn’t catch the edge of the wave you need to ride to get really deep into PFC. Plus, it’s just too crunchy for what it does. A great game for the period (1996 for the 1st ed, 1999 for the second), but really, guys, we’ve moved past explicit skill lists in mechanics for almost half a decade now. FS was great in the fact it helped pioneer the “merged attribute-skill matrix” as I think of it, with the ability to apply different attributes to a skill to get different results⁵. That was great. But it’s kind of done these days; Trait systems express the core idea better and more flexibly.

thandrak suggests Teenagers From Outer Space or Toon. This is me giving you the stink-eye, dude. Not the least reason being in the first case it’s always better to recommend something that’s actually seen print this decade, and in the latter … Take six Bonk. Have you ever tried running something even remotely serious (and PFC is very remotely serious) with either of those? Aside from having mechanics that grate and jitter like a twenty-year old transmission that’s never been tuned up⁶, neither of them even remotely work for the feel we’re talking about. I’ll even cop to having Toon and all its suppliments on my shelf, but I’d never think of taking it down for this.⁷

Next post, I promise, I’ll get down to talking about Beast Hunters, Over the Edge and Universalis, plus the obvious option I completely forgot, Wushu. Possibly, in a flash of “spacing it out and making fat egoboo from each one because I write as if I’m posting game suppliments, one at a time and stretched out interminably” I’ll treat each one seperately.

Tonight I watched, jaw-dropped and eyes huge and round like big black icons of delight, that work of profound iconography, Tokyo Gore Police from the same team as Machine Girl¹. As you might expect from the title, it’s heavy on the ol’ ultra-violence, with horrific mutilations, explosions of blood, emotionless murders, schoolgirl prostitution, and all the wonders you really expect from a Yoshihiro Nishimura piece².

But that led me to start thinking. There are a number of movies in that genre of artistic expression. Tetsuo: The Iron Man and its sequel. Ichi the Killer. By most measures we could include the entire creative output of Takashi Miike in there if we wanted to.

What system, pray tell, could possibly wrap its evil little head around the sheer levels of absurdity that modelling such things would require?

Yes, this is another gaming post.

We have a huge number of options which live both on my HD and on my shelves. There’s a truly immense and bogglesome swath to choose from. There are some constraints but at heart they boil down to a simple axiom:

The system can’t be very crunchy at all.

And here’s why: The action in the actual play has to be almost utterly unconstrained. It has to not only be possible, but perfectly reasonable for someone to — say — have their left arm cut off and simply grow a demonic, one-eyed fanged maw to replace it, or for someone to rip open their guts and use their intestines as a lasso. That’s the kind of inspired insanity that happens regularly in this genre, and it’s just that kind of thing that most systems that ostensibly promise to be about “stunts” and “over the top action” mechanize to the point it’s ultimately less rewarding to do such things in them.

Let me amplify on that a bit. Until very recently in game design, the idea that doing something cool should be mechanically harder for higher results was taken pretty much as law from on high. In an essenential way Exalted, despite being a system widely lauded for its “over the top” nature, is the modern exemplar. Sure, Stunting (as improvising something that gets an “oh, cool” from onlookers) is possible in the system and mechanically supported, but it often involves facing a higher Difficulty Target for a given test. Even with the 1, 2, or 3 Stunt dice such a move may bring (very rarely 3), statistically it means that having a running swordfight while literally running on the heads of a throng in Times Square would be less likely to succeed than just having it on the sidewalk.

Completely the wrong way to manage things.

Additionally, most of the “free form” designs really are more tightly constrained by pre-imagined specification than you’d want for this genre. Games like Truth and Justice have mostly free-form pre-defined Traits but, like many of its supergero bretheren, T&J leans heavily on fairly tightly defined book-given power sets which, if you’re doing traditional four-colour comics, can suffice — but that’s not what we’re talking about here.

I can’t even use my usual go-to game system, Capes, in here. Oh, you could do what I’m calling Planet Fucking Crazy³ games in Capes, but it, too, tends to lean a little heavily toward pre-imagined Traits as the character defining mechanism, but with Capes comes a strangely unexpected problem. Character differentiation within a niche is difficult! Putting together, say, a group of mutant-hunting cops who have a similar set of basic abilities (pistols, police authority, cruisers) which are all usable for narrative control means there are only a few Traits that differentiate them one another.

So, that’s what we can’t or shouldn’t use. Tomorrow or the next day, if inspiration returns, we’ll talk about some of the positive options:

• Beast Hunters
• Over the Edge
• Universalis

Well, there are a lot of them, but one in particular comes to mind at the moment.

The recent direction of indie game design has moved heavily toward setups which aren’t; that is, they have a premise, but the basics of the situation and often the environment itself are created by the gaming group starting with the first session where they meet. They don’t just create their characters but the organization or village or entire setting from Day 0 — essentially, a significant part of the act of world-building becomes owned by the Players.

Before you jump to conclusions, I love this. As someone who has spent most of his gaming life GMing, the spreading of responsibility off to other people is a wonderful thing. Even when my role is fixed as Adversary or Facilitator, I get to watch as others carry part of what I usually got stuck with and as a result, they get closer to the game. This is all good. Massively, hugely good.

Unfortunately, it makes pitching an idea almost impossible. Why? Because I can’t really pitch more than just the basic underpinning of the premise, the mechanics if they’re good. And that’s it. That can be a hard, hard sell.for groups who buy into the fact it’s a group act of creation. They want to know if it’ll be worth the effort — and there’s just no way to know.

Some games work for some groups. Some just don’t. For the fantasy class-based grognardists, pitching D&D 4ed is relatively easy. “It’s stereotypical fantasy, you hit stuff until gold falls out and look badass doing it.” If we go over to something like Wushu, you know up front you have to assemble a setting, a rather tight one, then hook folks with the freedom within it.

But I was about to try and write up a Covenant pitch this morning, to go along with the Waste Hunters / Beast Hunters pitch from 5th. And while the Players get to define a lot of the details regarding their tribes, their families, etc in Hunters, the setting itself is pre-crafted in a flowing way. It can be pitched. Covenant¹? Not so much.

Firstly, it’s set by default in the “present,” which really means between the 80’s and the 2020s. That ill-defined-but-urban period. Could you run Cov outside that? Absolutely … but it would lack a bit of the meat that being hung between the Y2K disaster and the Mayans’ 2012 gives. So there’s that.

Secondly, the whole thing kicks off with a brainstorming session. And not just any brainstorming session, but things like “What motifs are going to recur in this story?” This is a mechanical question, mind you. Motifs are things that recur in the narrative and can be introduced or referenced for dice. Things like “rain happens with death” and “blood spatters.” On the other side of the creation brainstorm, everyone creates a list of characters associated with the conspiracy they’re part of. Administrators, contacts, tech guys, whoever might be involved and where. It’s really the guts of the setup, because that’s where the tensions between characters get inserted. Different agendas, different orders, just like you’ll find on 24 or Alias.

It completely catches all the right buttons to do the job wonderfully (and I love the actual resolution mechanics), but I can’t pitch the setting because other than “You’re all part of a thousands-year old conspiracy that runs almost everything … or did,” because almost everything after that is Player-created.

If Waste Hunters seemed too “out there” for my folks, this’d be an awesome alternate choice. But its hard to pitch.

On the other hand, I’ve put together some awesome example Cell and Character sheets:

Feel free to click on them for larger versions.

Now, I’m off to bed.

I was trolling through my usual blog sites when I stumbled on something strange, something that doesn’t usually happen:

I stumbled over a reference to an RPG I don’t own, haven’t heard of, and is dead on in a genre I generally try to stay on top of.

MSG.

MSG is a game about being part of the economic universe, a 20-minutes-into-the-future setting where corporate Assets are all but owned by the Brand and head-full of plugs and data-flows. Where Freelancers see to guerrilla Marketing at gun-point and fill up their CVs with lies. Where, as io9 put it:

You’re a hard-working Rep for AwesomeTech Solutions (ATS), a global corporation that values creativity, the future, and nostalgia. Except it doesn’t value any of those things, only profit. And they want you to assassinate Mickey Mouse. The skills to pull it off have been uploaded into your brain, but are you really willing to sell your soul for the good of the Brand? Of course you are! You’re playing MSG.

Note there’s been no buzz about this game on any of my usual fora. Story Games has a grand total of no threads talking about it, which is just damned odd. And yet, you can get a free copy of an early beta on Lulu through the 25th, and a somewhat cleaned up version can be bought in PDF for #3.43 and softcover for $10.33.. Why hasn’t anyone told me about this thing?

I have good reason to think that the author, Howard Ingham, and I were inspired by similar sources; the mechanics of game-play in the GM-less MSG share some structure with my own Dungeons & Douchebags in the sense that the Company/Dungeon rotates through players in turn and that both are a resource-management/bidding resolution system. Frankly, I think that’s most likely because we both read Capes and 3:16 and went similar directions. Which is awesome, folks, because that means I’m not quite the dweeb of a game designer I thought I was! Whoo, parallel development! That vaguely suggests we’ll see more games with similar shapes, and I consider that to be a plus.

The basic character creation system is very minimalist, and part of creating a game is designing the Brand collaboratively, the overall image / icon that the Company (really, a multi-headed multi-threaded complex of companies taken as a schizophrenic gestalt) is promoting.

Which, of course, pretty much just begged for me to do a quick off-the-cuff write-up.

Ripley (Freelancer)

Expertises: Marketing, Professional Services, Security Solutions

USP: Experienced ship-crewman

iLove:

• Newt, a young girl she rescued on a previous Company mission

iHate:

• Burke, an executive trouble-shooter, and a complete prick
• Bishop, an android-model

My Secret Tragedy

• I spent decades in suspended animation drifting after my crew was killed by a xenomorph.

11 Resources

• 7 Compassion
• 4 Self

Burke (Asset)

Expertises: IT Solutions, Executive Management, Mergers and Acquisitions

USP: Ruthless devotion to the Company

iLove:

• Marne, a freelancer

iHate:

• Cpl Hicks, a security goon and a thick-headed moron besides
• Valerie, HR prole

My Secret Tragedy

• My ex-girlfriend left me for a guy in weapons development and died due to a radiation accident.

11 Resources

• 4 Compassion
• 7 Self

Hicks (Freelancer)

Expertises: Marketing, Security Solutions, Law Enforcement

USP: Leader of Men

iLove:

• Conner, a woman on the outside

iHate:

• Burke, self-involved prick
• Lt Gorman, the imbecile

My Secret Tragedy

• Involved in a secret time-travel experiment where he travelled back in time, fell in love with a woman, and got dragged back to real-time just as he was dying and seeing a drone combat unit destroyed.

11 Resources

• 6 Compassion
• 5 Self

Weyland-Yutani

Brand Values

• Efficency
• Excellence
• Success

Company Resources

• 33 Resources

So, I’ve been reading CthulhuTech on and off for the past couple days as the mood catches me, and I’ve wandered happily through the weirdly beautiful backstory, marveling in happy awe at how they’ve integrated the Cthulhu Mythos and various facets of anime geekdom (particularly The Guyver and Neon Genesis Evangelion, perversely). I find myself scratching my head at the sheer amount of thought that went into the process and smiling at the results.

And then I wandered on in to the first bits of the mechanical system, checked out the means by which conflicts were resolved, and felt it all go painful before my eyes. I took at least three Insanity points, there and then.

Let me lay it out for you:

1. Look at your skill ranking (Novice to Adept to Legendary, roughly 5 steps), convert that rank into a number of d10s.
2. Roll said d10s.
3. Look for one of the following:
   • Highest single die, or
   • Add die roll multiples (4, 4 = 8; 7, 7, 7 = 21), or
   • Sum the dice in a “straight” (3, 4, 5 = 12; 1, 2, 3, 4 = 10)
4. Add value derived above to your controlling stat for this Test
5. Compare to difficulty target, where Diff is approximate 8 for Easy, and increases by 4 for each stage of improvement until it hits 28 or so for Impossible tasks
6. Margin of success determines degree of success
   • If more than half the dice were 1s, it’s a Crit Fail
   • If value exceeds target by 10, it’s a Crit Success
   • If the Stat + 7 > TN, don’t bother to roll, take auto-success

Maybe I’m getting old, but that just seems like too much damn fiddly dice-throwing and counting, especially given it’s d10s. You have to figure out what your best value is, in what combination, then compare to a not-very-neat value (which has some slop between the areas; I just gave you the average target values for the band).

Too much fiddly for a guy who’s become used to “OK, roll FA or NFA; I’ll count down the actions, go!” This may have spoiled me.

Then I got to the weapons list. Now, I know that modern games with weapons of range in them are obligated to have long tambly tables of weapons which differ in only slight ways and have exotic names so the grognardy hardcore can prove their dick-size by memorizing it, but really — do you really need more than a handful of traits with ratings and maybe a Special to describe weapons in general?

• Range: Poor / Mediocre / Fair / Good / Great / Superb

• Power: Poor / Mediocre /Fair / Good / Great / Superb

• Penetration: Poor / Mediocre / Fair / Good / Great / Superb

• Special: Can stun target one round per success rank / hits multiple targets within range / causes unresistable sexual longing in the target for the firer / whatev.

There, I’ve reproduced their entire four pages, small print, of weapon stats in a fisrfull of lines with possibly even better detail. And not only that, but mapped it to use Fudge while I was at it. This can only be an improvement.

Maybe I’m getting old and crochety. Maybe I’m the lineal opposition of James M at Grognardia, the new wave curmudgeon who has distaste for the old ways of doing things because they’re clearly inefficient, crufty, and marginally functional and instead prefers the ways of the new, indy games because they’re streamlined, fast, and focused. (And I like D&D4e (a lot) and I can’t wait for someone to invite me to play in a game so I can run my Halfling Warlord, fo realz. But I digress.)

Something in me that was tantalized by the ideas of the background and the way they’d worked out a future history that combined humanity facing their darkest hour with it being one of the most resolute and optimistic times for man — that which loved those aspects cringed hard when the crunchy hard mechanics rolled out and I felt a desire to actually run or play in the game actively withering. And then I started working out what systems would actually capture the feel of things better, more tightly, more evocatively, stripped of a lot of the cruft.

(Hell, I’d gotten half-way through reconstructing an example combat from the book in Capes before I caught myself, and that only because I was wondering if Tagers/Dhoanoids are two different characters or only one …)

I think this might represent another of the genuine schisms in the hobby population. I know, like it needs another one. The ongoing differentiation between games which leverage direct, clear, simplified mechanics and unified resolution systems represent an interesting new ecology of solutions. Choosing to function within the auspices of one doesn’t preclude but doesn’t actually encourage functioning within the other and certain members of each tribe have a bested interest in expanding that rift.

Just some random thoughts before bed. This is how my mind works.

I just finished reading the 1993 reprinting of the 1987 game, Fringeworthy (hereafter FW).

I’m reminded why that I’m so deeply and abidingly glad that the design of games has changed so radically in the last twenty years, and simultaneously reminded why my friend maliszew’s near-obsession with the structure and feel of late ‘80’s games leaves me wholly cold.

Conceptually, FW is awesome. You probably know it better as Stargate SG-1 since 80% of the underlying concepts that went into the latter originated in FW. So much so that I’m absolutely shocked there hasn’t been any subsequent suits and huge settlements for ripping the idea off wholesale, but I digress. In FW, the world has discovered a set of huge, hovering rings that lead to a network of pathways between worlds. Only 1 in 100k can actually use these gates, so the UN administers the exploration of this new resource. Some gates open to planetary locations, some to alternate Earths (in fact, a massive, endless array of them), some to places in the solar system, some directly to other star systems. Humanity goes in, runs into aliens, finds some cooperative, others less so, and a Big Bad.

All pretty straightforward, right? I could run something based on the underlying idea in an endless parade of fun.

Then there’s the rest of the book. Remember, Tri Tac, ‘93. Ten pages of detailed, small-print human form location tables down to “front of spleen” or “5th metacarpal.” Fifteen of complicated strangely interwoven skill system, to the point of “Solar Powered Electronics” is on par with “Xenobiology.” Fifteen on randomly generating a new planet to be discovered, which is unlikely to really even be human habitable. Don’t forget the inevitable d100[1].

Could I run this? Not on your stinkin’ life. Which is pretty exemplar of the games of the era, a number of which I own in my extensive historical library.

I occasionally wonder if there’d be any money in picking up a license for some of these older properties and retrofitting a new system on the old setting info and feel. Some kind of stripped-down Fudge system would do just fine for the more mechanical systems, or maybe even just a description of common themes and means for dealing with characters in Primetime Adventures or Capes[2] . This would be impossible, since such licenses are always overpriced and would undersell, but … A man needs dreams.

Traveller done up as a Universalis plug-in and seed set amuses me so, though.

1. A review of the Fringeworthy 10th edition says it all:

   And then there’s the combat system. I’m not even going to try to describe it—you won’t believe me. To make a long story short, it makes even Rolemaster seem fast and simple by comparison. Those who want the details anyway are hereby referred to Michael Richter’s review of FTL:2448.

   In summary, this system is misbegotten all the way. Whether in or out of combat, the players and GM will be constantly flipping to different sections of the book just to find the information they need to do something. When they’re not doing that, it’ll be because they’re still trying to figure it out in the first place. Very bad for a game that has supposedly undergone ten years of playtesting.

2. Pretty much my core workhorse games now in many ways. PTA gives you a truly stripped-back character descriptor and conflict system, Capes gives you the GMless and conflict-focus for other things.

It says something about me that in my travels around the Net, I managed to find an RPG inspired by Gurren Lagann. Not only that, but the mechanics are rooted in InSpectres, possibly the best of the supernatural horror / reality show hybrid RPGs ever written.

OK, the only one. But you get the idea.

I almost want to run it. Almost. But then again, I kind of want to run a Bliss Stage inspired by a mix of Gundam and Grey Ranks focusing on the inevitable horror, suffering, misery, and just plain damn coolness of giant robots in war.

So many things I want to do, so few people nearby to do them.

But I’m sure __oni_no_kaze__ will be amused at the Gurren Lagann RPG and introduce his Navy buddies to it forthwith.

I wasn’t quite done with getting things done, of course. The BSU card was pretty much prototyped, but I need a personal card, right? One with my contact info on it as a primary thing.

So, yeah …

I originally intended to play it a lot straighter, I swear. Simple, black lettering, blocks of blue-grey with some overlapping shading, that sort of thing. I swear that’s the way it was going.

