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.

Alright, ladies. You've been on this fuckin' hell-hole a good ten hours now so you know what kind of place it is! Outside these walls is a seething forest full of creepy-crawlies and God knows what else! Well, since I'm God for you poor bastards, I'll tell you what else is out there! There've been four recon units sent into this goddamn shit-kicking moon and only one significant radio broadcast came back, and that one was a garbled piece of crap. Orbital scans say there's somebody down here on the surface but they can't pick up jack through the canopy. So, instead of sending another bunch of lame-ass pansy rangers down, they decided to send some men with balls! And that's us, you fuckers!

We're going out there to find our men and bring them home, or what's left of them. Then we're going to kill every last bastard who's responsible for their deaths. Every. Last. Fucking. One.

Lieutenants! You have your assignments!

This place is filthy. I do not understand how anyone could possibly choose to exist on such a disgusting level of survival. Absolutely unacceptable.

Sergeant Green, you will be given Area Zed. Be certain that you search it thoroughly and stay in constant contact with the headquarters here. I will be returning to the ship to ... oversee matters of a pressing nature. Green, you absolutely must be certain to contact the base at your scheduled time. No excuses!

Sergeant Barker, you will be searching Yellow Area. Your orders are exactly the same as Green's. Contact the headquarters on a regular schedule and find any evidence that our recon elements may have left. This job is imperative!

Sergeant Hix. Oh, Sergeant Hix. What, oh what can we do with you? I suppose the only choice is to have your squad manage communications here at the base. After all, someone has to do it and there really is no one left, yes? Collect reports from Green and Barker and be sure they're prepared for my study.

 

That will be all.

• If the squad decides to kill Green's men
• They find a relatively well-concealed trail that the Ewoks have been using and probably never expected anyone to bother looking for since they would be dead long before that happens. The trail leads to a series of Ewok hunting / patrol parties and, eventually, the Ewok village.
 
• If the squad decides to carry Green's men to base
• They're harried by Ewok hunting/patrol parties through well-prepared and trapped terrain. Remember, they need NFA's every couple of rounds to keep Green's men alive! Once the Threat's gone, the squad reaches the HQ. Braugh sneers at their weakness and casually mentions that he's been tracking the IR signatures of the Ewoks through their Mandelbrites and has triangulated the location of their source, the Ewok village.

• If the squad E-Vacs
• They're pussies. But see above for what Braugh does and how they get pointed to the village.

As some — or even many of you — know, I’m passing over DragonCon this year thanks to a combination of bad organization, financial state, and no calls for me to be there. Which is alright. It’s OK. It gives me a few days in a row to spend with my girl and gives me a bigger run-up to my weekend of mad debauchery planned for Anime Weekend Atlanta. And a mad debauch it shall be, as I make a scramble to run not one, not two different systems but …

Four different systems across four separate sessions!

All indy game designs and only one is returning from last year.

Here’s the current layout:

RPG Schedule

Friday:

• 3:00pm

  3:16 Carnage Anong the Stars - Heavy Load

  You are a soldier in the Terran Expeditionary Force, devoted to the cause of preserving Earth against any and all threats to her continued existence. Covered head to toe in high-tech Mandelbrite armour, carrying state of the art weapons and out among the stars instead of safe at home for your own reasons, only your personal strengths and weaknesses — plus good ol’ Terran fighting spirit! — will get you through going face to face with the worst the cosmos has to offer: alien life!

  3:16 is a cutting edge lightweight gaming system designed to pick up and go, and go hard! Fast, agile and dangerous, we’ll do character generation and then run through as many planetary missions as we can during the four hour slot. Given that character generation takes about 15 minutes at worst, expect there to be lots and lots of blowing things up, high-tech shennanigans and trying not to frag your superior officers.

  Site: http://gregorhutton.com/boxninja/threesixteen/index.html

• 5:00pm

  Bliss Stage - Midsummer’s Night Dreaming

  Right now, right this moment, right as you read these words, humanity is devestated by an alien attack from the edges of our understanding. It is the first blow of a terrible war. Seven years later, armed with technology you cannot comprehend and can barely operate, you will strike back. This is how. With the power of weaponized love.

  In the aftermath of complete devestation, how will humanity survive, reduced to teenagers and kids piloting giant robots made of dreams and love against nightmares who bind adults in eternal sleep? In Bliss Stage, you’ll find out. Returning, this year the game’ll move to a new city and new characters who live, love, die and dream of a better world — or a lost one! Character generation right at the table or pre-generated, your choice.

  Site: http://swingpad.com/dustyboots/wordpress/?page_id=229 or live recordings of the GM’s group at http://www.talkshoe.com/tc/23290 !

Saturday:

• 1:30pm

  Giger Counter Beta - The Hungry Dead

  Nothing says “survival horror” like hordes of shambling, groaning zombies, the living dead, and they want nothing more to eat your brains! But they won’t eat your eyes. In a small backwater suburb, you’re one of the few people that haven’t heard about the new flesh-eating craze sweeping the nation, but you’re about to. You’re alive, they’re dead, and someone, somewhere has got to be safe. But it’s not you.

  Totally new and cutting edge, Giger Counter is the system of survival horror. Share the duty of Director as you explore the build-up to the nightmarish horror of the undead unleashed on the earth. Lightweight mechanics, dramatic scene framing, and — Someone. Will. Die. In fact, probably several someones, but death is not the end of your play! Build the map in-game as play proceeds and use every tool at your disposal to survive the menace of the hungry dead!