Not exactly the way it turned out.

I did pick up the salmon colour from the squid-body and echo it slightly darker on the text, which pulled the whole thing together nicely. The halo around the text is actually “paper” colour, so it’s a place where there’ll be no ink. I love being able to layer that sort of thing in InDesign … you get some nice interlacing if you want it.

I’m pretty pleased with this design. I’m vaguely tempted to redo the text and make it the official Operation BSU card, except I’d keep getting the two confused in my wallet and that’d be a bad thing. Maybe I’ll just find different squid art for it, or a nice nuclear explosion. I like the way the fonts and space work in this design. Hmmm, maybe strip the red out of the old one and just move the background grey text words over under a nuke sillhouette.

I’ve written of Dragonstaff before.

The original idea was a totally over-the-top fantasy setting, roughly inspired by the kind of insanity one finds in DragonLance, but expressed through Capes mechanics. The possibilities for comedy and pathos were always massive in such a thing and the original plan was just to go the whole 9-yards and let the madness flow.

But we can do better.

At Dragon*Con, I plan to go somewhere out even beyond that far outpost of limitation. Just as Marvel has created the Ultimate line of comics to bring their characters into the 21st century, and largely managed to screw up everything that made the originals cool, so I plan to bring Dragonstaff into the modern era and screw up everything — OK, no one but point5b and I really saw it, so no one can really be horribly disappointed, but that’s not the point! The point is that I’m fully intending to bring the most bizarre mix of crazed over-the-top-ness ever to a gaming convention.

I want people playing in the RPGA Living City games to look over and wonder what in th’Hell we could possibly be playing … and how they can get in on it! I want it to get rowdy and disturbing and bizarre by turns. Sometimes all at once.

We can do this.

Ultimate Dragonstaff takes what few limits there were on the Dragonstaff setting and throws it out the window. Ultimate Dragonstaff will make Exalted look like pikers playing in a sandbox. Ultimate Dragonstaff takes a look at Nobilis and scoffs at such a low-level campeign!

OK, maybe not that last one. But close!

Ever wanted to play Fistandantilous / Raistlin? How about The Scarlet Empress? Drizzt Do’Urden? Elric of Melnibone? Conan? John Carter of Mars? John Galt? Elminster the Wizard? The Black Adder? Arthur? Lancelot? The Lady of the Lake? That Guy on the Dead Wagon?

You can do it all in Ultimate Dragonstaff, and probably should!

But you can’t have a Capes game without a Comics Code, the list of things that cannot come to pass … and, which, incidentally, the villains and sometimes heroes of the piece try to do constantly, since almost achieving them gives Story Tokens as a pay-out.

So, let’s rough a little something out. This can be refined as we go, but as a first pass:

• Characters with Powers cannot be permenantly killed.

  The distinction here is any character with Powers. That’s heroes and villains alike. Falling off a cliff to your “certain doom” pointedly does not count as being permenently dead, nor is being left in a deathtrap. If neither of those happened, there’d be no fantasy novels!

• Exemplars cannot be permenantly killed.

  Well, if we’re giving Powered folk the out, might as well give it to Exemplars. This pretty much just means your Exemplars will be constantly in some kind of danger, as folks go for the Gloating pay-off.

• The root conflict between characters and their Exemplars can never be resolved.

  • Corollary: Unspoken love can neither be revealed nor abandoned.
  • Corollary Exemption: A character in love with a villain must make it repeatedly, brutally obvious to everyone but the target of their love.

  Those pesky root conflicts. It’s just no fun if Aunt Mae tells Peter she’s OK with his web-slinging and hires a goon army to protect her from his rampaging rogues’ gallery, and neither is it fun when the cute red-headed wench the burly Adventurer is smitten with but too shy to tell has it all ruined if he confesses his undying devotion like a sane, smart person. Just doesn’t happen. Ergo, can’t.

  Why the thing with the villainous love interest, you ask? Because it’s necessary.

• The world cannot be destroyed.

  Pretty obvious stuff, that. Can’t blow up the setting. Note what’s not covered, though: political revolutions, murdering heads of state, ruining economies … and that you’re intended to be playing characters that can do such things reasonably on a whim. Feeling a bit unconstrained yet?

[21:59] point5b: http://i11.tinypic.com/4pmxyeg.jpg
[21:59] point5b: And the excellent comment:
[22:00] point5b: Jesus plays SHADOWRUN??

Guess that makes sense, you need patience to count all those d6's.
"Okay, this is a simple run. You go in, locate the poor and downtrodden and unload some hope and salvation at them. If you run into any crippled or blind, heal the bastards without thinking twice. The means of exctraction are as usual: martyrs death while spreading the gospel of the lord to the unbelievers. See you in heaven."

[22:00] exopilot: [laugh] OK, Old Testament as Shadowrun. There's a Nobilis game waiting to happen.

Or, at need, Capes ...

I've already done God, Jesus, and Lucifer in Capes, which is undoubtedly going to send me right to Hell. I'm horribly, horribly tempted to go pull Nobilis off my shelf and start statting out God as an Imperator, and Jesus, The Holy Ghost and Lucifer as Powers thereof. (This is, technically, wholly at odds with the original Nobilis setting write-up, but since I'm responsible for injecting a dose of yaoi romanticism between God and Lucifer in there, I feel comfortable further mangling things horribly.)

Jesus as Shadowrunner, though ... This could be fun.

Joshua Christi
Son of God and Ass-Kicker

You know, it was a lot more straightforward in the New Testament. Things were simple. No Aztechnology, no magic reawakened in the world, no two-guns-akimbo street sammies running hither and yon without giving two-farts-in-a-whirlwind about the Message of God. Honestly, Joshua had no real inclination to even come back. A few more centuries and the bone-headed morons on Earth might get some of their heads on straight.

No such luck.

Instead, Josh gets sent back to the world with nothing but the fact he's doing the Will of God and His Son, a charming affinity with summoning the spirits and powers of the air, a Holy Writ for the angels -- who are feeling kind of pissed and ignored, anyway -- and a bad case of post-traumatic stress disorder from the last time he dropped in. All that and a Desert Eagle in each fist.

The Son of God is back. And, boy, is he pissed.

Despite the name of the post, this is not a recitation of one of Lovecraft's best surrealist short poems.

No, it's just an odd meta-mechanic that I thought of for giving RPGs a certain taint of old Viking mythologizing. All too often, we forget that most of the really good stories put an expiration date right up front on the protagonist's head, not in numbers so much as in circumstances. We know they'll go down fighting, or murdered, or die of old age in bed, or wander off into the endless sea. It's shown us, up front. And then, later in the story, circumstances start aligning and the reader tenses, wondering, "is this it?" but it's just foreshadowing and the disaster narrowly averted, we go on, reminded of where the road ends. And, finally, satisfied at the end, destiny is revealed and we close the book, nodding.

Not perfect for every story, of course, but good fun on occasion, and not just in high tales of fantasy, but other genres as well. The grizzled veteran of the previous war who mentors one of our heroes who we know will die in the first reel to motivate the youngster, the bitter killer who goes on "one last mission" you know will be the death of him, or the cheerful and fearless kid who we can tell will end the story with his illusions shattered and his dreams burned even as he walks into the mists of obscurity, all are iconic images that the promise of can drive the story forward.

To that end:

The Doom Game

During character generation, in addition to normal chargen, you need to describe three Scenes in which your character plays a pivotal part:

Initiation

What things are present when the character is pulled into the whirlwind of events? What's going on? At the end of the Scene, how is their mind made up about the course to take?

Conflict

Pick an event during the course of the pursuit to come. You don't have to know what you're actually accomplishing, just a Scene during it. Where is it? What are you doing? What things are around? What thing hinges here that pushes you on toward the end?

Death

You are going to die. How does it happen? Who's in attendance? What are the Props, the Location, the Characters in motion? How do you go out, like a punk or a hero, or something darker?

The Scenes take place in the order defined and if more than one of the Players' Characters arrange to have the same Location for one of their Doom Scenes, all the better, though even if they do they might turn out not to be simultaneous.

For every aspect of your next Doom that you introduce during a Scene, you get one of whatever currency that your game uses for authorial control (unless playing Universalis, see below). For Wushu, that would be Chi, for Donjon, a generic Token that can be traded in for a success, for Capes, a Story Token, etc. If, at the end of that Scene, your Doom hasn't come to pass (the Doom Scene didn't come to pass, etc), take an additional Token. If you resolve your Doom Scene, moving toward your death, the other Players can elect to give you one or more of their unspent Tokens as fan mail.

Why would you want to move toward your death, you might ask? Because resolving your Doomed Death results in being given broad authorial control without risk of interruption or contravention about the Scene and events which cascade from it, to the extent of expense. Any and all Tokens you have left can be spent to dictate the eventual results. Want your grandson to sit on the throne of Caldenoia, musing about his grandfather's tragic loss? Done. Want your homeland ravaged by blood-orcs after your fall from your horse? Sure. As long as you have the Tokens to pay for the facts you narrate (roughly one Token per fact, in most systems), you are the Writer for the repercussions of your fall.

Obviously, this works best in games which already have a strong streak of Narrativist engineering going in, but there's no reason you couldn't use it with straight-up D&D as well as anything.

Universalis has a different spin on this, since aside from the time-disjoint, it's very much business as usual for the game:

Rules Gimmick: Doom Scenes

Important characters can have a Doom Scene Component created and attached for 1 Coin which gets a Trait of Initiatory, Conflict, or Death for free. DSC's can (and, in fact, must) have Traits attached which represent Characters, Props, or Locations involved in that Doom Scene. DSC's can be added to just as any other Component, and the connections to a DSC act bi-directionally, increasing the Importance of the person, place, or thing so mentioned and making it harder to remove from the story until the DSC. Further, presence attached to a DSC is a fact which counters bids that would make an attached Component inaccessible.

When a DSC resolves, the controller of the character so resolved receives the Importance in Coins as a bonus.

Why aren't Doom Scenes introduced as every Scene? A Doom Scene can only be invoked for it's bonus once in a number of Scenes equal to twice the Players. Three player Capes game? Each Player gets to call on Doom Scene bonii once every six Scenes. D&D game have four Players and a GM? Once every eight Scenes. And so on.

I was indirectly inspired by an indy RPG called Wyrd, which has some brilliant doom-and-dire-based-mechanics (which I cannot find anywhere hide-nor-hair, so if anyone knows Scott Knipe, tell him to find publication or look me up; we can work something out), as well as ongoing thinking about Elric, Conan, and their space-driven cousins, the Metabarons. Plus, you know, the Eddas and other lovely, uplifting stories of onrushing death.

What, you thought you'd get out of here without a Capes version?

Name: Ryo Shinta
Sorcerous Vampire

Abilities	Styles	Attitudes
Lure of Flames (5)	Detonations! (3)	Ironic (1)
Arcane Lore (4)	Asian Occult (1)	Bitter (3)
Inhuman Speed (1)	"This problem? You need enough dynamite to cure AIDS." (2)	Cynical (4)
Resilience of Dead Flesh (2)		Disappointed (2)
Mental Focus (3)

Drives: Obsession 1, Truth 4, Power 2, Justice 1, Duty 1

The interesting thing about trying to do White Wolf-esque vampires in Capes is just how hard it is. There are a lot of little fiddly bits that the WW systems have embedded as assumptions that you have to pare down to just essentials when you make the transition. "Is the character's struggle against the Beast important? How about their secondary and tertiary Disciplines? What do they care about enough to be Styles?" Tough stuff.

In a way, a Wushu conversion is easier because it pares things right down to a few core images and abilities and a weakness. That's it. Twelve things? Far harder, because it's both more and less detailed. A lot of things fit into Wushu Traits while Capes is a lot more circumscribed as to what makes a difference in a Scene, mechanically.

I was going to write some long, rambling thing here about politics and how anyone that said "The biggest threat to modern Western civilization is this Administration!" is an arse-bound moron, but honestly ... I can't be bothered. Anyone that knows that democracies generally hinge on accepting that when you get outvoted you pretty much have to suck it up until the next voting cycle and that very dynamic being the heart of post-Grecian democracy knows that saying such things mark them as unserious in any reasonable sense, and those that don't know it aren't worth the phytoplasm that pumps up their cells and no amount of denigration and deconstruction from my poison pen will change that.

No, I'd really rather write about what I've been killing lately.

Starchild, Eric the .5b and I have been pretty consistently keeping our heads down and firing off shots in the general direction of the enemy in Battlefield 2142. I apologize profusely for not having my usual horde of cool screenshots to illustrate this piece, but I'm generally far too busy trying to coordinate strikes on enemy-held positions or keeping my head down while hoping fervently my hopping, seeking land-mines blow away the evil, two-legged tank firing away at my cover not ten meters away. I've been focusing on my Engineering unlocks and point accumulation too much to really have time to reach over and trigger the Xfire keystrokes for screenshots.

The problem, as far as the addictiveness of the game design for 2142 goes, is that they've combined the tension of close-quarters combat with the ongoing and eternal desire to collect everything ever made of the hardcore RPG player. The unlock system, via which you unlock successively better equipment in exchange for points gained from engaging in combat on multiplayer servers, is a truly evil creation. My preferred role is Engineer, repairing vehicles after we engage and skirmish a bit, then getting back into the action. I leave little seeking-mine droplets of death in my wake to catch the unwary enemy who swoops in without carefully clearing the ground around a missile silo. At worst, I lean back and fire my missile launcher at excessively long ranges to do destruction against vehicles and the occasionally poorly-running infantryman.

I am no Squad Leader. You see something like that on the left come popping up, I'm squirming for cover and holding my panicky fire until he either drifts closer and feels mine-kisses or turns a bit so I can get an unobserved shot from the launcher. I do not command the forces of righteousness as they stride amongst the battlefields like the gods of old. I scrabble and sneak and keep down while hoping no one goes hunting for my dog-tags with an embarrassing knife kill.

And yet ...

And yet, I seem to be the one in charge of the squad more often than Eric the .5b, who, by dint of his incredible ability to go in killing and come out alive, really ought to be the one calling the shots. Or at least leading the charge. Eric does the bloody charges, the mass murders. Me, I think I'll sit here on this ledge and toss mines down at vehicles passing below me. Or sit up comfortably on the team's titan, an enormous floating nightmare base, and rain fire and flame down on a position while Starchild and Eric the .5b secure it after zipping in from an orbiting transport flight.

Yet, sometimes, I seem to forget my role. I'll head on over to our titan's launch pods and get one swiveled about, ready to fire, and punch the button, feeling the fire burning under my heels and spinning off toward the enemy titan, landing on top, directly between the massive anti-air machine-guns in their reinforced turrets, turning to blast either or both of them away from a handful of meters, getting my points in Titan Destruction. Planting leaping-mines directly over the shields through which the enemy's transports must take off and hoping they stick. Turning to head toward the back of the huge ship, dropping a frag grenade down a shaft that leads to overwatch positions on their cargo bay then dropping after, letting others clear the crew as we move toward the consoles that have to blow before the thing can be brought down.

Like yesterday, I can get the warning the hull's about to blow and have seconds to haul-ass out of the reactor room, scuttling through the hallways to the exit where a lone transport vehicle is parked, barely catching it and hanging out the side as I look back and see the massive flying ship burst into pyrotechnic bursts, ringed in radioactive death.

It's a win.

I suppose the reason I'm doing the duty as Squad Leader is I'm generally thinking about how we can accomplish the ends and objectives more than I'm noticing the guy sneaking up on my side. That's Eric's job, to catch that guy out and put him down for me. Mike's job is to keep an eye out and up, watching the high places for threats and calling them out in-game so they can be targeted. I need a guy who's job it is to carry the sniper rifle and to put delicately pointed rounds into the faces of the folks sitting ahead in the woods or on the skyscrapers, with the kiss of death and the blade of truth. I really should recruit a girl for that role, to be true to the story, but there aren't a lot of 2142-gaming girls. Pity really.

I guess I'll have to use an unlock on getting the Squad Spawn Beacon, after all, if only so I can summon down my warriors from on high, sheathed in steel and ceramic, born from a cocoon of death to serve the cause.

European Union. Pacific Asian Coalition. Doesn't matter.

Walking dreadnaughts. Hovertanks. Doesn't matter.

We fight the ice.

• Utahraptor
• FireEagleDngr
• Point5b

There, we're known as Team Tentacles!

I'll expect the clan tag field set appropriately next game.

Alright ...

1. I'm tempted to try and design this setting.
2. How come no one ever thought of this as a salable toy for my youth?

Back in the day, not long after it came out, I used to play in a MMORTS called Shattered Galaxy.

MMORTS, you say?

Yes, a massively multiplayer real-time strategy game. There were persistent territories on multiple planets, persistent armies, ways to gain rank and with gaining rank came the ability to command others in the sense you could invite them to take part in the battle, have bigger armies involved in a given territory, and have more units in reserve. Units leveled up as they gained XP, became more powerful and could mutate into new and more exotic units as they went.

It was also, incidentally, responsible for the little Korean I know. La!

Battle for Middle Earth II has a sort of integrated meta-campaign in the single-player where you gain XP as you move around a meta-map, reinforce territories, and generally behave as if the word "strategy" isn't just something folks tacked onto game designations back in the day because the word "tactical" had too many edges. Individual territories give armies various advantages if they're held, resource bonii, the ability to recruit various things, etc. As your armies (and your main hero) gained experience, you could add skills and powers to your hero, levelling them up and customizing them to your perverse (in my case) desires.

In the multiplayer game, you accrue XP for the ladders but you also have the option to play in longer-term map-focused games which give the players access to the meta-map for effective campaigns. I don't actually want to think about how long one of those things could run, though, because in single-player, they're obscenely long and that's with getting to fight every battle. I can only imagine the snoozing you could enjoy if you had to wait for others to resolve their RTS battles before you could take your next turn. LAN parties really shouldn't require you to play other games to keep occupied while the campaign is on.

And that brings us to Dawn of War: Dark Crusade. Which, if you've been following my blog so far, you already know I think is pretty darn spiffy, if only because it lets me play far-future SF metal undead, which I can paint in garish colours and set to marching against my enemies. What you may not know is that, generally, I just don't play the single-player games in these things to any great length or depth, because for one they're too hard because I have a life and can't devote my life to just playing them (see BfME2) or the plot really doesn't catch me and feels too linear for me to make much of a dent in (see, well, the previous DoW entries).

But Dark Crusade goes more toward the BfME2 architecture for the single-player. There's a 25 territory meta-map that breaks up the planet Kronus. You can play as any of the seven factions in the DoW franchise (sadly, no 'Nids, yet; I'm wagering they're saving the Zerg-progenitors for their next game), each with it's own starting territory. Territories give you bonii for possession, and your army commander gains wargear during the campaign as you hit breakpoints like taking X territories or sustaining Y attacks (or, in my case in one situation, having a 3:1 kill ratio). To the right you can see the wargear screen for my Necron Lord as he stands in my last turn. There's a pretty nice mass of options, and each piece of gear changes your commander's appearance both on the big interface screens and in-game.

The interesting thing, as I see it, is the potential to add some kind of persistent multiplayer battle-map to DC, without necessarily having to do a huge engine overhaul to do so. They've already lifted so much from BfME2, I don't see why lifting their accessibility to the meta-map for LAN and Internet games should be unlikely nor undesirable. DoW plays out a lot more smoothly in the meta-map, not the least reason being that your constructed buildings are persistent in each territory and you can buy reinforcements of some of your basic units in each territory as well which will always be there if the territory is attacked, even if your main army is elsewhere. Your commander also builds up an "honour guard" of more powerful units which go where he goes and start the territory map wherever your base begins, which is quite neat since I've zerged several territories with just my Necron Lord and honour guard while building up base defenses cheaply. Best of all, the home territory of each faction isn't just a standard RTS meeting engagement; each one is like an intricate, multi-objective puzzle. For instance, in taking the Imperial Guard's home base with my Necrons, I had to take out their forward bases, hunt and destroy their artillery which was randomly bombarding me on the attack, and finally dodge across a vast trench which was dug by a huge freakin' Titan beam-cannon which the IG kept firing to try and take me out. (And succeeded at least once in wiping out most of my army because I wasn't watching the timer.)

Perhaps the most alarming positive thing I can say is that I'm enjoying playing single-player in DC.

That said, there's no reason they couldn't adapt the engine to go further into the MMORTS arena. I'm iffy on the whole idea of there being a Warhammer MMORPG, the use of the property for an MMORTS is barely a stretch. In a sense, that's what Games Workshop does with their massive, distributed tabletop storyline tournaments. No reason that they couldn't abstract the mini-map into a larger swarm of worlds and territories, with individual players given single squads to start with and tasked with being part of a larger assault. I know I was always quite thrilled in SG to play a pivotal role in the taking of a map, even if it was a small one, from defending a site being taken by someone else to hunting and flanking the enemy artillery hiding in some niche. Combine that with getting new gear (which shows up on your units, something already done in DoW with tech upgrades), traveling to new maps, and perhaps borrowing a bit from both PlanetSide and Unreal Tournament to build maps which have multiple foci and on which power can shift back and forth, and you could have a fantastic set-up.

Of course ... I very well might be talking about Dawn of War 2. The developers have been really coy about whether they're doing a full-bore sequel (possibly using the Company of Heroes engine, since it's been so excellently reviewed) and the game developer has said in interviews he really wants to do 'Nids, but they require a whole new resource system and some other issues. The changes to the Necron resource model and the way Kroot Carnivores can eat enemy corpses to gain health might be seen as prototypes for the Tyranid mechanics. Other than 'Nids, all that's left is Dark Eldar, and the designer has made noises about wanting to do real flying units (like, say, jetbikes). The end of the DoW campaigns have twice been used to spotlight the next races to be added (IG in the first, Necrons in the second), but the end of the DC campaign pulls back to reveal two more planets showing large explosions on their surfaces. Multi-world MMORTS would certainly fit in with their design goals.

I'd play that.

In the original version, our intrepid gamers, Alice, Bob, and Connie were using Capes to run an opening scene from Battlestar Galactica. They discovered that Capes' architecture actually leads to the opening scene being, well, like the opening scene for a TV ep. This is good. Moreover, it established the fact that a system originally conceived to model the narrative of super heroes could cover space combat quite neatly.

Now it's time to try the latest weapon in the RPG arsenal here at Squid's Redoubt, Universalis, which paints itself with the following:

Universalis is:

The game where every player is the Game Master

The game where players can create and populate the world as they desire as they play

The game where everything that happens, happens because a player wanted it to happen

The game where suspense comes from the actions of other players, not from a random roll.

The game whose plot evolves as you play with no random tables, rail-roading, or scenario books

The game which requires absolutely no set up or preparation time

The game where it doesn’t matter if all of the players show up on time or at all

Begin play with only sheets of blank paper, pencils, ten-sided dice, tokens, and plenty of imagination.

None of which I actually disagree with, after a couple of readings. Like Capes, Universalis is predicated on players engaging each other with conflicts rather than with some overall imposed story guide or GM directing things. Unlike Capes, the whole system is about starting from ground-scratch and building up the Tenets of the setting (things like where and when it occurs, big things like cities or continents, the overall massive shape of things, plus issues like genre, and even bits like "Turn off your stinkin' cell-phones, you goddamn Neanderthals" get created then by expending in-game currency (Coins). Universalis also shifts things in a rather more elemental way than it might at first appear by moving the focus from Debt which you accrue by acting to a Coin cost to specify a Fact; the move of the attention of resource control from after the fact to before makes you think about the cost more directly, I'm wagering.

Regardless, let's go on to our feature presentation.

( Battlestar Universalis )</u></font></a></span>

Just as a note to myself, and sort of referential for everyone else, I really need to sit down and respin the Battlestar Galactica space combat between Starbuck and Scar that I originally did in Capes with Universalis. Mainly as an exercise for myself to see if I understand the architecture well enough to write it out, and also to see if I can figure out exactly how the Complications differ from the way Conflicts in Capes play out.

(I'm not doing it now because I just took my Ambien and it does me no good to try and write unconscious.)

Just as a gloss, my gut suggests the Capes Conflicts are a lot more "active" than Universalis Complications, mainly due to the fact that Conflicts can activate Powers repeatedly at the cost of more Debt, but Complications can only activate a Trait once for each time it exists on a Component. I suppose you could buy additional copies of a Trait if you wanted to go on using it multiple times in a given Complication. That'd move the Debt idea to an up-front cost instead, which is kind of interesting. A character which started with the Trait "Laser Cannon" who gets in an intense fire-fight might have it bought a few more times, ending up with "Laser Cannon x4" at the end. In the next Complication where it might be useful, it's already bought up and can be used 4x for free.

I wonder if that wouldn't actually better mimic the arc by which a character begins a story fairly loosely sketched out, and develops not only peripheral abilities and breadth, but the facets of their character that get brought into play a lot dynamically get invested in, making them ever more important.

Side thought: Could this be an alternative approach to the Hero's Journey that D&D rather sadly attempts to mimic via levels? Traits that get branched out and built upon as stories go, making the character ever harder to remove from the narrative and establishing more things about them that have to be Challenged to essentially change them? Remind me to try a fast-sketch of how a "First-Level Character" might change over multiple stories."

Well. We'll just have to see how this sort of thing works out in auto-play before I actually try it with other people.

You know, I don't mind ads in roleplayers.

What I do mind is bad ones.

I'm particularly annoyed by bad horror-genre games that don't bring anything new to the table. I'm doubly-annoyed by trying to republish a 16 year old game design as if it had some kind of relevance in the field or some reason it'd be worth dropping my hard earned money and, more importantly, my time on.

I mean, c'mon, the splatterpunk horror genre was never huge, and the focus on combat was endemic of all the designs, from Chill to Kult. And I say the latter as someone who dearly loved Kult, but the high-complexity martial arts and combat system was horribly out of place and misdirected the reader from the truly horrific setting the game created to play in.

Blood doesn't look to bring anything at all except Rolemaster-scale combat nightmares and a taste for red ink in illustration. With games like Dead Inside, Dread, and Wonderland in the marketplace, each with some significant innovation, the potential to be played full splatterpunk, and bringing the serious weird, why would anyone try to play off a 16 year old design as something worth having, save as a cheap PDF to toss out there because someone found the PageMaker files lying around and shrugged out a "Why not?"

I sometimes don't understand these folk.

So, yeah ... it looks like the opportunity to write the DropTeam novel is going from "vaguely joked about" to "it looks like they might want it, seriously."

Which, truthfully, is just a bit this side of terrifying.

The really terrifying thing is that my current employment comes to an end, in any time-devotional sense, on the 18th of this month. Then there's a week at the end of October.

And then NaNoWriMo begins.

It is sane to actually demand a minimum of two-thousand words a day out of yourself for a month, with the intention of actually selling the smelly dog-fart that'll inevitably result? It's not that I can't produce that much text, of course. I did well more than that on Iteration X Revised, in a per-day sense. I just can't stand to read anything I produce about two weeks after I write it.

So, me being me and devoted to using the most bizarre tools that I can in an effort to make twiddling and screwing around look good, dug up FreeMind from my archives and started laying out some node structure of ideas that I think are important to get down with connections between them for the novel. Some people like outlines. I like node-link maps.

Of course, what I really want is a full 3d node-map creator and projector, with the ability to let the nodes find their own least-energy patterns based on the way they're connected up, but I fear that'll have to wait a few dozen more years before the interface to deal with such comes to fruition.

Still ... it's a start. Getting a semi-pitch opportunity, having the tool at hand, having a whole month free without having to worry about a real job ... It's almost providential. If I were a religious man, I'd be terrified.

As is, I'm just short of that.

Interestingly, reading Universalis actually helped rather than hindered working in this format. The focus on bought Traits with the power of a thing dependent on how many Traits describe it has made me acutely aware of where the weight in my narrative falls, even so early as sketching out the setting details. LiveShips are a big chunk of the setting, so they get a lot of verbiage, but also a lot of details which can be summoned up during the story. The Space Aztecs (to be named properly later) have ... well, nothing yet. They carry no mass in my narrative as yet.

These are handy mental tools, too. As important as the way to visualize the structure directly.

I'm ... ready, I think. For this.

Is the world ready for me to join the universe of Michael Stackpole and Fred Saberhagen? Is the world ready for me to write a novel? Even a crappy novel for a niche video game from a niche video game company?

Am I ready?

Folks, repent, for the end time is nigh.

No, I don't mean Jesus is inbound any moment and about to drop a Rock-like most electrifying deity in sports-entertainment history Jesus'-elbow across our shoulders. I can take that skinny punk all by myself.

No, I mean I've been being the voice of reason and wisdom in an online forum full of prickly and obsessive grognards, and being lauded for my ideas. I know, I know, its kind of horrifying when you get right down to it, and yet ... there it is.

Yes, I've been active in the DropTeam fora.

Thus the new icon for a specific game instead of the generic wargame icon.

My latest opus on the DropTeam forum concerns the evolution of the game's tactical interface, in particular better means of dealing with autonomous elements, thus, bot wrangling. It simply would not do to let it go without at least an excerpt from the beginning:

Provocative title, not that provocative concept. I needed a thread to ramble about useful additions to the bot wrangling interface.

As stands, there's a lot of focus on playing from a FPS-esque direction because getting the bots to do useful work from the tactical screen (hereafter abbreviated "tac") is not just awkward, sometimes its a real pain in the tookas. But, given a bit of polish -- OK, a lot of tears, sweat, and programmer-bile -- it could be a lot easier.

I'll just put out a chunk of ideas that have been kicking around my head and some notes:

• Multi-point Commands: Being able to give multi-point orders with different modes at each point will help a lot when it comes time to orchestrate moving groups together. Not only that, but it'll help a lot when just trying to get a bot to pull any moves more complicated than driving straight at the enemy without babysitting them. And that gives the players more time to come up with good tactics and even better strategy.
  
  The bots should be able to follow a path of at least five points, shifting from "Defend," "Attack," etc at each one.

[...]

And so on, over several more points, including discussion of a minimal set of formations platoons should have available for command.

The thing that struck me last night came as Eric the .5b and I were warming up for a night of delicious bloody destruction by going a few rounds on the DropTeam demo server, which doesn't have infantry or a number of the latest additions, but is still nicely serviceable, is that once upon a time, I'd discussed with him the kind of game that would satisfy the both of us and play to our strengths, a game which could be played from a FPS position, on the battlefield directly, firing the guns and choosing positions, or from above in an RTS position, directing swarms of lesser elements around to aid and support the human-directed units. Perversely, DropTeam is aimed squarely at that niche. While Eric was "in the shit," firing AP iridium darts at oncoming main battle tanks, I was soaring above the chaos, directing bots to give him supporting fire, dropping minefields directly in front of advancing enemy elements, and occasionally popping onto the battlefield myself to snipe at long distance with ATGM launchers from the safety of a sensor jamming field. It was, in short, almost a perfect mix of everything we're both good at, and that gives me a good feeling.

Often, when we're playing Battlefield 2, I get the feeling that I'm not exactly pulling my weight. Oh, I know, I'm a fine sniper and a perfectly serviceable bombardier, but neither of those roles get the attention that others get from charging directly into short-range firefights and tangling up directly on a contested base, even if my sniper rounds or long-range support from a tank helps take it. But those things don't seem quite so intriguing, since others seem to make them irrelevant as a means of operation.

For example, I think I'm the only one that ever pops smoke out of a tank or IFV when I hear a lock-on, even though you can throw it into reverse and turn a bit and often have the shooter totally miss through the impenetrable haze. But that's good doctrine for keeping the element alive. Of course, I think I'm the only one that's ever run out of ammo in a Bradley IFV in B2, too.

I manage to feel pretty useful in a DropTeam entanglement, with my ability to direct multiple elements at once and a sense of strategic deployment. And, at the same time, Eric can feel like he's fighting the good fight, rushing up to take out the trash in concert with my units, making a fine example of the meat-grinder and driving at high speeds in dangerous vehicles over rough terrain.

There are few games out there that try and straddle two very different continuum of games, but its nice when they do it, and do it well. How many other folks would game together more happily if there were more games that catered to their particular foci and let them shine, individually? It seems like there should be a market.

DropTeam seems to be having a fairly significant gameplay-affecting release every two weeks, at this point, and they don't seem to have any intention of decreasing the pace, given they've already announced a WWII mod that registered buyers will get for free. I'm not particularly interested in the WWII form, but the idea that such a thing is just fine with the developers and important enough not just to do, but do well, is fantastic.

Possibly relatedly, I've kind of taken it up myself to do the basic structuring of the relatively virginal DropTeam wiki. If you feel like helping out, get intrigued and involved by DT, and think you can help out, by all means, pile in. It'd be a full-time job just going through the fora and pulling out the best of the tactical advice and element stats.

This has been your weekly wargaming broadcast. We now return you to your regular broadcasts of war, already in progress.

Another few levels, another vehicle for Aganterra. This is the first of its kind I've seen, in my first look at the vehicle vendor at Crossroads (the home of much CB'er activity). I wouldn't normally have bought it, but it came with Military Reinforcement on the chassis itself, which helps make up for the fact that a fairly underfed Scav could bench-press it on a good day. Still, its got a nice top-end speed of 109mph on the open road when I really put it all in the pedal, which is about 30mph more than my Marduka.

Above, you can see it fitted with a rare front-mount flamethrower and a rare Blood sprayer that I'd really, really like to trade for a longer-ranged fitting, but its just the most DPS for 3 targets at a time I can put on, and I need that with my tendency to go rampaging through large crowds of infantry (though the increasing tendency of the two-legged lunatics to explode in rather unpleasant fireballs may increase my reticence on the matter).

The cost? 56 scrip, which was no big deal given I had 109s when I bought it. By the time I logged out, I was back up to 70s and funds weren't looking hard to come by.

Playing Auto Assault and World of Warcraft back-to-back, I'm forcibly reminded of why I actually prefer running missions in AA. Heather and I ended up running a set of much lower-level missions in WoW, in order to unlock the mission arc which led up to a couple near-but-under our current level. Going in, there was no question we could do it, and would accomplish it, as long as we just put our minds to it. The kills were easy, and as a result it wasn't that big a deal that the drops for the things we needed took three or four targets to fall; they were coming fast enough that it was actually fun to go in, wading knee-deep in gore. Those who play WoW regularly know what I mean when I say when I talk about how frustrating it can be, especially with a larger group but very, very frequently simply alone, trying to run those quests of equal level to your chara. It quickly becomes drudgery if the required quest item doesn't fall on every one you take out. At core, it feels like the designers don't want us to win and take steps to stymie that event, unless you just put in hour after hour.

Auto Assault feels, by comparison, more like City of Heroes did back when we started (and before the truly painful XP curve coupled with XP Debt on death made even being a superhero agonizing); it feels as if the designers want you to accomplish your missions so you can see what they have next for you. As if they're standing there, gleefully rubbing their hands together and making encouraging gestures with their smiles as they push the plots forward. I end up feeling competent and important to the setting rather than having the world push me down as hard as it can until I'm sucking mud. I think that's an important change of stance in terms of what I, as a consumer, receive. For the first time since Guild Wars, I feel like the designers want me to see endgame content. Contrast with WoW, which seems to go out of its way to put obstacles between the player and endgame, in the hope the poor fool'll just give up and go away.

Someone recently described MMORPG play as "going to a club." Some folk go to chat up every person they see there, to network, meet-and-greet, and get it on as much as possible. Some go just to be around other people but not necessarily to get involved with them, to hang with their circle of friends and to share an experience with the larger whole, but only as audience. I'm almost wholly in the latter group, as are, on observation, most folks who go to a club. If you design your club to cater strongly to the networkers, you'll get the other group if there's no other places they can go to be alone together, but they won't really enjoy it, they'll feel forced and shoved around, like their personal space is always being violated. That's how a lot of people, myself among them, feel in the majority of MMORPGs on the market, and something AA goes against in its casual-friendly, success-intended, no-forced-grouping architecture.

I like places I can go to be alone together with other people.

Feet of Clay, that blog I linked to earlier, the one with the obsession with statistics, writes on a lot of MMORPG issues, including inherent perception of power. And then he comes along with this:

Here’s the thing: Lyndon Johnson may have been shocked to learn that 50% of the population was of below average intelligence, but an analysis of social dynamics quickly yields the counterintuitive conclusion that 80+% of people are below average in aggregate ability for any complex task. A handful of extreme performers, be they uber-guilds, professional sports players, or just lucky stiffs who were in the right place at the right time to gain some initial advantage that then compounded, skews the “average” performance upwards and leaves the vast majority in the dust.