  Site: http://bleedingplay.wordpress.com/geiger/

• 3:30pm

  It’s Complicated - High-School Hellraisers

  High School is a crazy time for the best of us, but how much worse has it got to be if your parents are witches, demons, or psychics? Welcome to Public School 666, where the elite of the young hellions go to get it together, learn to keep their natures on the low-down, and maybe live through their high school crushes! It’s Prom Night, and students and teachers alike are gearing up for the wildest night of the year. Can you keep your grades up while mooning over the cute demon in the front row? Can you finally ask the witch in the back of the class to prom? You’ll have to work hard, It’s Complicated!

  Indy game design as it’s finest, It’s Complicated combines a big paper board, coloured markers and a system that hinges entirely on quirky, dysfunctional characters and their complex relationships. With no dice and aggressive scene-setting, what you say goes in the game, but getting what you want is going to be much, much more complicated. Character generation in play and giant sheet of paper for the relationship map will be provided. No dice necessary!

  Site: http://dissolutegames.wordpress.com/category/its-complicated/

Both Giger Counter Beta and It’s Complicated use big table-drawing maps and charts that’ll really hook people in as they go by. I always bring some props for Bliss Stage for the Controller to type on. And 3:16 gets a cool multi-band map with, maybe, some action figures on them to define scope.Everything comes with visual things to play with.

Of them all, I’m absolutely sure that It’s Complicated will be the hardest one to hook for. The rest have exceedingly violent content to help run them into people. Crazy.

Ah well, time for bed, but at least my notes are up.

Game was awesome and you can hear the results, recorded live, over on TalkShoe as The Hellworld Chronicles. Quite possibly the best game I’ve run in years, and that includes the Bliss Stage game that involved the giant Space Vagina underneath Stone Mountain.

No, you probably don’t want to ask too much about that.

I did promise to post the notes for the mission in the aftermath. This is that aftermath!

Aftermath

I think Corporal Andreeva is planning to murder Trooper Koch, but that’s the Sergeant’s problem not mine. Mine’s aliens, planets, and the Lunar Marauders’ superiors feeling vaguely miffed that they’re still alive.

As I mentioned last week and have been getting progressively more revved about, I’m going to run some 3:16 on Saturday afternoon. I’ll pin down the exact hour tomorrow afternoon, but for those already interested and as keyed as I am about my running something for the first in almost a year, read on!

I’ll be running it on TalkShoe because I really, really want to record the game for posterity and to have something to show to the original author with big shiny eyes and sharp, dagger-like teeth. This means that if you usually talk to me with Skype, you need to get a VoIP solution and get it set up for accessing TS. I suggest X-Lite as it’s what I use, so there’s at least a chance I can help you get it hooked up, and because it’s free. Plus, there’s already a rather nice tutorial for getting X-Lite working with TalkShoe that I’ve found very useful. Note that it does require some setup, so don’t leave this to the last minute! You can also use Skype’s dial-out or even the built in ShoePhone, I suppose … However you get there, get there! And give things a shake-down run before hand. Call into someone random’s show, give them a thrill. ;)

I’ll be running the gaming table using RPTools’ MapTool, for which I’ve already got player tokens made, counters, etc. Basically, all you need to do is go to the site and click on the MapTool 1.3.b37 link in the left-side nav-bar. (By Saturday the version may have updated again; we’ll be using whatever the most recent Development version is because I need some of the new token macro bits …) All you need to do is hit the link and if you have Java installed correctly on your system, it’ll download the installer and ask if you want to run it. You do. The Java install’ll pull the software, put a shortcut on your desktop, and start it up. At that point, you’re ready to roll!

At the time of the game, you’ll want to have MapTool already running when you call. Once we get hooked together, I’ll have you connect to my MapTool server and you’ll automatically pull the maps and the starting tokens. Everything from there, you’ll have me for. Aren’t you lucky?

If you want to go ahead and buy the PDF version of 3:16, it’s only $10 from IPR and I’m sure Gregor Hutton won’t object in the least. You won’t need it to play, however. I’ll get you through it. Trust me. No, really.

I’m seriously looking forward to playing this with you folk, and this looks like a great chance to get back into things with a great, cutting-edge indy game. I’m stoked! Whoot! No, seriously, whoot!

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.

Well ... Hell. If I have to be awake during the time the evil daystar is up, and I'm going to be up before it's up, I might as well use the time to do something creative.

This morning's project:

Convert Heroes into Primetime Adventures.

Heroes

Premise: A seemingly random selection of average people receive superpowers.

Season Length: 9 episodes.

Setting Conventions: Prime-time TV, with all the FCC regulation that entails, but a liberal hand with some gore.

Tone: Fairly serious, with issues of drug abuse, criminal operations, and child abandonment up-front.

The Cast

Isaac Mendez

Paints the Future, Heroin Addict, Simone Deveaux (love-triangle love interest)

Issue: Addiction (Heroin). Isaac believes he can only paint the future while high. He'd like to get clean, but feels like he's part of something bigger now.

Personal Set: Isaac's Loft Painting Studio

Hiro Nakamura

Bends Time and Space, Ando Masahashi (Japanese sariman sidekick and sane-person), Charlie Andrews (dead love-interest, brain-scooped by Sylar)

Issue: Heroism. Hiro really wants to be the comic ideal of the superhero. Unfortunately, the grit of reality keeps getting in the way.

Claire Bennet

Ultra-Healing, Ben (confidant and friend, AV geek), Mr Bennet (adoptive father and secretly involved in an organization devoted to mysterious ends)

Issue: Self-Worth. Claire fears that if people find out she's "different," they'll think she's a freak.

Personal Set: The High School.

Nathan Petrelli

Supersonic Flight, Politician, Linderman (crime boss)

Issue: Denial. Nathan is totally devoted to denying that he's different or heroic in any way.

Peter Petrelli

Power Sponge, Nurse, Simone Deveaux (love-triangle love interest)

Issue: Meaning. Peter wants to be more than just the "little brother" of the Mayor or Governor, he wants to do something important.

Niki Sanders

Superhuman Strength, Micah Sanders (Niki's son), "Jessica" (Niki's alter-ego, the more violent and vicious of the two)

Issue: Atonement. Niki's trying to make up for being a bad mother in her mind, trying to give Micah a decent life, and trying to deal with a sociopath in her head.

DL Sanders

Matter-Phasing, Criminal, Micah Sanders (son)

Issue: Atonement. DL wants to make it up to Micah that he got arrested and "disapeared" into the federal prison system.

Micah Sanders

Technopathy, Niki Sanders (mother), DL Hawkins (father)

Issue: Self-Worth. Micah's not exactly sure what he contributes to his life yet; he's just a kid. What next?

Matt Parkman

Telepathy, Cop, Audrey Hanson (FBI agent and sometime partner)

Issue: Self-Worth. Is he crazy? Is he useful? Is he, like Peter Parker before him, simply the universe's butt-boy?

Nemises

Mr Bennet

Secret Operative, Claire Bennet (daughter), Linderman (crime boss)

Syler

Telekinesis, Power Absorbtion, Mr Bennet (captor)

Just to throw some more stuff in the pool, here's a This Present Darkness-inspired set of Heroes.

"Reese"

Inhuman Gun-Skills, Doctor, John Q Public (personal nemesis)

Issue: Anger. Reese is trying to get revenge for all the abused women she's treated as a doctor over the years.

Personal Set: The ER where she works.

Alex Voynich

Blasphemous Transformation, Mythos Occultist, Haley Savage (Doc Savage's great-granddaughter, expert on ancient ruins, and annoying kid-sister)

Issue: Quest. Alex is looking for a secret method of removing his occult curse.

Personal Set: Any ancient occult ruin, anywhere.

Eric Thompson

Alien Physiology, Computer Programmer, John Doughman (imprisoned rogue superscientist)

Issue: Denial. Eric wants nothing more than to live a normal life.

You can blame She That Is Wicked for this one; I take no real responsibility.

Name

Jason Mullins
Mullet Man

Background

Jason Mullins was just a normal, everyday redneck, living in a trailer-home in rural north Georgia, drinking entirely too much Pabst Blue Ribbon and watching NASCAR whenever he could catch the time between working hard for his uncle's house framing company.

But that was before the rock fell.

Jason was the first on the crash site of the supposed "meteor," and so it was only he who saw the Grey crawl from the wreckage. Being a hospitable sort, Jason helped the dying creature free of the crater and, in gratitude, the alien creature passed it's life-force into the stunned good ol' boy. That power was somewhat incompatible with the human biology, however, in that Greys simply don't have hair. Instead, Jason's hair took on the powers of a Grey's intestinal cillia, becoming highly extensible, flexible, and able to act as additional grasping limbs. In addition, Jason's natural knowledges and abilities were magnified. He became a better race driver than Dale Ernheart (may he rest in peace), a better wrestler than the Undertaker, and the fastest redneck alive!

Jason was never the brightest bulb in the chandelier, but his simple-man ways and honest belief that life can be better for everyone if "we just sit right down and have a beer together" makes him one of the most hopeful and comfortable hypermen for the common man to sit down with.

When "in costume," Mullet Man wears a worn brown duster over a white strappy t-shirt, worn blue jeans, and worn brown boots. Embroidered on the back of the duster is a glow-in-the-dark stylized Grey head which is typically half covered by his mullet.

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.

Interesting post in my Roleplaying For Dummies Yahoo Group today:

How patient would you be with a player that doesn't seem to grasp the
mechanics of a system in a role playing game?

( Full Post Within )</u></font></a></span>

Yes, I had some thoughts:

Well, there's a difference between this:

How patient would you be with a player that doesn't seem to grasp the
mechanics of a system in a role playing game?

And this:

Quite honestly, I believe the problem was this girl was more familiar
with Kindred the Embraced than she was with Vampire the Masquerade.

The first is a question of mechanical resolution, which, if you were using the Storyteller d10 system, while not the most complicated system on Earth, is in places counter-intuitive, and the latter which is a much more damning problem of thinking Nosferatu just aren't that much more unattractive than bald, pale guys and that the operation of a Vampiric city generally involved posing on rooftops at night looking both pretty and like Heathcliff ... Well, that's an issue.

I can deal with folks who have trouble with systemic operations. It helps vastly that my choice of systems is generally so far down on the complexity scale that one would have to be an absolute imbecile not to have the core resolution operation well in hand. Someone can be forgiven for asking, "Say, what's the stat adds for a Rotschreck test again?" but it's harder to justify "Say, what Trait do I roll in combat, again?" when there's only three or four Traits on the sheet and one of them is "Kill Things With Great Efficiency." So, there's that.