I feel strangely illuminated, actually. I mean, the best kind of knowledge is that you already possess, and this definitely hits a sweet spot in my under-conscious.

Whoot! I'm really, really enjoying Auto Assault. Aside from the nimrods on the fora, its a great game, indeed.

One of the things I like best about it is the fact that even when I'm afraid I won't be able to solo an area or a mission arc, I usually turn out to be wrong. In part, I suppose, because I've been conditioned by games like World of Warcraft that assesses punitive death penalties (though nothing like City of Heroes' penalty), I see the fact the mission is a couple levels higher than I am, knowing that its a boss fight on top of that, and I get concerned.

I needn't be.

(Though I'm glad to stumble over other MMORPG pundits' feelings similar to mine on death penalties, and why they have the effects they do. With statistics!)

In Auto Assault, I was nearing the end of the Highway 667 missions, and I knew that the end-bit was an instance where I faced off against Mozak once more -- a recurring villain first seen in the first mission set in an instance off Highway 667. I decided to just sort of plow right on in, secure in the knowledge that if I failed, worst case, I respawn right on the repair pad just inside, anyway.

As ever, the first section of the instance was relatively easy. Rather large and aggressive groups of Pike infantry were swarming me, but I switched from my Warrior's Crown back to my infantry-scything multi-target military duo machine gun, and cut on through. A bit of running back and forth later, and I was at the final mission, on the Mountain Temple grounds itself.

And here came Mozak. At level 21, with a boss' load of nightmarish hit points (3,000) and a rather disturbing ability to shrug off damage. Oh, yes, and his posse, among which was a missile-spewing tank. One of my least favourite Pike weapons.

The solution to my conundrum, as it often is, was to switch my pets into wide-area aggressive and leave the bulk of the posse to them, ignore Mozak, and take out that tank. With the Warrior's Crown firmly back in place and my recently acquired innate boost to Contamination damage, the tank went down with relative ease.

Mozak was not quite as easy.

My secret? Once the pets were through hashing the posse, they converged on Mozak, who was so busy trying to avoid them, that he kept getting hung up on bits of the temple, like the walls and the fountain in the middle. This was a prime opportunity not just for lining him up in the front and turret arcs simultaneously, but for backing up and then flooring it as I rammed into him at full speed, usually pushing his nose even further into a trapped position.

Remarkably swiftly (given a good ram was popping 25 damage each and my weapons were throwing single digits; lucky for me, my Contamination Shell was eating his Contamination resistance, which upped the damage my pets and my DoT were doing), Mozak exploded in a fountain of enjoyable, wonderful loot.

Amongst which was a great piece of high-resistance armour, and a new car! One I could actually drive!

Needless to say I was stoked, and wasted mo time In getting back to town so I could trick and trim it out with goodies saved for just such an occasion.

Enter the Vrai GTO Extreme (here pictured with the railgun mounted because, damnit, it looks more intimidating).

Outfitted with the new resistant armour kit, painted with some electric blue paint I had from an earlier drop and naturally possessing a rich purple secondary colour (trimmed out into tribal flames), it has upgraded hit points and power capacity over the Marduka. It also has a higher redline -- but an abyssal drive-train power, given its just as heavy. Accordingly, it goes faster on the straights and absolutely sucks on the hills, just like a real GTO!

I love it!

Tomorrow afternoon / evening, nyxsis, Eric the .5b and I will be on the Apocalypse (East Coast) server, Mutant side, playing our low-level characters -- currently Level 4. Since AA has a free 14-day trial just for the downloading, readers are encouraged to join in. (I know Steve Hutchison has a character, there, as well.) Skype is the voice comm method of choice since AA hates our USB mics, so prepare accordingly. We'll be Convoying, but since the game is so loose, don't feel compelled to stay with the group. If you're in range, you'll get XP and kill credits, regardless.

Drop on by.

I think my patience with humans has hit a particular low-point, as it does move in cycles and it's been coming for a while. In particular, I've just hit my limit on a response to someone in the Auto Assault fora about PvP invasions of the non-shared newbie/lowbie areas by other races:

Firstly, please, by all that is Unholy, do try and work legitimate English into your posting. I can forgive such things in IM and fast chat situations, but borderline 7337-speak in the context of something you have more than five minutes to prepare causes opthalamological bleeding and renal failure in caged hamsters ...

But on to something substantiative.

Quote:

---

AGAIN, I repeat all this on a PVP layer like GZ. Then we can have our cake and eat it too. Anyone see a weakness in this concept? lets discuss...

---

You mean, like everything I posted earlier in response to your original posting? None of which you actually addressed or even glossed over in the course of this reply?

But if you demand the point-by-point Fisking ...

Quote:

---

A) appropriateness in this post apocalyptic world, after all...why shouldn't the Biomeks/Mutants raid into the Human areas and vice versa? After all we are racial enemies.

---

Because its not fun for the folks in those areas? Because it makes little sense in the overall narrative? Because it spreads out the folks who want to engage in PvP content and thus is poor, nay, lousy game design? The reasons both in-game and out are myriad.

Quote:

---

b) A ton of fun for those who wish to defend their territory...as it is Necessary for us to want to do this. Any nation protects its borders and its citzenry will fight for this.

---

Isn't that exactly why GZ exists and is designed the way it is, not just so that out-of-game they can pit their skills against one another, but for "National pride?" If I were forced to an in-game stance response, I'd have to say something like:

"If you have such pride in your faction, why aren't you out there defending and taking the bases, cur? The borders are being kept by others whose job it is to do so; the key to expanding our influence is to control that crater! Now move!"

Quote:

---

c) Bragging rights for those raiding parties which have successfully managed a raid and reaped the rewards.

---

So the bragging rights for taking out players of lower level than you are somehow more intriguing and energizing than those for engaging with folks of rough parity? I think you've just told us more about yourself than you'd like.

Quote:

---

e)Clan camaraderie and a reason to log on and have fun together.

---

You have yet to actually provide reasoning to support this point. Moreover, its silly. Are you not getting a sense of Clan camaraderie from pursuing missions in the non-GZ areas and orchestrating your missions in GZ?

If not, might I suggest you find a better Clan?

Quote:

---

f)Larger scale multiconvoy tactical battlefield action, with clearer command and control for the classes...the Lt classes will have their job as would the engie classes and the commando and Bh classes. Interdiction, guerilla attacks, scouting, basecamp repair centres, cavalry type charges, end around attacks, feints and blitzkrieg ...u name u can employ it.

---

Like much of the rest of your post, you fail to mention how this is not already the case in GZ. If your contention there aren't enough people in GZ, I'll stare blankly at you and wonder how you might have missed that the game's been out less than a month and GZ is end-game content. If your contention is those things aren't adequately supported by the content of GZ as stands, I might even support that statement ... but that's an entirely different argument than the one you're making, and is actively at odds with your arguments, what there are of them.

Quote:

---

As i mentioned before...I like this concept becuz it reinforces the expected behaviour created by the Lore of the land, did u guys read your manual?

---

We did. It was written considerably more coherently than your bits, though, for which we were all rather appreciative.

Quote:

---

I also mentioned that this should not be a totally random event...but should be either mission driven...a la' "Goto to Human city Apollo and back as a reconnaissance, rewards are 12 Uranium widgets"

OR, time driven like the arena events and announced as such...."Biomek invasion force expected in 20mins driving toward Duenna, human defenders are expected to halt this invasion and/or prevent any Biomeks escaping." Results announced in 40 mins.

AGAIN, I repeat all this on a PVP layer like GZ. Then we can have our cake and eat it too. Anyone see a weakness in this concept? lets discuss...

---

Regardless of whether its mission-driven or not, its simply bad game design. Terrible game design, especially in a game where people are already complaining about low population. Not only would you be spreading out your PvP-interested faction population, but you intrude on the games of others who aren't interested if the invasion needs to be countered to deny your faction an advantage (which clearly, deeply, and stupidly favours whichever faction has the most pop at any given time; its self-reinforcing), and you'd be completely ignoring the content that's been designed and geared to be equal-opportunity between the factions and already mission-based (GZ).

The population-weight argument is one I neglected before but its certainly worth pointing out now: If your idea was implimented, the current Human population balance would be highly and irrevocably reinforced, because sheer numbers of attackers would ensure they always have the advantage in any invasion situation, ergo more people would choose to join Human for the winning advantage and the cycle would perpetuate.

Planetside had a somewhat innovative approach to ameliating this. The lesser-populated races would get an XP bonus for as long as they were under-represented. Thus, they might have been losing battles, but gaining more XP for the successful acts they pulled off and at creation time, new players saw the XP advantage and weighed that against being the minority. Thus, there was incentive to create lower-populated races. This could certainly be workable in AA, but it certainly wouldn't be sufficient to make your idea workable.

Is that a bit clearer in terms of what the objections are?

There are times I wonder why I bother reading any MMO fora at all; inevitably, they're populated with illiterate, scab-minded, repulsively mentally filthy sewer-crawlers who must be getting their net.time by leeching off a fibre optic cable running to the local PETA outpost where they kill small yappy dogs and plant them in others' back yards so they have something to bitch about. If it wasn't for the fact my more reasonable and less annoyed posts might be seen by a developer, read, and actually make a difference, I doubt I'd bother at all.

The World of Warcraft fora are absolutely unreadable due to this kind of addle-pated feculent waste.

That's not to say that every poster is a waste of good protoplasm but like blogs, the percentages are not on your side.

I'm getting very, very sleepy as the Ambien kicks in, but I ran into this bit about targeting markets on Tobolds' journal:

[...]

That inevitably leads to conflict, especially if Jeff Kaplan stupidly announces that he doesn't do more Deadmines type of dungeons, because all his time is taken up by making high-end raid dungeons. Should developers concentrate on the content in which most time is spent, or should they concentrate on content which is available to the most people? In general MMORPG developers have a tendency to favor time-content over people-content. Which is insofar questionable as their salary is paid from income coming from monthly fees, so it is the number of players that determines a games financial status, not the amount of time these players spend in the game. From a business point of view a monthly fee MMORPG should rather have more players, each one spending less time in the game, than having fewer players who play 40+ hours a week. Blizzard is concentrating on the wrong kind of customers, the ones that use up the most resources.

[...]

I'd say that this is exactly the kind of analysis that's occuring far too little in the MMORPG industry.

I spend entirely too much time thinking about these things.

A thread I've started on the Auto Assault suggestion forum regarding the implementation of the Auction House (or Swap Shop, in local parlance):

There's been a lot of talk about the implimentation of the Auction House, a fairly prime requirement for getting an economy that actually rewards crafters and makes it a worthwhile exercise outside the bounds of purely crafting for your Clan, but Auto Assault provides a definite difference that should be capitalized on to really make the Swap Shop shine.

That is, because individual crafters will have products to offer with slightly (or even vastly) different traits, instead of requiring a finished product to be placed in the Swap Shop (hereafter abbreviated SS), allow crafters to put a "contract to create" up for anything that they have a broken version of or have memorized. Two different prices could be set, one for the crafter providing the components, a second for the purchaser providing the materuals. (If you're particularly savvy, having a third price for just buying the materials straight from the Swap Shop at the current lowest price for all of them together or whatever the buyer is missing would be ideal.)

Once contracted, the SS interface would take care of optionally automatically crafting the item if the crafter had set it to do so and the materials were available, or simply require the crafter to acknowledge the contract and the SS'd go ahead and craft the item, manage any exchange of funds, and distribute appropriately.

The buyer should be able to set a maximum time to wait for a response to the offer to purchase and the crafter should probably have a note saying how often they have averaged on response time.

In perhaps a 3rd generation version of the SS, it might even be reasonable for the buyer to put an offer up on the SS for a general type of creation they would like crafted ("Medium Turret Weapon, at least 7dps, Contamination damage") and an initial offer, and have crafters respond if they can craft something appropriate. Matching the descriptor should be easy enough (such filters are going to really be necessary for even a basic SS anyway), the real interesting here is the action of the "inverse auction," where crafters put in offers, trying to both be the lowest and provide the best match. The buyer would then select an outstanding contract, and finalize it.

(This is somewhat similar to EVE's station-market for transporting goods on contract, but far more useful. There has been many the day I've wished for something similar in Warcraft.)

In the end, I think this would capitalize on AA's strength when it comes to crafted items being so highly variable. The idea of "contracting" could be extended to both Experimentation and Tinkering, with little change in interface. This would certainly make being a crafter both a more interesting and a more dynamic proposition.

The addition of some kind of system-managed "contract" mechanic would be a real boon to a lot of games where there are services that can be bargained for, and not just objects. The failure to actually frame those services in the overall economic architecture has always been an issue, in my mind. It causes all sorts of annoyances.

While I used EVE Online's transport market as an example, its not actually what inspired me to start thinking about it in any detail.

No, that dubious honour has to go to Enchanting in World of Warcraft.

For those who aren't in the know, Enchanting is a profession which allows a character to convert enhanced items ("greens" or better; weapons or armour with some bonus to their wielding) into materials and materials into bonuses which can be laid on the weapons or armour of yourself or another. With effects as diverse as "+1 to damage" to "steal some life from the target" there's a significant market to sell enchanting services to other players. Like any service, as long as you charge more than it costs in materials to produce, you profit. Enchanting is big business.

There is absolutely no way to engage in that business better than telling people, repeatedly, on a public channel what you're offering and how much it'll run. There is absolutely no way to automate the exchange, or have it occur while the player themselves is not directly logged in and managing it, even though you can do just that when it comes to the exchange of "physical" goods through the Auction House.

I suppose I should feel honoured that they implemented things such that you don't have to actually wholly hand your goods to an enchanter to receive his blessing. It wasn't always the case.

Given that so much of what a crafter or other "professional" does in an MMORPG really is an exchange of service for funds, sometimes involving an exchange of "physical" resources to help offset the costs (like someone asking for a Life-steal enchantment and bringing you the 75 gold in materials to do it), you really would think that some thought on how to mechanize and intermediate the process so both sides have better safety and trust would be somewhat remotely important.

Like I said, I spend too much time thinking about these things.

New blog I'm reading written by one of the guys who works at NCsoft includes this insightful bit embedded in a much longer and still interesting piece:

Specifically, I’ve been trying to catch up to my Uberwife, she of the many level 60s all in post-BWL gear. Her main dual wields a Perdition’s Blade and a Gutgore Ripper and her stat bonuses can only be described in imaginary numbers. Yet, in what can only be described as true love, she actually wants me to catch up to her so we can stare at CTRaid output together.

The problem, now, is that I am a permanewbie. As in, I constantly reroll. I *always* reroll. I am *never* happy with my avatar; I am always thinking that some other mystical combination of class and race and starting location and server will be the Magic Number Combination that will unlock the keys to happiness or something. The first game where I actually achieved maximum level (aside from Ultima Online, where you could cap out a character from breathing hard) was Dark Age of Camelot, and that only because guilds managed to get powerlevelling down to a science. Don’t ask what realm rank I achieved though, because you’ll only laugh. (Oh, OK. RR3, on a nightshade.)

However, my wife finally discovered something that would break the permanewbie conundrum - a secret concoction of bribery and guilt. Oddly enough, this is also what powers most marriages, so it works out rather well as a system. So she has been raining quest hellfire and damnation down upon my character, who is only peripherally along for the ride. Last weekend we finished up Felwood, did all of Winterspring, Sunken Temple (with some help) and all the necessary paperwork for Blackrock Depths.

My little character is now level 57. This is attracting no little attention. When our guild leader noticed, he blinked, and said over Vent, “wait a minute. Scott has a character over level 20?” My wife helpfully said that I was free to tell him to bite me. (I did, using Shakespeare).

You know, I'm one of those people.

I fully admit, I really enjoy running through the low-end areas of the virtual universi than the supposed "end-game" content. Its just not interesting to me, largely because it utterly shifts the game's underlying assumptions from one mode to another, typically from solo-friendly / small-group-friendly content to the necessity of hooking up with more than a friend or two to thirty to forty in order to see anything or enjoy anything at that point. And, yes, World of Warcraft, I'm looking at you. The opening, "newbie" areas (which, truthfully, generally reach from the start of the game to roughly a third to half-way to end-game / level cap) have the kind of craft any creator puts into the first thirty pages of their script, the part designed to hook and hold someone coming to the story.

But the end-game ... Dear Hell, does anyone but the hardest of the hardcore actually enjoy waiting on 40 people to get their shit together and self-organize into something remotely like a coherent group, then spend six hours or more with this team of flailing incompetents trying to get a goody-drop that one or two people max out of the entire swath will actually get to touch? I know Morgasm enjoys that sort of thing (she's actually told me she's got no interest in Auto Assault because it's too easy to level, which is a thought so alien it has to get a green card just to enter my noggin') but for we folks who actually have jobs that eat more than a trivial portion of our waking hours or social lives which resemble less the butterfly and more the sloth, it would seem that designing a game to cater to that demographic target would be less than ideal.

In fact, I feel so strongly about it that I've posted multiple threads in the Auto Assault fora that specifically address how I would design content to be friendly to we solo and small-group folk as well as the "I like scary numbers of people to play with" folk. Well, my answer to the latter group is "go play a different game, you jackasses, since pretty much every other game on the landscape caters to your slack-jawed kind," but you didn't hear that from me. (Yes, there are links to three different threads embedded there. Worth reading if you like to see me occasionally being polite -- somewhat.)

The secret, as I see it, is scaling, something Diablo II did without much thinking hard about it back in "the day." (Strangely enough, D2 is a Blizzard property. You'd think those guys'd learn.) That is, while the general area might be shared, the meat really should be, effectively, instanced, and not only instanced but the content should be adjusted such that its properly keyed to the size / power of the people playing through it. This can be as true for the areas which get opened by newbie mission arcs as the late ones, and has the great advantage of veteran players getting to go back through the early instances and finding a repeatable challenge that's appropriate to their capabilities, and incidentally extends the replayability of the whole game, plus scales gently to the folks involved, be it just me, or my group of friends.

I also find it interesting that no one has really made use of random area generation in an MMORPG for anything significant. Its not a hard task, especially as server power keeps spiraling upwards and code for distributed computation becomes easier to create. Random generation and scaling go together well, and really help in adding non-crafted content to a game that responds well to expansion. Coupling hand-crafted missions / environments with procedurally-created content would seem to be an obvious way to extend the reach of your game.

Why no one has done these things for an MMORPG yet continues to elude me. (I'm aware of another project in development that uses this very concept, but I'm NDA'd. You'll just have to bribe me with green peanuts and schoolgirls to find out more.)

Someone in the comments to the blog post I opened this with complained of "Auto Assault feels more like a single-player game than an MMORPG." In my mind, that's not a drawback, especially when I look at Elder Scrolls: Oblivion's sales and hear people talking about how good it is, both critics and grognards alike. It seems to me that one of the real draws of the MMORPG genre of games is pointedly not the social aspects. Pretty much everyone with experience agrees that the average other MMORPG player is an utter moron who has neither tactical nor strategic acumen. We don't get online to get social, we're looking for an audience. We want to show off the latest blind we pulled off of Mozak, we want to hang out with people we already know, we want to be able to efficiently get resources we want, and we like the feeling when we're able to help someone else out as long as the investment to do so isn't too high. Its not the socialization we're coming in for, its the open eyes and ears. Even PvP can be seen as performance art rather than socialization; it's less important that you socialize with your group than your murderous capability have an audience, and that audience is squirming at the end of your sword / mace / canon / laser.

The idea of mating essentially single-player game content to an MMORPG back-end seems to me to be a winning combination.

I may be a permalowbie, but the statistics would tend to suggest I'm not the only one, and really, not even in the minority with my distaste for the "must raid" mentality that's permeated MMORPGs. There definitely needs to be more design experimentation that tries to capture more of the "casual" non-raiding non-heavy-guilding player base. Interestingly, NCsoft has done the most I'm aware of in this field: Both Guild Wars and Auto Assault are pioneers in many ways, and they have equally interesting stuff readying for roll-out.

Good news, permalowbies! We are looking at good stuff coming down the pike.

This post is really about MMORPG design in general and Auto Assault in specific, but its worth noting that the Squid's Redoubt Top Ten Podcast had issue #24 come out today, and it is likewise devoted to Auto Assault. But that's an aside.

One of my least favourite parts of some MMORPG design, specifically World of Warcraft's design, is the idea of the "instance," a separate area which is only brought into existence for the presence of a given group, party, or individual. It can be done well (see Guild Wars, where every time you leave a city or waystation the outside is instanced for you and your party members -- why GW gets it right and WoW blows it will come up here shortly), but so far there aren't a lot of games that have done so.

Auto Assault is among the few that does it well, but there's one little glitch with it.

You have to complete all the missions in an instance in a single sitting.

World of Warcraft has instances, but they're specifically designed to be for groups and you simply can't complete them with just one person or even two of the instance's level, populated as they are by Elite Monsters of the level of the area, which really means they hit and take damage like creatures of 4 - 6 levels higher and give XP of the same level. They have no scalability. The contents do not shift to match the levels or numbers of people headed into it.

Guild Wars, because it's designed along the premise that the whole outside is instanced, is designed such that everything is reachable and much stuff is able to be done alone by virtue of the fact you can pick up Henchmen on the way out the door, AI characters who, while dumb as rocks and with the occasional pathing issues, are still better than a whole lot of pick up groups I've been in. The healer character will actually heal people when they take damage, for example.

City of Heroes / Villains takes a middle way, and is most like the system Auto Assault uses. You pick up missions from characters out in the shared area, and often get sent into caves or buildings to carry them out. Passing through the doorway puts the group into an instance for the duration of that mission, which, once finished, then spits the group out like a bad hotdog.

In Auto Assault, instances are largish areas, which you access by following a mission trail from the shared area. Once opened, you can always return to it simply by either driving there or having INC airlift you to the zone. Within, you'll find a series of missions which have to be executed and completed, typically in order, usually culminating in at least one boss fight. The missions up to that boss are generally pretty straightforward, but unlike the other games I've mentioned, when they tell you what level a boss fight mission is, they really mean it. If its a level over you, even with hardcore hardware (and believe me, I'm packing some serious hardware on my car, Marduka), you're going to be seriously sweating, possibly just not able to actually kill the bugger. And that means if you can't finish him off, you'll have to run through the instance mission sequence again, for no mission rewards for the ones you've already completed, though you do get XP for kills and drops as usual.

The first AA instance I ran through alone, I actually managed to finish alone in under 45min. 15 of that was the fight against the final boss, Mozak, who had the good grace to play Flight of the Valkyries loudly enough that I could hear it coming from his overbuilt truck as he tried hard to kill me. It was tough, but I got lucky in that the fight was in a fairly dense urban area in a cliff valley, and I could get him rammed into a cliff and hardly able to move as my pets nibbled at him and I unloaded all I had.

This new instance, Old Town, is a big, old, destroyed city full of destructible bombed out ruins and small but dense groups of Scavs. The Scavs and the odd mutated fauna are nothing; I can waste them by the dozens and hardly look up. I don't think I even used a repair vial during the mission sequence up to the boss. But ... oh, that boss, Boss Granby (yes, that's his name), drives a huge tricked-out military-armed front-end loader and continuously spawns Scavs who rush from the surrounding trees ... which stop neither one of us, as we careen through them throwing trunks around like toothpicks and blasting down neighboring buildings, providing me no way to really keep him pinned.

Needless to say, I died.

Dying does not kick you out of the instance. I could have headed back over and wailed on him again, just for the cost of a couple minutes' healing, but I was tired.

I'm not sure how I feel about having to re-run the lead-up missions. On the one hand, they're easy and relatively quick, and the things I kill by the hundreds do give XP and drops. On the other ... I have to bring that annoying bastard more bloodsteel nuggets.

Yes, its more Capes geekery. Of course its more Capes geekery.

I've been playing a fair amount of Auto Assault lately. Unlike World of Warcraft, you really don't have to be on a few hours to complete a couple missions; you can generally do some decent farming or run a couple missions in an hour, which is part of why I appreciate it so. I can pop on, go butcher some Pikes or Scavs, ram head-on into vehicles and crazy huge monsters to watch their ruined, burning forms go hurtling through the air, and roll on with a big ol' smile.

But AA wasn't the first game to involve putting on the armour of Mad Max, arming up with your railgun, and heading out into the wasteland. Car Wars burned along the highways of North America long ago, and Autoduel Quarterly was one of our favourite reads. We were slaves to the wheel, strapped in and burning hard with nitro injectors and crazy-huge arenas full of jumps and deadly traps, which we bump-and-jumped around and over while blazing away with machinegun fire and flames, missiles and plasma arrays. Or we were on the highways and by-ways of a dead and mutated America, picking up resources from bombed-out cities for our Arks and subterranean bases, fighting off muties and worse in the ruins.

Well, Hell, how could I get so wound up over such a concept without translating it into the goodness of Capes? But why do it the usual way?

Car Assault Wars Auto Double-Zeta takes the Capes mechanics and leverages the click-and-lock system to let players jump in, throw together a vehicle, then hit the arena or the highway, looking for a good time, and more than a little carnage.

( Car Assault Wars Auto Double-Zeta Rules )

This has been your free Capes mini-game broadcast for the week.

Poor UrsulaV. She made the mistake of inspiring me, and I made the mistake of following that inspiration.

An excerpt:

Description

The Battle Hamsters of the Northern Gardens are well-known for their cold brutality, their incisive berserker mentality, and their adorable cuteness. Seldom appearing in groups of less than thirty, they swarm and chitter and kill amid the icy wastes. Their battle-lord, Helm Eriksson, is the foremost of their mighty ranks, and epitomizes all that which they aspire to. Few cross him and live.

National Geographic provides lots and lots of squid-based news footage, but this piece on the evil and capricious Humboldt squid reminds me of where my DNA is sourced. A six foot long tentacled monstrosity that's been known to attack humans, sharks, and even each other if opportunity arises speaks to the best in all of us.

Which, of course, has its own demands:

Giant Squid
Destroyer of Ships and Entire Cities

Abilities

3 Sharp Beak (P)
4 Grasping Arms (P)
5 Ink Cloud (P)
1 Powerful Jet (P)
2 Enormous Eyes (P)

Styles

3 Tangled Up In You (P)
2 Hit and Run (P)
1 Surprise Attack
4 Collateral Damage (P)

Attitudes

3 Aggressive
1 Shy
2 Hungry

Description

Its a giant frickin' squid! Whaddaya want?

Of course, for extra spicy gaming, bring this into a Scene on land, and watch the head-scratching begin.

Ah, Discovery Channel. Not only do you provide wonderful TV for we geeks, but fascinating bits on things like terrestrially-sourced gamma ray fonts. Naturally occurring. And then you embed things like this into the text:

It appears, perhaps, that TGFs are created at various elevations, said lightning researcher Steven Cummer of Duke University. Those that are higher can be only detected by RHESSI and those that are lower can be detected only on the ground, as was recently detected in Florida by lightning researcher Joseph Dwyer.

Stanley and his colleagues were also able to refine the timing of the events and in one case found that the gamma rays detected by RHESSI might have preceded the lightning, which was a complete surprise, he said.

"In every way this was unusual," said Stanley.

Until now it had been assumed that the TGFs were a product of the lightning initiation process. Now it also appears possible that they could play a role in triggering lightning as well. How?

"It's really not at all that well understood," said Cummer. Despite centuries of research to unlock the secrets of lighting, including Benjamin Franklin's discovery of its electrical nature, "Nobody really knows what starts a lightning stroke."

For decades, we know that Mad Scientists, those crazed bastions of all that is holy in the universe, have been cackling madly and experimenting with their green-glowing radiation, while electrical arcs dance in the clouds over their ruined castles. Now we have mainstream science beginning to understand why. The Hulk is often presaged by thunder and lightning, before now simply believed to be his big feet or enormous claps as he leaps about. No more. The truth will out.

Which, of course, begs the following:

A Dark and Stormy Night
NPC: Environment

Abilities

2 Lightning
1 Rain
3 Thunder

Styles

5 "Its alive!"
2 "Not fit for man nor beast!"
1 Dangerous Weather
3 Transport Breakdown
4 Environmental Destruction

Free Conflict

Goal: The protagonists take shelter.

Description

No horror camp or mad scientist's lair is complete without a dark and stormy night. Fraught with washed out dams and roads, cars breaking down at the slightest provocation, and folks driven to comment on how the weather is fit for neither man nor beast, the dark and stormy night best serves to push our protagonists into the disturbing shelter of a place they'd rather not go.

(As a bone thrown to our fruiter contingent, "Its alive!" can be replaced with "Asshole, slut, asshole, slut, asshole, slut ..." or Audience Participation without additional fee.)

OK, you knew it was inevitable.

---

Snakes
Long, Short, Venomous and Writhing!

Abilities

5 Venomous Bite (P)
4 Concealment (P)
1 Scaled Skin (P)
3 Serpentine Speed (P)
2 Fangs! (P)

Styles

2 Sneak Attack!
1 Cold-Blooded Calculation (P)
3 Poisonous Side-Effects (P)

Attitudes

1 Cold-Blooded
4 Sneaky
3 Hungry
2 Agitated

Notes

They're snakes! Long, short, thick and thin! Some of them are poisonous and some of them are not, but why take the chance, right?

---

On a Plane
(NPC Location) On a Motherhumpin' Plane!

Abilities

1 Stews
5 The Tiny Bathroom
3 Overhead Bins
4 Cargo
2 Rows of Seats

Attitudes

1 Sick
2 Tired
3 Terrified

Free Conflict

Event: Someone pulls out an air-sickness bag!

Notes

You can't have Snakes on a Plane without the plane! From the long rows of seats, to the harried steward{s|esses}, to the feelings everyone has when they have been in the air a couple of hours. Inevitably, someone'll pull out an air-sickness bag, and whether its full of yuk, hides a gun, or a snake jumps out is up to the resolver!

---

Snakes on a Plane in Capes is probably only worth one Scene in most folks' games, though if it really gets rolling, that Scene can go a goodly number of Pages. The plane part of things itself will be fairly reasonable if someone brings it on as an NPC; the blocking Traits will make sure that the standard tropes (the tiny bathroom, for instance) won't get too abused, and the Free Conflict just begs for lots and lots of bidding escalation.

Just as in chadu's Truth & Justice version, its probably a great idea to have your characters' Secret Identities or latent forms on the plane for some trumped-up reason, then bust this out. As such, probably not an effective opening Scene, but a damn fine option for when you've got some Story Tokens to burn on bringing in one of your usual characters, the Snakes and On a Plane, all at once! Good Conflicts to break out include:

• Event: A snake slithers across someone's foot!
• Event: A snake drops from above, off-panel!
• Event: A woman screams!
• Event: A snake bites someone!
• Goal: A stewardess stops screaming!
• Event: Someone dies!
• Goal: A snake dies!
• Event: The pilot pulls the plane out of a fatal nose-dive!
• Goal: Someone convinces one of the passengers to pilot the plane!
• Event: A hero takes the pilot's seat!
• Goal: The plane returns to a semblance of calm!

The best part about all of the above Conflicts is that they're all blocking Conflicts; once introduced, until it's resolved, the postulated situation simply doesn't and can't go away. So if you narrate everyone goes into paroxysms of terror and drop Goal: The plane returns to a semblance of calm! it simply can't return to calm until the Conflict's resolved ... and might not return to calm as a result of that Conflict, given it's a Goal and not an Event! (After all, someone might want to stymie attempts to calm things down -- like the snakes!)

It's hard to write about Snakes on a Plane without using entirely too many exclamation-marks.

I'm thinking that this might actually be my Convention Starter Scene of choice. Give everyone two Story Tokens to kick off, and either burn both of mine to bring in both Snakes and On a Plane, or conspiratorially arrange to have someone else bring in Snakes after I set the Scene, bring on one of my usual Characters, and pop off On a Plane ...

Post Scriptum:

This just in.

SNAKES ON A PLANE
The Roleplaying Game
of Personal Discovery
Dire Combat
And Motherf%king Snakes

I do believe I've figured out why I've been so religiously posting things to LJ about Capes and This Present Darkness, and why so many of them are characters and organizations.

I love to create worlds.

Now, this isn't really surprising, I suppose. Aside from the fact I have the most over-developed megalomaniacal god-complex of any socially functional person you know, I do think of myself as a writer. (In fact, lately, I think of myself as more a Writer than a Computer Engineer, which is really quite the transition.) I enjoy the very act of creating a coherent world, piece by piece, birthing it into being, bringing it into awareness and, beyond that, introducing others to the construction and having them feed back into the loop.

In that sense, RPG writing, for all the fact you can't make a living at it, is the perfect environment for the kind of writing I enjoy most. I can endlessly create facets and spin them off into the Void, tying them together with spiderwebs of character and implication, and just wait for others to start treading on them. The forging of entire cultures from a few lines of text and a bit of a flowchart of decisions is just my taste. RPGs are all about creating that shared context in a concise but evocative manner and letting the people at it to enjoy it.

So, in that sense, its not that surprising that I'd keep inundating my blog with TPD bits. Unlike in a more typically structured RPG, Capes isn't built on a GM building a vast edifice for the Players to explore like tourists. I gather the standard setup doesn't really involve a lot of pre-construction at all, depending on folk to build things as they go along with various interlacing. Its my personal obsession with constructing shared spaces (along with Eric the .5b's help, to be fair) that's driving the fairly large amount of material hanging off the TPD wiki right now.

Also, though, in that space, Capes' GM-less play-structure works against my desires. There's not really much of a point in creating this nuanced, faceted space since others can and will and should be adding onto their bits and Scenes and Characters, adding to the Character Library and the shared mythos of the world well beyond and without making reference to my pieces at all.

Part of it is that I'm pretty much the most obsessive world-builder in the group, at this point. I'm also the traditional GM point-man for almost any system you could name, since I'm the obsessive collector and can quote details of systems and settings of games that were released before the bulk of my readers were alive while simultaneously being obsessed with the more modern designs and more experimental approaches. I'm a Collector, in the truest geek-sense, and the folks I'm likely to play with all know it and sometimes seem to defer to it.

The funny thing is that the sense of "playing with your hand showing" that Capes creates just makes me want to write more little obscure characters and even stranger organizations. There's no pressure in having to make it "just right," since everyone else will be equally tasked with making Scenes be cool and interesting. If Marda Nova's throwing a fund-raising gala for the Pact of Warsaw, and someone thinks it would be profitable to have Carlotta Stregazzi in attendance so they can leverage the old material between them, and someone else brings George Bush ... that's all good. It works, insofar as long as folks are dropping interesting Conflicts, they'll be rewarded by the system and by other Players. The more things I write, even stuff no one ever uses, the more I feel like I'm building up the world.

I like building worlds.

Sometime, I really want to play Primetime Adventures, too. Unlike Capes, however, PtA is all about the collaboration from the start, with a GM who exists not so much to create and manage the world, but to pace and create even more conflicts. The means of stating those conflicts is through explicit stake setting, ie. "If you win, Carlotta makes Marda look foolish in front of her backers, whereas if I win, Marda not only looks elegant and stylish, but gains the approval of folks who were previously on the fence about her ... like George Bush," rather than Capes' more ambiguous introduction of the Goal: Carlotta makes Marda look foolish in front of her backers, with the alternatives left unstated. The difference between the games goes to the heart of what's important to my enjoyment in the act of creation, though, since in PtA the GM is pointedly not in charge of creating the world or even wholly Scenes; PtA is much, much more decisively collaborative.

Part of what I'm enjoying about TPD, even with not a full session being played out, is that I have the sense of unfettered creation that I enjoy but without the cloud of terror that the results will be missed. Everyone in the game can read the stuff I'm putting out. Hell, everyone reading my blog can, at this point. I like that.

I'm a world-forging god. And so is everyone else.

For the record, folks, can we try and get together for the first session of significant substance on Sunday evening? Mike, you still need to get a character in. Since all it takes is any three of us to hook up to do the deed -- let me rephrase that -- it should be easy enough for some two of you interested folks to schedule it.

I'm ready to put my dice where mt mouth is.

While we're talking This Present Darkness, let's talk about the only unabashedly heroic organization I've put in so far:

The Council of Apostles

Established in 1002 AD by Pope Sylvester II, the Council of Apostles was conceived and forged as an ecumenical meeting of religious minds. That is, it would be composed of more than just Catholics, any who professed a belief in God, in some form, and was devoted to the good of mankind would be admitted to its ranks. The Apostlic Council's purview would be the threats that the Church discovered in the course of discharging the duty of Christ, both to investigate and, if necessary, eliminate it. The number of seats on the Council was deliberately kept small, the better to keep their activities and knowledge secret. At its head would sit a prelate devoted soley to making sure the activities of the members were directed and managed in accordance with holy responsibility, and that role fell on the shoulders of one family: the Stregazzi.