If she doesn't understand the setting assumptions, though, that's a bigger problem, and it can spur from a couple of places. You might have drifted off "canon" in some ways without noticing it, and she's actually closer to the text than you are, even if you have a perfectly functioning game. You may simply have a different understanding of a multiply-perceptible setting issue (something that happens all the time in White Wolf properties because of their obsession with multi-viewpoint metaplots; they've become better about that). Or, she might just legitimately be a goon-head that needs a beating with the hardback leather-bound VtM release until she starts bruising in the shape of the Clan insignia.

If someone's breaking the dynamic for the players in any setup, for any reason, you effectively have two responses:

• Re-educate them, with a hammer or a soft word, your call.
• Remove them. Usually with a hammer.

Feelings don't really come into it. If you think she can be an overall positive addition to the group, and you think investment of time and effort is going to pay off more than you invest, re-educate. Otherwise, why jeopardize the dynamic of a functioning group?

And all that's true, as far as it goes, but there's another facet that's important, especially for online games.

The system you pick has to be simple enough that at any given decision point, it would be fast and easy to do what you want to do in the system, resolution-wise. That might be through extensive, well-indexed tables and charts being available online for your game ("OK, Frenzy, Rotschreck ... ah ha!") or because the system itself is simple and direct ("I have Good Self-Control, bumped down to Fair because of all the blood around, and I roll my 4dF ... Crap, Terrible! I Frenzy!"). If one or the other of those things are not true, then the game has a built-in explosive device that will take out the whole thing, if not today, tomorrow.

Oh, yes, the third option is to have no system at all. While a lot of "forum and chat-based RPG games" take that option, I find it's just about like combining the no system references and a complicated system in one place. You can make it work, but you're surfing on an explosive device that doesn't like you.

On the "things you might buy Alex for Christmas" list is ...

A HARDBACK RULESBOOK WITH THE FIRST EDITION COVER

This hardback edition commemorates the twenty-fifth anniversary of the release of Call of Cthulhu, sporting the cover illustration and a design evoking the look and tone of the first edition of the game. The interior is identical to the standard edition of the game available in game and book stores. The image below shows the front and back covers, plus the spine.

Am I likely to run it? Absolutely not; I cab't deal with the good ol' CoC percentile mechanic at this point in my life. Far too fiddly and crunchy for the setting, in my opinion.

But I have a copy of 1st ed Call of Cthulhu. It was the first RPG I ever ran on a consistent basis or, for that matter, at all, now that I think about it. It set the tone for a lot of my thinking (pro and con) about system and, in fact, game design. Plus, it's Chaosium, and they deserve more money for CoC purely for keeping it alive and prolific lo these many years.

One of these days I should really make a Cthulhu Conversion for one of my more favoured systems. But for now ... it's the 25th anniversary.

Well, I'm not sure it's fair to say I see the rules as a "necessary evil," given my obsession with discovering unified mechanical systems that hang together under stress, but ...

The one thing that threw me about this one was that I've been in the rarified air of game theoretic analysis so long I just couldn't decide what they meant by "realistic." "Conformant to reality as we know it" is the least useful definition I can think of; replace reality there with "genre expectation" or "shared spotlight" or any hundred other things and the question remains.

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.

Well, yes, AIT's system bites the wax tadpole. So, what other options are there?

Oh, c'mon, you just asked me for different system options! Are you crazy?

Let's start with Wushu, since it's the easiest system to design in, bar none.

Ryo Shinta
Occult Librarian (4), Vampire: Mental (3), Geomancy: Lure of Flames (5), Traditional Vampiric Weaknesses: Can't cross running water, stakes put them in torpor, vulnerable to fire and holy might, etc. (1)

Occult Librarian represents all the things the bookish occultist might need, including contacts for books, knowledge of obscure magical beasts and a certain amount of income from their licit or illicit trade.

Vampire: Mental gives one the general abilities of the vampire (strength, speed, etc) with a focus on the mental powers of such beasts, including entrancement, knowledge of more obscure things that they, in fact, lived through, inhuman ruthlessness, etc.

Geomancy: Lure of Flames is the particular field of sorcerous knowledge that Ryo has specialized in. The applications range from lighting a match with a fingertip to conjuring massive sheaths of fire which burn nothing of him.

Traditional Vampiric Weaknesses neatly packages up all the useful means for finding and tracking vampires. Whenever trying to oppose one of them or if one is brought to bear against him, the relevant Traits becomes 1.

And there you go; not only is the system itself more succinct, but its immensely more flexible for casting off all the burdensome crap that bogs larger systems down. Coupled with Wushu's "whatever you say goes" attitude toward Player power, you can have characters which do all the cool, big things of the most cinematic of the vampire stories and still be useful.

Example Conflict:

Ryo is surrounded by a group of cops who've stumbled into his feeding, after being on the run from the city's Scourge after a minor misunderstanding. The GM decides they represent a group of 8 point mooks; hardly a significant threat, more an excuse to show off.