Technically, the Council of the Apostles only has thirteen seats, twelve reserved for operatives and one for the prelate. If need is dire, the Council can call on other Tribunals within the body of Christ if more resources are necessary (and several have somewhat overlapping areas of concern if not methodology).

Appointments to the Council are for life. If a seat becomes vacant, the prelate is tasked with finding and recruiting a replacement.

We can't have a Council without at least one operative, of course.

Father Andre Di Meo
The Sword of God

Abilities

• 1 Invulnerability (P)
• 5 Regeneration (P)
• 2 Inhuman Stamina (P)
• 3 The Sword Kyria (P)
• 4 Priest (P)

Styles

• 4 Plodding Unstoppability (P)
• 1 Takeing Incredible Abuse (P)
• 3 Bleeding (P)
• 2 Being Sent Flying (P)

Abilities

• 3 Pious
• 1 Centered
• 2 Determined

Drives

• 3 Justice
• 1 Truth
• 1 Love
• 3 Hope
• 1 Duty

Description

5'2, blue eyes, brown hair, an average Italian man in almost every way. He wears his clerical vestments with familiar comfort. Its almost impossible to get a grip on how old he is; his face is unlined but his eyes are deep-set; he could be anywhere from 20 to 45.

Background

Father Andre Di Meo is a relatively new addition to the Council, transferred over from the Tribunal of the Holy Blood (devoted to the investigation of the vampire threat) within the last year. He's tight-lipped about his past, but has said that his amazing ability to survive any injury is wholly an act of God.

Note that Father Di Meo gathers narrative power almost wholly from describing how he's getting his ass beat down, then dusts himself off and keeps coming. I've been wanting to do a character design in Capes like this for a while, almost from the first day I read the text, in fact. There just aren't a lot of game systems in which such a thing is feasible.

And he has Bleeding as a Style. How cool is that?

Are you wondering where I picked up some of the inspiration for the good Father? You clearly never read Xombi.

(Yes, putting Nun of the Above and Catholic Girl on the Council is disgustingly tempting.)

Had a bit of inspiration earlier today that resulted in more characters being added to This Present Darkness. We already had Nazi werewolves, but no setting is complete without Nazi zombies!

Martin Henge
Zombie Commander

Abilities

• 1 Assault Rifle (P)
• 4 Undead Stamina (P)
• 3 Air of Command (P)
• 2 Strength of Ten (P)

Styles

• 4 Only a Head Shot Will Do (P)
• 1 Just Keeps Coming (P)
• 3 Bystanders Feel Compelled
• 2 Organic Material Feeds the Beast (P)

Attitudes

• 4 Happy
• 2 Calm
• 1 Casual
• 3 Relaxed

Drives

• 1 Obsession
• 4 Pride
• 1 Power
• 2 Despair
• 1 Fear

Description

6'1, apparently 16, blonde hair, blue-grey eyes, relatively squarish build, pale-grey skin that's only slightly inhuman. Typically smiling or even laughing. Usually wears a Pact of Warsaw soldier's uniform with the shirt untucked and the shoes unpolished.

Background

The Alies had their Super Soldier program and its secret success. The Nazis had a failed Ubermensch project, and in the shadow of that colossal investment, the Thule Retreat's successful experimentation with fusing alchemy and science under Mengele's supervision gave rise to several successes, though none without some inherent problems. Martin Henge was a fairly normal member of the Hitler Youth when he was invited to be a subject of enhancement at Thule, and the resulting innundation of his flesh with necrotic energy was hailed by those working on creating Undead soldiers with pleasure. Henge himself felt his fears of mortality fading away, discovering his effective immortality. Henge's compulsive fear of his own mortality dried up in a flash as it was simply no longer relevant.

The rest of the experimental subjects reacted less well than Henge to the treatments, becoming mindless automatons, though able to follow orders without hesitation or fear. Henge maintains human-level intelligence and an inherent facility with command, so he was put over command of the other Dead Squads (Totegruppen). Their relative durability and lack of need for significant support makes them perfect garrison troops.

Henge is vulnerable to head shots, but unlike his soldiers, they do not completely destroy him. In fact, he has been burned, exploded, bathed in acid, and other means too gruesome to speak, and always has reformed from the most egregious damage in weeks at the longest. A bullet directly in his head will put him down for hours at best.

---

Totegruppen
Zombie Soldiers

Abilities

• 2 Assault Rifle
• 3 Undead Stamina
• 1 More Than Human Strength

Styles

• 5 Outnumber
• 1 Unstoppable Shamble
• 2 Unthinking
• 3 Following Orders
• 4 Head Shot Vulnerable

Attitudes

• 1 Silent
• 2 Mindless
• 3 Empty
• 4 Vicious

Description

5'7+, built lean and lanky, thinning colourless hair, skin grey and clearly inhuman. Always appears slack-jawed and vacant unless feeding on flesh. Uniform is standard Pact of Warsaw but almost always disheveled and unkempt.

Background

Created in the same experimentation by the Thule Retreat that created Martin Henge, the Totengruppe soldiers are zombies, dead flesh animated by necrotic sorceries channeled by Nazi superscience. Incapable of reason or much volition, they exist to simply obey and protect. Particularly vulnerable to others of strong will, they will follow almost any order given strongly enough unless another prevents it. Cold, heat, even the vacuum of space -- none are matters of concern to the Totegruppen.

Nothing goes down with Nazis like Zombies!

Alright, that's really a bit pretentious.Really, what I mean is that I've been giving some thought to the way that With Great Power acts to push the progression of the story not just through the agency of the GM, but through the mechanical construct of the Story Arc.

The Story Arc, if you haven't been following along with the posts I've been wrangling on about regarding game design, is a means by which the Players of WGP can change the allocation of which cards in play are wild cards for the GM. In effect, the game Arc starts out with a significant bias mechanically in favour of the GM / Villains, and as the Players invest their cards from their hands, begin to swing things to significantly more biased at a mechanical level toward them. Its a clever design, making sure that the big bads have early wins, pumping up character motivation to come back and give them what-for, and modeling the progression of melodramatic supers really quite well.

Unfortunately for the world, two things stand between me and really, really wanting to run WGP:

• The mechanical system is entirely card-based, with it being driven to the point the GM has one deck for each of the Players and his own, and GM hand size is well in the 10+ range for most of the game. My tentacles are simply unsuited to manipulating things of that order.
• I ran into Capes first, and really, really like the GM-less nature of the game.

(Some of you were wondering when Capes would enter this post. You're now feeling gratified.)

This put me on the path of thinking about how to really integrate Story Arcs into Capes. To suggest that was "problematic" understates the case. The GM-less nature of the game means that its pointless to suggest that the Arc's progression changes the actual mechanical power of one Player at the expense of the others, as in WGP. That makes no sense, as everyone plays both roles constantly. Moreover, there is no "story arc" in the abstract sense that can be referred to before it occurs in Capes. Finally, I needed a comparable resource for the Players to actually spend for the progression from one stage of the Arc to the next.

Then it hit me, in combination with some thinking I was doing on the idea of meta-Conflicts. Literary criticism may disagree, but cognitive science says that stories only exist in retrospect. An ongoing series of events does not constitute a story until it's told to someone else in the aftermath. For a story to make sense in the context of a Capes game as a meta-narrative, it would have to be assembled post-hoc from things already established. But what things represent facts established in the narrative with any continuity in Capes?

Inspirations, exactly!

Why not Story Tokens? For one, they're too valuable to be tied up outside the context of Scenes, but beyond that they have no history implicit in them. To bring an Inspiration in as a boost to a die, you have to tie the Conflict that granted it into the current situation. Perfect! Add to the pile that Capes is a competitive game at many levels and I was inspired to put together a prototype construct.

The Story Arc in Capes
An Optional System

A Story Arc represents the progression of a given thread or plot from its first manifestation in the experience of the Players and Characters to its resolution. In some senses, a Story Arc acts as a large meta-Conflict, which limits the content of Scenes rather than the actions of a Character during Scenes.

A Story Arc (hereafter referred to as an Arc) comes into play when a Player commits sufficient Inspiration to move the Arc from the Introduction to Exploration stage. An Arc ends when the Resolution stage comes to a close.

Each Story Arc consists of four stages:

1. Introduction
   
   All Arcs start in a nebulous unformed state. The first Scenes in a session or game aren't associated with any particular Arc at all, until Inspirations are committed to create the Arc and go beyond the Introduction. In the Introduction stage, the Arc's overall conflicts are brought out and the Characters get involved to various degrees.
   
   Any Inspirations committed to the move from the Inspiration stage to Exploration are considered to be tied to the issues that the Arc is about. Whoever has committed the most points in Inspirations to shift from Introduction to Exploration gets to narrate the first Exploration Scene.
2. Exploration
   
   In the Exploration stage, the Arc is brought out to the table. Here, the Arc begins to take on shape, the Characters begin discovering information about the core issues of the Arc, and Players begin committing Inspirations to move the Arc along to the next stage.
   
   No significant twists can be introduced in Scenes within this Arc until it moves to the next stage. Again, the person who's committed the most points in Inspirations to advance the stage gets to narrate the first Complication Scene.
3. Complication
   
   Here, the Arc begins to accumulate significant challenge. The first Scene, which is narrated by the Player who committed the most Inspiration points to shift to this stage, generally involves a significant swerve being delivered to the Characters, either in an unexpected twist or greater complications being brought to bear. Once the first complication Scene is introduced, others can by the other Players.
   
   No resolution of the issues which build the Arc can be resolved until this stage transitions to the next by sufficient commitment of Inspirations. As before, the Player who committed the most Inspiration points to the shift gets to narrate the first Scene of the Resolution stage.
4. Resolution
   
   Here is where everything comes to a head. The first Scene in this stage should be bringing things to a conclusion, whether it be in an explosion of violence or confrontation between lovers. Sometimes this will require more than one Scene to deal with all the issues at play, and after the first is narrated by the Player who committed the most points in Inspiration to shift to the Resolution stage, the gates are wide open.
   
   Of particular note is that the total pool of Inspirations which went into the Arc is available to anyone involved in a Scene of this stage, whether they originally committed it or not. As long as there are any Inspirations left attached to the Arc, it is not Resolved. Once all the Inspirations are used, all the issues are considered tied up and the Arc comes to an end.

Key to know is that the Inspirations attached to an Arc at any given stage should guide the creation of the Scenes in the next stage. Any Inspirations committed to an Arc are issues which need to be dealt with in the course of the Arc, the highest rated being the focus of the next stage and the others being of lesser importance. Inspirations committed to an Arc are considered no longer usable by the committing Player until the Resolution stage.

Each stage has a minimum value in Inspirations that need to be committed in order to shift to a new stage. This value can vary based on whether the Arc is an A-Plot or B-Plot (see the Capes text for more detail on those). It is suggested that the number of simultaneous Arcs be limited to only one A-Plot at a time and up to half the number of Players in B-Plots.

Potential advancement values:

A-Plot:

• Inspiration -> Exploration: 4
• Exploration -> Complication: 8
• Complication -> Resolution: 16

B-Plot:

• Inspiration -> Exploration: 1
• Exploration -> Complication: 2
• Complication -> Resolution: 4

Its not necessary that, once introduced, Scenes should be explicitly mentioned as being tied to an extant Arc. If a Scene is important to an Arc, Inspirations which are gathered from that Scene's Conflicts will be committed to that Arc.

Optional Thoughts

• The A-Plot and B-Plot advancement costs are rough approximations. It might be worthwhile to set the cost for moving from one stage to the next equal for all stages if you don't want a build-up of issues as the Arc gathers speed. In fact, you might want Arcs which start spread out and then focus down, in which case it would be sensible to put the largest cost in going from Introduction to Exploration. Optionally, the Player who initiates Exploration can make that choice.
• Nothing limits you to just two kinds of Arcs, either. Introducing Issue Arcs which cost somewhere in-between or Multi-Issue Arcs which are more expensive to shift is certainly possible.
• As a very optional and experimental rule, you can say that Inspirations committed to an Arc can be used by anyone in a Scene related to that Arc's issues (committed Inspirations) at any stage. This will reduce the number of Inspirations usable by the group in the Resolution but mechanically tie in the issues which created the Arc along the way.

Short Example

Alice, Bob, and Carrie are playing with Story Arcs.

After the first couple Scenes, Carrie initiates the A-Plot, committing Peter kisses Gwen: 4. Since Carrie's up to create the next Scene, she gets to start off the Exploration. She knows that the A-Plot is about Peter's relationship with Gwen, so kicks off a Scene where Peter proposes to Gwen.

Alice commits Goblin threatens schoolchildren: 1 to a B-Plot, but Bob commits Harry Osborn defends himself from his father's anger: 3, and controls that B-Plot. Alice can't go to Exploration on that Arc, so creates a Scene with Gwen's father arguing with Gwen about her proposal from Peter (going with Exploration on the A-Plot).

Bob can go to Exploration on the B-Plot, and knows its somehow about the Goblin's threats to the kids and Harry's successful defense of himself. He Scenes Harry confronting his father about the latter's actions as the Green Goblin, then turns around and commits Norman Osborn strikes his son: 2 and retains control of the Arc. It's ready to go on to Complication.

Carrie commits Gwen deflects Peter's questions about Harry: 5 to the B-Plot and hijacks it from Bob. Now Gwen's relationship with Harry is somehow tied in. Instead of going straight to Complication there, she makes a Scene for the A-Plot, with Peter asking Gwen's parents for their blessing. Bob plays Gwen's father and puts Mr Stacy doesn't like Peter: 6 into the B-Plot. He now controls it again.

Alice puts Gwen's mother bursts into tears: 4 and Peter is embarrassed: 4 into the B-Plot, making it even more complicated and taking it over. She complicates things by having the schoolkids that the Goblin threatened being a class that both Mr Stacy and Peter spend time with (the former as a cop representing the department, the latter as a part-time science teacher), and has both present when the Goblin makes a cruel return to terrify the children out of their wits to get back at his son for the affront.

Bob puts Goblin is thrown out the window: 4 into the B-Plot and goes straight into Resolution. Spidey and Goblin face each other on the highway overpass, with a schoolbus full of children teetering on the brink and at risk. Spidey is rocked, as Goblin taunts him publicly and he remembers Mrs Stacy's tears and his humiliating embarrassment, and the Goblin turns his anger at Harry into ever more brutal acts. Driven by the need to prove himself worthy to himself and, despite their ignorance of his identity, the Stacys, Spidey finally drives the Goblin off and saves the bus.

But what about Peter and Gwen? Do they marry, or does more nefarious evil intervene? (Of course it does!)

More inspiration turned to serve This Present Darkness:

Sniper Overwatch
"God, we need some support here." "Roger."

Abilities
• 5 Steel-Jacketed Bullet
• 1 High Perch
• 2 Telescopic Sight
• 3 Riflery
• 4 Concealment

Styles
• 2 Headshot
• 3 One Shot, One Kill
• 1 Glint Off the Scope

Free Conflict
• Event: Sniper line of sight is broken.

Notes
Sometimes everyone needs a bit of backup. Whether its a group of carefully positioned military snipers with state of the art hardware and carefully trained spotters, or just a guy up in a clocktower with a deer rifle, the concealed sniper is less of a who and more of a what. Sometimes they're on the side of the angels, like when a SWAT team needs a guy behind a window holding hostages put down fast, sometimes he's rolling with the Devil, like when the good guys are pinned down behind whatever scraps of cover they can find and know that jumping out means taking a bullet.

Of course, the sniper in your back pocket's only good so long as he keeps line of sight. Sometimes the target moves out of the way behind something big and heavy, sometimes the sniper's flushed. Whenever that happens, you're out of luck. For now.

Inspiration for this came from reading entirely too much Sin City tonight, and thinking about one of the movies I really felt the most directly engaged in of any, Sniper. Why did such a lousy 3rd tier movie engage you so, you ask? Because it knew what it was, and what it was, it went after with a cold blood-thirstiness, just as a sniper is supposed to.

Of course, you know the sniper most portrayed on TV; its not the crazy in a bell-tower with a thirty-ought-six. Its the police sniper, tucked away up on top of a distant multi-story building, muttering impatiently into his radio, "I don't have the shot ... Hold it ... One second ..." And then *bang*, there's a detonation and a zip and someone goes down with a neat little hole between their eyes.

I love that.

By and large, the heroes aren't snipers, though. Its just a little antiseptic. A little too hands-off. No, the heroes enter into an environment created by the sniper, for or against them, a situation that's defined by the parameters of the absence of the actor in the environment. In movies, they may jokingly refer to their sniper overwatch by the code-name "God," but that's not so far off thematically. The sniper is omnipresent, until he's not present at all. He's all seeing until he's blinded. He hurls lightning bolts from high atop the holy mountain. The heroes exist beneath and below the sniper, whether he's on their side or gunning for them.

So, Sniper Overwatch written up for Capes. I can't wait to use it.

I think I've been watching too much mainstream prime-time television, because I just added this to the This Present Darkness wiki.

Sexual Tension
Scene Charging NPC

Abilities

• 2 Smouldering Looks
• 3 Brief Touches
• 4 Averted Gazes
• 1 Awkward Pauses
• 5 Muttered Phrases

Styles

• 3 Almost, But Not Quite
• 1 Avoidance
• 2 Frustration

Free Conflict

Goal: The affected characters overtly express their interest (kiss, ask the other out, etc).

Notes

Moonlighting, Brokeback Mountain, even Batman have been suggested as havens for sexual tension between two or more characters. It just wouldn't do to not have the ability to introduce it to a Scene as an active participant!

There's probably something wrong with me, that I thought this was a good idea for addition, but ... well, the potential for useful addition to Scenes was just too much to resist.

Alright, we've outlined a system of Dramatist nature and structure for an online, multi-user, parallel-structure game. It has some very, very different structural underpinnings than the more traditional systems. What does it buy us, and what does it cost us?

Pros:

• It cuts out two of the primary causes of Player complexity:
  
• The issue of power balance across characters is wholly removed.
• Everyone gets a chance to access the big roles as well as the small roles.

The latter probably deserves further discussion. There is a marked tendency in MU* environs to strongly stratify by time the player has been a member of the community. In some cases, this is a good thing, but insofar as it leads to people who take their in-game position as granted, it becomes an issue just as in any organization, where they work hard at gaining power just to maintain power. The game is no longer about playing well with others, it literally becomes about the players more than the characters.

You can see this often in World of Darkness MU*, where a small core cadre of players play the real "movers and shakers" in the game-world, and if you're not one of them, your stories won't get any attention, and in fact, you'll find yourself being blocked and shut out. (What, me bitter?) Its not an unusual dysfunctional pattern for play to fall into in many games where mechanical focus is on characters who've parlayed "experience points" of whatever type into in-game control.


• The real level of Administration work is seriously diminished.
  
  Instead of spending so much of their time trying to balance the availability of interesting content for characters of all levels, the Admin can look after the relatively minor complexity task of making sure characters who are submitted for review are appropriate and mechanically sound, and documenting the flow of events (an issue which I'll deal more with under Cons, below).
  
  MMORPGs are fighting this very uphill battle, in the form of trying to create multi-tiered content for their players, high and low, in multiple factions. Even with millions of dollars to throw at the problem in big buckets, they frankly do a lousy job of it. Forget the ramifications of trying to view the events of, say, World of Warcraft in a simple, sensible fashion, the entire context of game-play changes significantly between even the upper-mid range of power to the high end top tier. And managing that content takes thousands of Game Administrators, few of whom are empowered to affect the context of the game significantly. Throw an attempt at consistency into the mix and you might as well forget it. There's no way an independent creator can compete at that level, but they don't have to.
  
• Player-driven Scenes are not unusual, and they're not hard to do well.
  
  The fact that every Player has the ability to create a Scene and play it out with others, with very minimal (if any) involvement from the Admin is almost a Holy Grail of design. The introduction of Player-run Plots in most Simulationist systems demands that the Admin keep a tight rein on things, because the mechanics don't provide any tools for managing game-breaking. In fact, they encourage it, in most cases, by encouraging self-protective behaviours; there are no advantages to engaging in risk.
  
  The key to this? The Comics Code, or whatever one calls it in the context of their overall setting.
  
  The Code provides a safety-net for Players to engage in game-threatening Scenes without actually breaking the world. Would it be problematic if the major powers of the world were overthrown? Make it a Code prohibition to actually change the political or social order without Admin review. What's the advantage? Players can raise great armies, work hard at assassinating important figures, or create world-shattering sorceries, secure in the knowledge that not only will they not only not break the world, but they'll be rewarded for risking and failing.
  
  I can't emphasize that last enough. Simulationist designs do exactly what they say they do: they simulate. Simulations do not model with the intent of getting specific results out the other end, they create a structured process which is expected to turn out a revelatory and sometimes surprising result. While this is just what you want when you are trying to decide what the global climate will be in a hundred years (scientific wishful-thinking aside), its pointedly not what you want when you're trying to wrestle tens or hundreds of people into a shared world. If everyone (or just most people) are playing it safe, in the sense of maximizing their minimal risks, the results are very predictable, because that predictability is what people want. People want to win, and if the only way to win is to trump every challenge, people will optimize to that. If one can "win" (in the sense of gathering resources successfully) while providing a narrative "loss" (in the sense of being on the side of a Conflict that's not controlling it when it resolves), then the tension between different ways to win will drive the system as a whole.

Its not all roses and candy, however.

Cons:

• The Admin need to be responsible, at least in part, for making sure events in the game-world are communicated.
  
  This is hard work, and its pretty important in this kind of Dramatist setup, because without knowing the history, its hard to get engaged with the flow. If someone's run a siege on the High Priestess' tower, there needs to be a record of the events, even in summary historical form. Perhaps more as a contrast to traditional configurations, if a character is killed, there needs to be a note on the Character sheet of when, how, and why. Being killed in a Dramatist setup is not really a guaranteed way to being taken out of the game; if its interesting that a Character make a return from the dead, if it looks like it'd be profitable to engage people like so, it becomes inevitable that the Character'll be back somehow, but the context of the death event is important.
  
  (You can pretty much remove this as a significant issue by putting "Significant Characters can never be killed" in the Code, and define "significant" as "Any character with at least one Power," but its not strictly necessary.)
  
  Some of this can be alleviated by engaging the community of players through the mediation of, say, a wiki or other shared space where they can feel a part of weaving the ongoing history of the game space. When the community is doing most of this work, there's much less stress in being an Admin.
  
• The flexibility of Character switching and Scene setting is so outside the experience of most gamers that they may not be initially ready to deal.
  
  This is actually a lot more of an issue than one might think, because gamers seem to be an inherently conservative lot when it comes to trying new things, especially mechanically. D&D is still one of the big sellers in the hobby for a reason. The idea that you don't really have a fixed character, that the character you're playing in this Scene might very well be played by someone else once you leave the Scene is very difficult for some folks to get behind. They've been conditioned by Simulation to fear that someone else won't play as efficiently, as effectively, or as "correctly" as they would, and they'll lose their character. It sometimes takes a while to get them into the understanding that nothing is ever lost in a Dramatist system, so long as its interesting to the other players. This was actually a problem on the Ars Magica MUSH Tela Magica back in the day, when we allowed Troupe-style character ownership; one Magus, one Companion, and any number of Grogs that went into the common Covenant pool. People were always initially hesitant to both put Grogs in the pool and to play any but the ones they put in, but once they gave it some time, they found that there was an immense freedom in it.
  
  Dramatist systems require a significant mental shift to really start internalizing. A Dramatist MU* would be working doubly-uphill, since pretty much every MU* on Earth has been strongly Simulationist in structure. The primary audience is going to be dealing with immense hurdles as barriers to entry, and that has to be expected up front. In that sense, its a very good thing the overall Admin load is so low.
  
  The "privileged character" setup is a middle-position to help ease people into the Dramatist mindset on characters. The permanent Scenes in the core are intended to do the same for groups spinning off their own Scenes. Creating such things and making them interesting (a good starting Character pool, a setting that hooks other locations and events for Scenes) is the first step in getting traditional Simulationist gamers into a Dramatist mode.
  
• With such a focus on narrative, story, and drama, the hardcore "realists" are going to always be on your ass.
  
  This sounds like, at first, a restatement of the above, but it goes well beyond that. Your first complaints are going to be about the absence of a character advancement system. Your second is going to be about the fact someone can turn around and simply narrate out of effect the Conflict they just wrestled over for six pages. The third will be about someone else playing "their" character and doing it poorly. And so on.
  
  Basically, there is a certain component of humanity who will not read your premises, won't read your mechanics, and won't bother thinking about why things are as they are. This is true of every design, of course, but with a Dramatist core, the folks who pride themselves on "winning" will be going absolutely nuts trying to figure out how to "win."

Let me apologize for my descent into the madness of specificity, last night. Like most programmers, sometimes its hard for me to let go of implementation and to just work on design and interface. From a user, and even administrator point of view, it just doesn't matter what the underlying object/technical implementation looks like. Its moot. Only in the roughest sense is it remotely relevant, so I'll try and avoid going too much into programmer-speak and just finish talking design.

So, we've defined the verbs that the Players will use to interact with Scenes, and Pages, and Characters, at least basically. Now we need to talk about Conflicts and how they interact with Players and Characters.

Conflicts can be introduced to the Scene by a Character spending their one Action on a given Page, or by spending a Story Token. Since the Page should know whether the Character has expended its one Action yet, we can just assume that evoking the introduction verb will deduct Tokens appropriately (+conflict Name). There also needs to be a mechanism for taking a Conflict back out of the Scene before its been touched by activity, so that others can contest the introduction of the thing if its an Event or a Goal that drives an objecting Character. Those rules are best supported by social interaction, so all we need is to have a verb to pull it back off (+conflict -Name).

Once introduced to the Scene, a Character can operate on a Conflict in a limited number of ways. The problem is that Conflicts are side-specific, and can have more than one side (with splitting of dice and sides). The most convenient interface is probably to just number the sides, so that when a verb needs to interact with a specific die on a specific side, it can be addressed in the format Side Value. We don't need to distinguish between, say, three 3's on one side of a conflict, any of them will do.

As the result of an Action ...

• A Character can activate one of their traits and target a die associated with a Conflict, rolling it either up or down. Doing so Allies the Character with that side for rolling up or the opposite side for rolling down. (+activate Trait Conflict Side Value, or +activate Trait Conflict Side -Value should work for up or down.)
  
  This is complicated by the fact the result can be accepted or rejected, so requires a second round of verbs to complete (+accept / +reject).
  
  Its further complicated by the fact that activating a trait that is a Power (as opposed to a Skill) generates a point of Debt that has to be assigned to a Drive if the Character has them and not just an undifferentiated debt pool. Best means to do this is probably to just let them drop unassigned Debt into place with +assign Drive.
• After a Character +accepts a die, the other Characters around the Scene, starting with the Character that accepted, can react, activating one of their suitable traits and re-rolling the die. Again, this is probably something best handled by social means in terms of turn order, but the verb structure is straightforward (+react Trait, followed by +accept / +reject to move to the next.
• Either before or after his Action, a Character can stake Debt from their Undifferentiated Debt Pool (UDP, in a rate fit of comedy, from now on) or a Drive (+stake Conflict Side Drive Number, +stake Conflict Side Number). They can split dice on an Allied side, two or more ways as long as sufficient Debt is staked (always evenly) (+split Conflict Side Value Ways).
  
  The Player can also use an Inspiration gained from a previous Conflict. (+inspire Inspiration Conflict Side Value. This will probably require the Inspirations a Player has to be numbered for individual reference.

This pretty much defines the back-and-forth process of the Conflict. There are only two things that needs to be defined now.

Firstly, Conflicts can be Claimed at the beginning of a Page, and Claiming any after the first requires a Story Token. All Claims are reset at the beginning of a Page before Claims are done, so a Claim only extends for one Page. (+claim Conflict Side)

Secondly, once Claimed, if the Claimed side is in control at the end of a Page, the Conflict resolves, and we need verbs for that.

• If the non-controlling side(s) have Debt staked, they get back double the staked debt. It goes back to the Drive or UDP it came from, so no interaction required.
• If the controlling side has Debt staked, the non-controlling side(s) get that as Story Tokens. If the Conflict creator is Allied with a non-controlling side, they get the first Token. The rest are dispensed by the controlling Player (+token {Player|Character}) as they see fit.
• The controlling Player then matches up dice between sides, as defined in Capes. +match Conflict Side Value Side Value is about as simple as that interface can get. This results in folks getting Inspirations. Dice that can't be matched just get converted to Inspirations and distributed automatically.

Once resolved, the controlling Player gets to narrate the Conflict's resolution.

There is one more significant thing a Character can do during a Page that's not directly connected to a Conflict but is an Action, and that's to attempt to roll up an Inspiration the Player already has. +activate Trait Inspiration followed by +accept / +reject will work just fine for that. Pointedly, an Accept here can allow others to react, just like accepting a die on a Conflict.

A Scene should be considered finished if a Page starts and there are no Conflicts in the Scene. (Obviously, this doesn't apply to the first Page of a Scene.)

We'll walk through a couple Pages of a Scene between Alice, Bob, and Carrie:

( Extended Example )

In Part III, I'll go into some of the overall advantages of this kind of Dramatist approach compared to the Simulationist.

After being involved in a lengthy, ongoing thread on roleplayers that involved some rather egregious examples of bad MU* Admin decisions in the construction of TPs (TinyPlots, in the argot of the age; from now on referred to herein as Plots), it occurred to me that I don't think I've ever seen a system'd MU* core that was based on any principles other than the strict Simulationist, which provides certain problems for me as a game designer, and moreover as a guy who's developed multiple systems for MU* play.

I'm not sure which is worse at the moment, that I've never tried to create a Narrativist system for a MU*, or that I find myself using Edwards' Threefold-Model to talk about it. (In consideration of my love of simpler terms, I think I'll use the more reasonable term Dramatist, not the least reason being its easier to type repeatedly.)

So, yes, Dramatist MU*ing. I'm sure Gen Lang will want to jump in here, somewhere, given our long history of online game design discussion.

I'll take as my model (predictably) Capes, as its possibly the most convenient architecture I've encountered for creating consistently Dramatist results with the lowest cognitive overhead. Others might suggest Universalis as a preferred basis, but since I can't get a copy of the game in my hands for love or money, I'll be forced to acknowledge its potential perfection without actually referring to it.

The essentoal element of Capes play is not, as in more traditional fare, the Character, but the Scene. In a MU*, the general idea is that a virtual location (a "room") really defines a specific place and time. But is this necessarily absolute? I've certainly constructed virtual spaces on a MU*, such that the description of the location and its connection to others were dynamic, definable by the inhabitants and existing only so long as there are inhabitants. Something of this order would seem perfect for a Dramatist MU*, with a few core, constant Scenes serving as a meeting ground for folks to interact and then spin off other Scenes by mutual decision.

Exempli gratia: For the sake of making sense,. we'll proceed to design and structure a MU* in an abstract sense. Doing so lets us explore our ideas in a common context.

We'll take as our premise that the MU* is devoted to Modern Urban Fantasy. After all, the World of Darkness MU* are still hugely popular, and I've never shied from ripping off what works.

We need a few core Scenes, so we'll build The Halcyon Days, a bar and grill for the vampires with twin silvered katanas and the fey with big troll-hammers to hang out in. Plus it makes a convenient center. While we're at it, we'll create the deadland version of the Halcyon as another Scene (for ghosts to be non-perceived by the inhabitants of the real-world Scene). That'll do for now.

Once we've set up the core Scenes, we can create the mechanisms for spawning, displaying, and joining new scenes (probably with commands like +scene Name, +showscenes, and +join Scene), so that folks can get involved with making such.

Unlike table-top Capes, we have the potential for folks to join Scenes in progress already. I think the simplest solution to that is to add the new Players to the end of the list of folks engaged in the Scene, and then, at the start of their first engaged Page, allow them to perform the same series of tasks they would at the beginning of the first Page of a Scene. They'll be cycled to the end of Action declaration, as a result of being added to the end, so that should keep things notionally mechanically balanced.

This brings up an important point, Players are just amorphous potential until they are joined with a Character at the beginning of the first Page of a Scene they're involved with. This works well with our Dramatist intent, since we can use technical means to keep the presence and communication of said Players invisible to those with a Character bound to them. That is to say, we can limit the textual perception of those engaged in a Scene to the presence and output of the others playing in the Scene.

How do Characters get assigned? The best method is likely the idea that every Player can create a privileged Character, one which can only be attached to his Player object. They can also create any number of Characters, but all of them have to undergo Administration review for consistency before they go into the common pool. Its probably a good idea to allow people to create Characters for a Scene that don't get added to the common pool unless requested and which have no objective presence after a Scene ends (the Character object vapes when the Player leaves the Scene). This is the kind of thing that can be yanked as an ability if there are complaints about a Player, but best to start with an initial level of trust.

Eg: Alice, Bob, and Carrie want to run a Scene in the deadland outside town. Alice +scene Deadland Outside Town and both Bob and Carrie +join Deadland Outside Town, so they're all in the same room. Alice thinks about it and then does a quick @desc of the room to the Scene.

Alice and Bob both pull their privileged Characters from the pool (+chara Whatever) while Carrie wants to create a ghost for them to engage with, but nothing particularly permanent, just a throw-away for the Scene (+newchara Ghost). That puts Carrie in the new character creation mode, where she puts together the ghost and its Character is attached to her Player until she leaves the Scene.

Once the Scene is over, Carrie decides the ghost is interesting enough to be added to the common pool, so requests an Admin look at the Character with +review Ghost.

Defining Characters in Capes is easy, and that works well for us when trying to do so online. Once in the mode, there are only a handful of commands you need:

• +name Name
• +ability Ability=Rank
• +ability -Ability
• +style Style=Rank
• +style -Style
• +attitude Attitude=Rank
• +attitude -Attitude
• +description Longish description of the character
• +background Longish background of the character
• +submit

Hitting +submit should validate the character design, then go ahead and create the Character object and attach it to the Player, setting the Player object's description temporarily to that of the Character. It should revert once the Player leaves the Scene.

Pages aren't "objects" in the abstract sense so much as they are constructs, but from a technical point of view, they should probably be built as a physical (but invisible) object created when the Scene is spawned. For Scenes which are actually player-created, the Page should add the creator of the Scene to the Player list first, followed by the other +joiners in the order they arrive. The Page also needs to have two additional commands, one command allowing the use of Story Tokens (hereafter Tokens) to add a Character to the Player's position-slot (+chara Name), and one to add Conflicts (costing one Token per Conflict after the first, just like Characters) (+conflict Conflict).

The Page manages the turn-order of Actions of Characters/Players. Each Character gets one Action per Page for free, any after needing to be paid for by Tokens.

That takes care of Scenes and Characters. The last real Dramatist object of importance is the Conflict. Conflicts are where the meat of the command system really resides, and all but a few of the remaining system issues center on how Conflicts are managed.

But I tire, so I'll take that issue up tomorrow.

Or, as Webster's would have it, "exalt."

With Exalted 2.0 coming out soon, and with Zach Bush being one of the writers for the project, it's rather demanded of me that, in this rash of conversion-madness, I do a little something along those lines. This isn't really the imposition that it might otherwise be, because Exalted is actually one of my favourite fantasy settings of all time. The setting for the game was never my problem with Exalted. The intricate political setup, the multiple axes of personal and political power, the intrigue, the Abyssals, the Autocthonians, I was pretty in from the ground floor -- and the fact I knew the developers and writers even before first edition was released has nothing to do with it.

Well, very little.

In fact, the project I write for White Wolf, Iteration X: Conventionbook Revised, wasn't actually developed in a vacuum (though the horrid suffering inflicted by the cover art may make me wish it had been suffocated in one). One of the reasons I agreed to take up the contract in the first place, aside from the inchoate need to actually rewrite the Technocracy as a whole into something not overtly insulting to scientists and the last several thousand years of social and technological advance, was the desire to do something cool with Autocthon, the alternate dimension/other planet of artificial life-forms and possessed of a potentially malign and ancient intelligence. Luckily for me, Exalted was under development at the same time and I had the privilege to pre-figure some of the revelations of Autocthon as primordial forge-god in my text. That was some good stuff, right there.