"Ryo strikes a pose, fingers hooked and fangs bared (*), forcing the cops back a step, paling almost as white as his dead skin (*). With a sudden shout of power, his entire body bursts into a pillar of spinning blue flame (*), and he leaps toward the cops, arms spread, as if to embrace them (*). Two of the poor men stumble backwards over their own feet and start screaming (*), pissing their pants in terror (*)."

That's 6d total for this exchange. Ryo's player puts one die in Yin, trusting to his joss to succeed, and the other four in Yang for the attack. The GM decides that the bulk of the effect is sorcerous so the target number to roll at or under is 5. The Yin die succeeds, so the mooks don't take a point of Chi, and the five Yang dice come up with four successes. Looks like another round of conflict and the cops'll be taken care of.

Later Ryo and his Coterie stumble over a haunted house, filled with the screaming souls of hatred sneaking through a rift from the Underworld. Naturally, Ryo'd like to get a handle on this phenomenon.

"Flipping through an ancient text called 'Flesh-Renders Bite The Thumb' (*) and which is well-known in the occult circles for its findings in this matter (*), he finds a section on the social order of the Underworld (*), illustrated by strange diagrams which appear to be sketched in human blood (*)."

Since things aren't hugely stressed yet, Ryo's player only generates 4d for the check, planning to use it for dice in a pool to call up later. As it's entirely in the domain of the occult librarian, his target's 4. Two successes get banked from the research for him to pull up later in a tight spot.

To use Wushu as the core in a LARP, you'd really need a different system than d6 to convey the random vector. A 36 card deck made up of the numbers 1 - 6 repeated 6 times would probably be random enough to do. Shuffle, cut, and draw a card off for every detail of your embellishment during one turn of the Scene. Mooks get no cards, just are assumed that they do one success in damage every turn that needs to be defended. Burning a point of Chi lets you ignore one success of a test. Run out of Chi, and you go down (out of the Scene) when another test goes against you. Rebuild Chi by one point every Scene / an hour. Start with three Chi.

Ta da! Next, I'll have to go through a different system.

Acquisition of the moment: Shock: Social Science Fiction

It looks like the big movement in gaming for the last mini-cycle of independent RPG releases has been an increased emphasis on "setting as mechanic," or the idea that the setting may be malleable but it's just as important to describe mechanically as any character, as it's just as important. This is not a bad thing if you're talking about the experience of play, since it means that the environment is just as mechanically described as anything and, as a result, the mechanisms for more things than just how you kill or screw a target get considerable page-count, and as we all know, you can write all the impassioned defenses of your game being about the subtle interplay between horror and eroticism you like, but if 64 of the 96 pages are about how to stick a knife in something before you fuck the hole, then that's what the game's about.

Shock is not about that. (That'd be FATAL, if we're being picky.)

No, Shock is about something a little more subtle than that. Shock appears to be a game in which someone said, "Hey, you know, the whole cyberpunk genre is about the collision between the social fabric and the ability to edit the Self, and a lot of good SF is really all about the conflict between the known and the expected, so let's generalize that." While 2nd/3rd generation RPG design was about generalizing the resolution mechanic across intentional models, this goes a step more abstracted and generalizes the question of what the essential tensions of the setting are and how they interact through the medium of the characters.

You might be getting the feeling that this is pretty heady stuff. You'd be right. If it's any consolation, the cover (and the website) are a sort of bright, cheery orange.

The problem with games that make the construction of the shared world one of the features of the mechanics is that it makes it damned near impossible to talk about in anything but the most abstract terms, unless you reify the experience into a simulated one, which leads to making the usual kind of category errors one makes when trying to pretend to be other people. It's hard. And not only that, it never sounds quite right.

Nevertheless, the quick run-down goes like this:

• Figure out what kind of game you're going to play.

Basic things. Era, general technology, etc. You want an ultra-far future dystopian nightmare in Space? You'd be playing Chronicles of Riddick, but you'd be playing a perfect setting appropriate for Shock. (In fact, it's so perfect we'll just use the Riddickverse as our play example.) Want 19th century steampunk? No problem. Just agree up front.

• Decide how long the story should be.

One-shot session or multi-session extended bit? You need to know this to set the number of Credits the Antagonist characters get, and since once your Antagonist is under 5 Credits they start going for the jugular on resolving your Story Goal, well ... There y'go.

• Put together The Grid.

This is where Shock goes off the map and into the setting-design mechanics for the social group.

The Grid is made up of Social Issues down the left and Shocks along the top. Issues are things that the group wants to deal with, behind, around, or on top of. Things like "slavery" or "corporate ownership of ideas" or "liberal group-think" or what-not. Shocks are pretty easily summed up as "how the setting differs from our universe." Aliens invading? Shock. Mind-transfers? Shock. Cybernetic enhancements? Shock. They're the "science fiction" part of the setting. Each Issue and each Shock has someone that "owns" it and essentially gets to have final say about the details of that thing in a general way if it comes up during play.

Somewhat implicitly, you need to have a number of Issues times the number of Shocks greater than the number of players because the actual Protagonists exist on the intersection of Issues and Shocks on the Grid. The text says that you can either have final say on an Issue/Shock or a Protagonist that confronts it, but that seems kind of impossible unless you want a different Shock for every player at the table, and that starts getting into a little too much shock for some kinds of setting. Worth keeping in mind, however.

So, for the Riddickverse, we might have:

Which sets us up nicely for an easy four player game. Where are the other major players? Antagonists. But we'll get there.

• Define your Praxis.

The whazzat? The Praxis are the at-odds ways that characters deal with the universe. They're, at heart, not necessarily what the events are about but they are what the characters tend to be about and set up a lot of the central decision conflicts. You get two opposed Praxis that the table has to agree on.

Examples, man, examples!

Sticking with our example setting:

The Praxis define the ways in which characters can react to conflicts. By defining your Praxis interestingly up front, you can define a lot of what the dynamic will be about.

• Create your Protagonist.

The part everyone has been waiting for, though, frankly, after having defined so much of the world, it's not really that huge a deal. By this point, you know what their hinge issues are likely going to be and you've got a pretty good idea where you're going.

Creating a Protag basically just means deciding what their ratings on the Praxis are (the Fulcrums, or how much they favour one side or another in terms of solving problems, and creating Features and Links. Features define how many dice you roll in conflicts and pretty much define things about the character. Links are things that the character's connected to, but as importantly things they can imperil or threaten in exchange for a re-roll on a challenge test.

So, continuing with Riddick:

Features: Shined Eyes, Unmatched Agility

Links: His Freedom

Story Goal: Shake the Law

Which means he's heavily biased toward violence, pretty heavily pushed toward rebellion and has 3 Features (and thus, rolls 3 dice). The text suggests only defining two Features and one Link at the start of play and pick one more soon after play starts. I think that's good suggesting.

(Of course, we know that Riddick accomplishes his Goal, but only after blowing enough things that he has to essentially give up his freedom to make it happen. Such is the fate of the tragic protagonist.)

• Create the Antagonist.

Big hook here? You don't create your Antagonist, the person on your left does. You get to name them but the person on your left sets their Praxis and defines their Features, though generally informed about what you've said you'd like to face. And the person on your left plays your Antagonist, reminiscent of the Shadow rules in Wraith.

Riddick's Antagonist might be the Lord Marshal, but it certainly would be more interesting to define it as the Necromongers as an entire group. Nothing keeps one from doing so, and thus the Lord Marshal and the Necromonger fleets could just be story elaboration (or Minutae, which are just game-mechanic created bits of info about the greater setting or Shocks). Vaako's Antagonist is clearly Dame Vaako, the conniving bitch.

Antagonists get Credits with which to buy dice during conflicts, so they don't get Links. They do have Features.

And that's pretty much it. You have a Grid, you have the Praxis Scales, you have a Protagonist and Antagonist (abbreviated to *Tagonist in the text, much to my amusement), and you're in.

Conflict resolution? Oh, yes, I suppose it needs to be discussed.

Conflict resolution in Shock is built on the double-active intent-declaration model. That is, it's not a to-and-fro action-declaration system, ie. "I hit him," but rather the player declares the intent of the entire confrontation up front ("I want to humiliate Lord Vaako in public" or "I want to kill the entire mercenary group") and then it's resolved. Both characters (usually Protag and Antag) declare active intents, and it's textually limited that both have to be possible outcomes, or neither, or one and not the other; declared intents cannot directly conflict. Likewise, it's limited that the intents cannot resolve the Story Goal of the Protag until and unless the Antag has 5 Credits or fewer ... in which case they have to try and resolve the Story Goal.

In the scene where Riddick faces the Lord Marshal in combat, his intent may very well have been "I want to revenge Kyra on the Necromongers" and the Necromongers' intent could well be "Riddick should be under our control." And in the ensuing dice nightmare, both win.

Once declared, you pick up a number of dice equal to either your Features or the Credits you (as Antag) want to spend, divided between d10's and d4's. d10's are your active boost to yourself, d4's modify your opponent's roll. Decide which Praxis Scale value you're trying to aim for (violence versus negotiation) and try to roll over your fulcrum for that Praxis if it's on top, under if it's on bottom. And if it's equal to the fulcrum? The stakes escalate, becoming more important or more intense. A mild beat-down might go to maiming, or murder. Public humiliation might lead to long-term social scorn, etc. The volume goes up. Reroll your d10s and the opponent's d4s.

Lose the conflict? Gain a Feature from it, which adds to the dice you'll roll next time. Not involved in the conflict? you can toss a d4 at either side for the cost of creating Minutae which bear on the current conflict ("The Lord Marshal can warp time in his passage") or call on one already established ("Riddick's a disgustingly able knife-fighter"). Lose and really didn't want to? Call on your Link and get a total re-roll -- at the cost of transforming your Link if the roll goes sour. Risked your Faith in God on that? Maybe you're an atheist, or you decided another deity was for you, or the loss was too much to take and you become a hyper-fundamentalist just looking for a bomb-belt to strap on to prove yourself.

And that's it. No detailed damage charts, no hundred pages of left-handed earspoons or grain-to-cartridge-to-stopping-power lists. The text is spent on focusing on the issues and pillars of the experience, on shaping the tone and intent of the play to a desired end.

As is stated at the beginning, there are only two static situations in Shock play. The first is at the beginning of the game, which the Antagonist immediately pushes the Protagonist out of (the ship is boarded, aliens invade, your wife is disappointed with your political acumen), and the other is at the very end with the Story Goal staring you in the face. Everything else has to be dynamic, has to have intents driving the situation to be something different. Intents are never defensive, they're always active, never "I dodge his fire" but "I leave this part of the city" with all that entails.

It's a good dynamic.