Historically, my problems with Exalted have been entirely due to its lamentable saddling with the White Wolf Storyteller system, a mechanical framework which is almost entirely at odds with the sleek and high-speed combat that the manga/anime-inspired art and direction implied. And don't even get me started complaining about the unwieldy and nightmarish complexity of Charm trees, which effectively neutered the power that the various archetypes had for me, even then, in the days before I was aware of the flexibility one can gain by going well outside the usual RPG framework of design. Up until now, the best mechanical conversion I've ever seen has been from Exalted to Wushu. That work actually manages to capture the feel of the over-the-top action implied by the Exalted history and setting, while still having hooks into that setting and story.

(If you're not familiar with Wushu, I strongly suggest you look into it and buy every single PDF available for it. Not because you have to, but because rewarding freeform design with such style is the just act of every righteous soul. Besides, before Capes, Wushu was the obsession I was rambling about at great length. It elaborated on the idea that broad, simply defined Traits were far more expressive than a hundred little skills that was so wonderfully introduced in Jon Tweet's Over the Edge years before, adding a mechanical sensibility that promotes greater detail to get more chance of success and furthering the school of gaming that is predicated on the axiom: "Whatever you say is what happens." I still need to finish writing The Wushu Guide to Giant Robots, but I digress.)

The new edition of Exalted promises to try and address some of the original issues with the mechanical system, but it appears that a lot of my concerns aren't really addressed by the new text. Nor, I suppose, should they be since the bulk of the targeted demographic for the system is disenchanted Dungeons and Dragons players who are looking for a game with more depth and consistency, not necessarily any more simplicity.

Rumor has it that the new Storyteller's Handbook has an Interactive History section, reminiscent of my last lengthy, rambling blog post, so at least I'm well on my way to being an insider with more prescient skill than most of the Weekly World News' reporters, which is a good feeling.

Discussing a conversion of Exalted to Capes has one, significant, difficulty: Much of the mechanical power of the setting and the characters comes from the semi-rigid structure which the characters are defined by. Dragon-Blooded Terrestrial Exalts are meaningfully different than Solar Exalts which are mechanically different from Celestial Exalts who have little definitionaly in common with Lunar Exalts. (I have to leave Abyssal Exalts out of the equation because they are mechanically and meaningfully similar to Solar Exalts, and for in-game reasons, too!) Capes makes different distinctions between characters; the level of detail is at an entirely different level of understanding.

So, this means we have to think about character definition differently. This is actually not a bad thing. Its very, very easy to fall into the bipolar means of character expression in Exalted. Solar Exalted of the Dawn Caste have a very defined role in the original philosophical underpinning of the setting, and that comes with a lot of baggage mechanically and psychologically. The vast bulk of Dawn Caste characters are either very close to that design, or 180 degrees from it. Since every Exalt has Caste-equivalents, all of which have defined expected natures, that means the bulk of characters are either aligned with expectation or can be expected to be directly non-conformal.

Similarly, all Exalts of a given type have a handful of traits which are common to all Exalts of that type. The broadest of these are the anima flares that all Exalts evidence, which is coloured by the Caste-equivalent nature of the expressing character. (For those who aren't Exalted geeks, anima flares are big bursts of energy that blaze around the character when they use their Exalted powers. Some are somewhat less obvious than others, but they're iconographic of the character and emblematic of their "different nature," so get brighter the more power the character burns.) All Lunars are shapechangers with a heart-shape (an alternate animal or plant form that they can switch to at will, along with any other creature they drink the heart's blood of; hello Bjornaer). All Dragon-Blooded have an elemental affinity to one of the five elements. And so on.

We don't define things that elaborately in Capes. For one, that would take far more traits than the twelve our system of choice brings to bear. For another, they're not important to every character, even if they are intrinsic, definitional traits. Let me go on a bit further about this, because its important for a true understanding of Capes mechanics.

The core conceit of Capes is not the fact that there are no GMs, nor that players define Scenes, nor that characters are defined by a smallish number of broad traits. The core conceit of Capes is the Conflict, and the reason that Conflicts exist: to gather more resources for a player to further control the story. The more frequently that players introduce Conflicts that the other players find interesting and care about, the more resources, be it Inspirations or Story Tokens, that they will be able bring to bear. It doesn't even matter that the player win the Conflicts that they introduce, its only important that they engage others' interest. (In particular, losing Conflicts is the only way to gain Story Tokens, the most far-reaching resource in the game.) In that light, Characters (in the sense of the defined set of traits laying on the table tabulated) only exist meaningfully by definition in how they engage with Conflicts. Their traits only define the kind of narrations that the player is likely to engage in to drive forward others' involvement with Conflicts.

That is to say, their traits are not defined as expressions of inherent truths about the character, they do not define the scope of a character's power for the purposes of simulation, traits on a Character define how that character -- note the difference -- narratively engages with Conflicts! This is a significant difference and departure not only from Exalted, but the mainstream of game-design altogether. A character can do anything, any given action can be narrated for a character, no matter what is defined on the Character sheet. What they can accomplish is constrained by their named and enumerated traits, and the traits that go into defining the means of accomplishment is a whole different way of thinking.

For example, let's talk about the anima banner. In Exalted, the anima banner has a number of potential powers and effects, depending on what kind of Exalted it is (Fire-aspected Terrestrials are surrounded by blazing fire, the Solar Dawn Caste tend to have pale white and bright gold flares which terrify onlookers, and so on.) For our purposes, none of this matters, unless the player who has created the Character thinks it interesting or engaging to the other players for it to be a means by which the character engages with Conflicts. Otherwise, the anima banner is just another piece of narrative text which exists in the space of description. For some characters, the anima banner will be one of their primary means of expression in the context of Conflicts, and as such will be listed as an Ability . For others, the anima banner may just be one of the ways they tie together a multitude of other powers and really subsume the practice of their Abilities, just being a Style. And still others won't interact in the context of Conflicts with the anima banner at all, save as narrative flourish for the usage of other traits ("Activating Angry. As the fury of the betrayal of the usurper burns in my gut, my forehead flares with the light of my caste mark and my anima banner unfolds like massive golden wings of solar light!").

Equipped with this knowledge, doing character creation for Exalted becomes a different exercise. We're not trying to define what the character is capable of, as the original system does. We are, instead, defining, literally, why we should care about the character.

( Exalt the Examples )

Exalted is not the most direct or neatest conversion to Capes, but a due consideration of the tropes of the setting and the underlying reasoning about why a Character possesses certain traits on the sheet may be the most revealing discussion I've written on the system so far. The setting itself is brilliant and, in places, beautiful. Its certainly worthwhile to consider how to reframe it in terms that actually work with my current style of play.

(As a post scriptum, its worth noting that, unlike the Exalted mechanics, you don't need any special systems to cover mass warfare in Capes. Characters can just as easily represent ten-thousand blood-thirsty barbarians as they can one little old lady. Armies, just like anything else, may simply be narrative entities, without a Character of their own, the Conflicts only being meaningful as the conflict between individuals. For example, the player of the Dawn detailed earlier, in a Scene framed as a clash between armies, say "Activating Swordsmanship. Charging into the teeth of the enemy, my hundred fighters lay about with the skill of mortal men drilled by an agent of the Unconquered Sun, bodies flying back from the force of their blows!" and the Dragon-Blooded could respond, "Reacting with Military Expertise. The Legion meets the thrust of the mere hundred men like a vast set of jaws, closing around them in a classic pincer movement, cutting off every avenue of escape." The armies themselves are purely notional, constructs of story for the purposes of illustration.

Woe betide the Dragon-Blooded if the Dawn's player burns a Story Token and brings in a Character for the forces under his command; he then would have an Action for each Character and a much higher likelihood of winning Conflicts in this Scene. But that's why Story Tokens are useful to have!)

I'm an old-school RPGer. My collection is frightening in its depth and breadth. I've probably given away more RPGs than most folks have in their libraries.

I actually have two copies of Aria: Canticle of the Monomyth and its' supplement, Aria: Worlds. Back in the ancient days of 1994, Aria was an imaginative, even cutting-edge, game design despite (as Eric the .5b maintains) possessing the worst RPG name in history. In terms of mechanical resolution, Aria wasn't actually all that ground-breaking. The d10-based Stat + Skill design was already popularized by Ars Magica, and already served yeoman duty in other designs as well. No, what set Aria apart was its telescoping focus, by design using the same conceptual framework to frame individual characters, small groups, communities, villages, cities, provinces and kingdoms as single-character mechanical abstractions. This was utterly new and no one really since has taken the underlying idea as far as the original, which suggested starting by creating ancient kingdoms and running conflicts 10,000 years at a turn, then shifting to smaller areas and/or shrinking the time per turn until, by the time you felt like finishing, you had a ready-made backstory rich in conflict and reasoned events that you and your players already had a stake in.

This telescoping mechanism also meant that the greater socio-political issues could be resolved at a higher level and individual accomplishments could then have effect, applying modifiers to conflicts in the greater scheme of things. That is to say, if you were rolling along at five years a turn, exploring the conflict between the Church of Freyland, the Ruling Council of Freyland, and a small group of rebels which called themselves the Silver Sword, it might be the Sword was actively engaged in a war of terrorism against the Council, secretly funded by the Church even while the latter paid lip-service to the Council. This gives immediate rise to the idea of playing out the course of one of these terrorist attacks, and if the characters are capable of derailing (or executing!) it, that could easily apply a modifier to the next 5yr cycle between the three larger groups (each of which has a character sheet of its own).

Aria also suggested building sheets for lineages, from which entire families of heroes might descend. Unsurprisingly, the organizations that a character was related to all had an influence on their character sheet, to the point which it would have been easier to do chargen with a complicated database/spreadsheet solution than mere pieces of paper. The question of whether anyone ever actually played the game as written (as opposed to, say, converting Aria mechanics to Fudge) remains open until this very day. The unexpected density of the main text, which read like a sociologist's wet dream, the complexity of the interaction between levels, and the general mood of the time cooperated to make sure Aria was never a big hit, or even particularly influential.

(That said, Andrew B. Watt was actually intended to write a supplement for Aria, and Bruce Baugh took from it inspiration to, much later, create the community creation mechanics for the D20 edition of Gamma World, so all was not truly lost.)

Aria really represents the core of trying to apply tenets of creating a "simulation" to a suitably epic set of design constraints. Unfortunately, simulation creates an inherent cognitive overhead and the models so created have no real measure of plausibility save arbitrary designation. What effect does introducing magical water-production on a daily cycle to wide-scale agriculture, anyway? Aria would have one crunch numbers and come up with an answer, but it never could overcome the underlying feeling that the answer had no authority save the work that went into figuring it out. Simulation, as a game design ethic, has to have a clear target to model or it loses what coherence it can bring.

But that's not why you've come here today. You're here to read more of my Capes rambling! And I shall not disappoint!

The real problem with Aria was that it tried to simulate, in the belief that such a model would automatically give rise to conflicts which players would then want to explore in greater depth, being vested, in some way, in their creation. As far as that goes, it was right -- but the baggage needed to create and sustain the model ran to over 600 pages. The sheer cognitive load that entails is staggering. While the core idea is good, the mechanism is faulty, like someone trying to build a timepiece out of cooked pasta. Watches are good; linguine makes a lousy spring.

Enter Capes. Capes does not take as its central tenet the need to simulate the way the world works. On the contrary, its model is explicitly formed around the idea that there are actors in the world, and there are things that they care in a narrative sense about which oppose one another, and that the actual physical logic of the means of resolution is effectively uninteresting, in a mechanical sense. Thus, in Capes, a "character" is composed of things which are "interesting" for we, as the audience of the ongoing narrative, to watch occur. This is why a Capes character need not be a person, as we've discussed here before. Locations, devices, and situational environments can all have enough inherent traits they bring to the story that they make interesting actors in play.

This opens things right up for playing out Aria large-scaled background development using Capes as the underlying mechanics. Simply frame the Scene as being "ten-thousand years in the history of the continent, Athos," and bring characters of an appropriate scale onto the table. There might even be individuals of sufficient immortality and personal power to be at play at such terrific scale, such as transfigured religious figures, gods, and the like, but likewise situations certainly fit the bill, such as floods, vast fires, volcanic eruptions, and so on.

Let's sketch out a couple characters which might be apropos to a ten-thousand year Scene:

( Ten-Thousand Year Egg )

Both of the above sheets could be modified slightly to create an inhabitant of one of the cultures, and this actually works to help tie the levels together. Without there being some kind of reflection between levels, some effect, there's little reason to care.

There does need to be some kind of mechanical support for changing the nature of such characters, and its one that I've been tinkering with for more individual-scale events. To wit: allow Conflicts to explicitly modify the characters if resolved. For example:

Conflict
Goal: Imrys deals the Kusangi a decisive defeat on the battlefield. (Kusangi's Warfare would swap with Vast Plains, decreasing their ability in battle.)

The key here is that there is a definite narrative event which is tied to the desired ends. The ensuing resolution would likely involve the Imyri staging daring attacks on dragon-back and calling up ancient sorceries while the Kusangi ride in numbers to the border and the plains themselves make it hard for the Inyri to channel the horsemen into killing fields. The Kusangi might introduce a Conflict simultaneously where their shaman work to unravel the concealment of the hidden city, forcing the Imrys' player to replace the trait entirely. And so on.

These thoughts are still very much in flux and further discussion would be much welcomed.

Last time, we dealt with the lovely genre of space combat when discussing Capes' capabilities. Tonight, we'll talk about things which are inspired by another fairly popular subgenre that R Talsorian games has done its level-best to make into a stinking pile of dog shite:

Cyberpunk.

Back in the day, RTal produced the original edition of Cyberpunk, using the Interlock mechanical system, and it was good. Rooted firmly in the 80's cyberpunk literature movement, CP was a great game with a lot of resonance for we gamers of the day. We could be edge-running criminals with power and charm, sticking it to The Man and turning technology to the service of Mankind and, more importantly, ourselves. In short, a lot like ourselves, if we'd had balls and the world really was the insane economic nightmare the anti-capitalist types keep telling us it is. CP was grungy, hardcore, and in most cases, like gaming and literature of other genres, wholly wish-fulfillment fantasies. Chicks were busty and under-dressed, geeks ran the world in electronic guise, and life was cheaper than dirt on a shoe.

Cyberpunk, the genre rather than specifically the game, hinged on a few tight issues:

• Technology is moving faster than society can keep up.
• The gap between the haves and the have-nots is vast.
• Criminal enterprise is one of the best ways to accomplish ends.
• Big Corporations(c) own everything worth owning.
• Government is, at best, ineffective and at worst, self-destructive.
• Culture in general is deeply dystopian.

And, perhaps the overriding iconic statement:

Style over substance.

Add to that the stylistic tropes of the genre and you can pretty much say you've got the whole thing:

• Big guns.
• Big swords.
• Tight leather.
• Sunglasses at night.
• Grungy, blocky technology that, nevertheless, is frighteningly advanced.
• Cybernetic implants; technology implanted directly into the body.
• The Net / Cyberspace / Matrix, the virtual magic-space of the computerized technology-world.

Together with the core statement, all the above go into the original Cyberpunk game, cyberpunk literature, and coloured all its inheritors, including the cyberpunk-plus-fantasy Shadowrun which, because it conflated an entire pseudomythology rooted in overt magic with the technofetishistic cyberpunk mythos, was less powerful than it could have been in actual play. (That said, the Jayhawk Series, written in 1991 and published entirely on the Net, was a fantastic piece of fiction based in one group's SR game.)

The presence of the Matrix / Net / Cyberspace / Hip-Term-of-the-Week as a pseudomagical technological mirror-world fits into the same niche as the text Sorcerer & Sword gives for the "Other World" in a traditional high fantasy setting. The Net serves as a mystical conduit between the priests of the setting and their gods, the wonders of technology, as well as a whole universe in which the spiritually empowered can compete better than the physically empowered. In this case, the deckers and hackers who are, effectively, cyphers for many of we-the-readers gain force in the setting equivalent to that of the street samurai and the fixers, the physically and socially advantaged. Deckers act as the go-betweens for the powerful spirits of the other world, as well, the Artificial Intelligences and programs.

In part, this is why I felt that Shadowrun really wasn't the game others were obsessed with it being. Even though I really enjoyed playing it, and the addition of the overtly spiritual aspects (particularly Shaman) added a whole different moral level to the game, at core they were elaborations on aspects of the setting already well present and insufficiently developed in games.

So, that brings us to Capes, which is probably what you've been waiting for, in short, "Why are you going on at such length about a literary movement and RPG setting that folks haven't cared about for a decade or more?" Part of it is the recent release of the most recent version of Cyberpunk, which was a pretty ugly mess of crappy design and even worse art, and part of it is recognizing that the particular mix of archetypes in cyberpunk literature really lend themselves well to the way Capes does things.

Let's talk archetypal characters.

( Archetypes )

Cyberpunk, as a genre and as a game, is ripe for Capes conversion. Hopefully this will have come through in this post and more interest will come flowing down the line.

I just had the oddest idea, and wanted to get it down before it escaped my mind (because writing it down mechanically pounds it into my brain).

Run Sorcerer using Capes.

The first House Rule is "All core characters are straightforward normals, with Skills, not Powers, save for one, which is their Lore."

All core characters have Demons which are Exemplars of one of their negative Drives. The Free Conflict associated with the Exemplar should hook into the Demon's Need somehow.

The third House Rule would be the kicked: No matter what character you play in a given scene, you cannot play that character's Demon in the same scene.

I think that really gets to one of the most interesting potential dynamics in the hybrid Capes/Sorcerer crossover, not in defining who you can play (as in most RPGs), but in defining who you can't. That would easily keep the sense of wary concern between the Sorcerer and the Demon very real, while still letting characters be traded around the table every scene.

Hmm, let me try some chargen.

( Test Capes/Sorcerer Character )

[thoughtful look]

Folks that've been following my blog for a number of years know that I'm endlessly fascinated with various forms of different keyboard entry. Part of that spins from the obvious, that I have the odd bit of trouble in actually using a keyboard, yet I've never found anything that actually works better for me than my old M-type IBM keyboard. Part of it is a deep-seated belief that the old school QWERTY keyboard truly is a less than optimal solution to the issue of getting data from your head to the machine.

So, yes, I've tinkered with various entry methods for myself, from the Dasher system (which I rather like for various times my shoulder is particularly pained) to an actual full-sized left-handed Dvorak keyboard (which failed to work comfortably for me because it used all four rows of keys for alphabetics, requiring a painful shoulder extension; you never think about how much another quarter-inch really means 'til you start needing it).

IBM's created the SHARK and ATOMIK stylus-based interface, which actually looks really intriguing.

So, now I'm passing it on to you.