Final rating: A+ (the layout and typography were fantastic)

I get the damned oddest spam.

Universal Psychic Guild is a world wide organization devoted to making
your life happier and more successful. "Voted the Number 1 Psychic
web site in the world" The Universal Psychic Guild's guarantee: If
you are not happy with your psychic reading, if you did not receive
accurate answers, if you did not receive an answer to any of your
questions, we will give you your money back as well as a FREE psychic
reading. That's right your money back PLUS a FREE psychic reading.
Try our online Psychic Reading now at
http://www.psychicguild.com/readings_email.php

OK, so ... you want me to contact an entire guild of professional psychics (possibly led by the Soverign, David Bowie), and if I'm not happy with the answers I get, you'll give me my money back plus a free psychic reading from the psychic guild that already left me unhappy.

As one can say about pretty much every psychic scam, "Didn't they see that one coming?"

That said ... I feel a perverse inspiration.

Name: The Guild of Psychics

Description:

Composed of dozens of psychic mediums worldwide, the Guild of Psychics act as a clearinghouse for insider information on the Average Joe. Using their thousands of contacts, they map the demographics of developed nations in immense detail, turning it into the most potent tool for advertising and political manipulation on Earth. Oh, yes, and they can see the future. Sometimes. Kind of.

Italicized entries are Powers.

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.

I just finished reading Universalis, Revised Edition.

I think my brain hurts. But not in the bad way.

Remember all that verbiage I wrote about Capes, and it's highly dynamic structure and the relative freedom you have when you play to define things abstractly as you go?

Multiply all that by about fifteen, and you have Universalis.

This is a game where your initial activity with your group is not to discuss what setting you've decided on, but to start defining exactly what that setting is, collaboratively and competitively, by the investment of a limited supply of resource tokens (Coins). One person might say they want a modern game. The next might say they want it set in London. The next might say they absolutely do not want any Monty Python jokes or references. (Yes, that's a legitimate Tenet to add to the game. I can see the place of it.) The next might say he wants it to be a Zombie Apocalypse(tm)! And the first might clear her throat and say, "I think I'll Challenge that ..."

This is where things get weird / interesting, because Universalis doesn't involve mechanics which define what a character can do, but rather it defines mechanics for resolving conflicts between authors. In other threads in the roleplayers community, I've referenced the implicit difference between systems which resolve the result of action versus systems which resolve issues of effect, and why the latter work better for creating collaborative content. Universalis falls firmly into the latter camp, like it's inheritor, Capes, and focuses almost entirely on issues in the meta-game space that have repurcussion in the game space.

I'll try and clarify that for those who don't speak tired Illithid:

Universalis focuses on resolving the issues between authors at the table collaboratively forming the ongoing narrative. The bidding mechanic exists to ration and maintain the abstract of "story control" between Players. The dice involved in the Complication resolution serve to introduce a bit of statistical deviation in a scope where "secret bidding" would be more awkward and slower if more mechanically consistent. Ultimately, the mechanics exist to resolve the question of authorial control, not character ability. Authors, of course, can choose to have characters they care about fail if it suits their desires.

The key equivalence in Universalis is 1 Coin = 1 die = 1 Fact = 1 Tenet = 1 Component (location, thing, character) = 1 Rule Gimmick.

Yes, that's right, Universalis is post-modern enough to include mechanical support for modifying it's own mechanical support.

For example, copying from the Universalis web site, and finding an idea that'll seem strangely familiar to my readers:

Plot Pools
Submitted by Mike Holmes

If you have a particular idea for a subplot or even main plot that you want to ensure has a life of it's own, give it a Plot Pool. Depending on how important the plot, give it between ten and fifty Coins from the Bank. Any player may, on their turn, spend up to two of these Coins per scene so long as their spent in a way that relates to developing the action or backstory of the plot with which they are associated.

OPTION
Adjust the rate of spending, increasing the number of Coins per scene to bring a Plot to the forefront, or reducing the rate to draw its conclusion out.

That's a rather egregious example. Others involve things like introducing the ability to establish weather effect Traits on an entire group by expending only one Coin per Trait rather than one for each Trait on every Character. There are a good dozen or more given in the book, but you'll figure out the best way to use them is just make up what you want on the fly.

That's what Universalis is about, dynamic creation is pretty much everything. Character generation is not a discrete structure, as Characters are just one more Component that can be involved in a given Scene. Traits can be added and removed at a lightning pace, and given there's no inherent ownership involved in any of the objects in a Univeralis Scene, like Capes, possession is nine-tenths of rewriting the whole thing from scratch. Except in U, that's literally true. Unlike Capes, characters and things can't reasonably be pre-designed and deployed before a U game. They appear to best and properly created and enhanced on the fly. It seems rare that a given character will remain unchanged even from one Scene they appear in to another.

Quick example: You Control the Character "Monty Crisco," the big-name porn star. You've just lost a Complication where your rival, "Boee George" brought a female co-star to a rousing real climax. As one of the Bonus Dice they're assigning, he gives you the additional Traits "Performance Anxiety" and "Open Scratches on His Back" which can be used against you if you enter another Complication where they'd be detrimental.

Interestingly, possessing both Traits makes you more Important, and thus harder to remove that Character from the story, as to do so you have to burn Coins equal to Importance, and Importance is the sum total of all the Traits on a thing ... even negative ones.

The idea of being able to invoke the use of Traits on the constructs which oppose you in a conflict is wonderfully perverse. I think it might be my favourite part of the system. Bruce Willis might have "Beat All to Hell" x6 by the end of a movie, but that just makes him that much harder to take out and he can certainly use that as motivation, himself.

What I'd really like to try running with Universalis at some point is giant robot soap opera, but I fear finding the right group for that would require folks that like both giant robots and soap opera. :)

Overall score: A+

You know ... I kinda want to run this now, along with Abomination Street, the Lovecraft/Sesame Street crossover.

So, Anime Weekend Atlanta requires I go diurnal for the weekend. Probably not a bad idea, given I'll be wrestling with the Day People, looking for a new job to get. So, I'll be going to bed here shortly, just me and my Ambien CR.

Glorious Ambien CR.

We have dinners planned for all three nights. If you'll be at the Con, or even in the area, and want to attend, give me a buzz or a text on my cell. You do have my cell, right?

I'm also looking at running Capes (anime superhero madness, guest-starring The Lavender Ranger), Cobras in the Cockpit, and possibly Doom: the Board-game. I'll bring a few extra things (undoubtedly My Life With Master included), but if I see anyone running Hearts, Swords, and Flowers ... I'll give them a cookie, and offer to sign the book. Because, Hades below knows, I'll never see a dime for all I sunk into it.

If there are any special requests for gamage, get them in. Potentials include octaNe, Wushu, and whatever I can throw together from some Fudge dice.

Source: Heather

Source interest: belly dancing

I've been meaning to use octaNe for something for quite a while. I love it when a plan comes together. The best part of octaNe is coming up with fun skills and descriptors for stats. Possibly of equal fun is it's in the rules that you describe your character with only three details, the rest can be filled in as you go in play.

Mmm, minimalist design.

Igora Massive

Description: Built like a brick shithouse, with cold green eyes that stare right through you, and hips that just won't quit.

Role: Bad-ass Mofo'

Mode: Psychotronic

Stamping Grounds: The Wasteland, Lost Vegas

Styles: Daring (2), Charm (1)

Gear: Golden sword (major), veils and clinky skimpy outfits

Skills: Pretty Face, Mad Kung-Fu Skillz, Gunning Down Poor Bastards, Pure Goddamn Coolness, Shake It Like a Polaroid Picture (Belly Dance), Acrobatic Like a Jumping Snake, Could Seduce a Priest

Background: She left the village in the wastes with little more than some shiny panties, a big golden sword (sometimes carried on her head), and good genes, but now she's looking for action in Lost Vegas and God-forbid you get in this girl's way! She'll give you a hard fuckin', and seldom in the way you were looking forward to!

Source: Theodora

Source Interest: drag queens

I'm running out of simple RPGs, here. Seriously, it gets harder to do one of these every time. Next system: Risus, the Anything RPG.

Yes, I'm going to Hell with the PC contingent for this one.

Ralph "Randi" Humbert
Vampire Drag Queen

Tall, redheaded, and just a bit on the lanky side, Randi has made a name for herself on the drag queen circuit, belting out old favourites from musical theatre with more gusto than the old broads had, themselves. Less known is that Randi uses these same tours as a mobile feeding platform, sating her terrible thirst for blood on the fag hags and cruisers in the audience. Randi isn't gay, but she's certainly not above playing the part for a juicy young morsel.

Drag Queen (4), Vampire (3), Singer (3)

Hook: Randi's just finished her rousing Lisa Minelli set when Victor Van Helsing, great great grandson of the legendary Van Helsing comes in the caberet's door. And Victor's wearing the same dress!

Source: The Guy That Wrote This

Source interest: tarot

Because it's obscure ... this is a character for Don't Rest Your Head. Because this isn't something I've blurbed before, let me reference a bit from its website:

You can't sleep. It started like that for all of us, back when we were garden variety insomniacs. Maybe you had nightmares (God knows we all do now), or maybe you just had problems that wouldn't let you sleep. Hell, maybe you were just over-caffienated. But then something clicked.

That was when you took a long walk down the streets of the Mad City, stopped being a Sleeper, and started being Awake. But that click you heard wasn't from the secret world snapping into place. It was the sound of the Nightmares flicking off the safety and pointing a gun at your head.

They can smell you. The Paper Boys are closing in, and you'd better pray you don't become a headline. You're chum in the water, my friend, and it's time you got ready for it... before the clock chimes thirteen again. Now that you're one of us, there's just one simple rule left that must dominate your life.

Stay Awake. Don't Rest Your Head.

Don't Rest Your Head is a sleek, dangerous little game, where your players are all insomniac protagonists with superpowers, fighting -- and using -- exhaustion and madness to stay alive, and awake for just one more night, in a reality gone way wrong called the Mad City. It features its own system, and is contained entirely within one book.

My name is Vykos Allen.

And I am a con man on the run.

What's been keeping you awake?

I've been running a successful series of scams on little old ladies and vulnerable young ones, and taking whatever I want of them whenever I can. But its starting to get to me, and there are a few people after me, looking for blood. Hard to sleep looking over your shoulder.

What just happened to you?

The husband of a woman I gave some sweet, sweet boning to after a seance where I "channeled" her dead kid shot me dead in the face with a shotgun. And I'm still here, unscratched.

What's on the surface?

People think I dress impeccably, with the finest Saville row suits and a charming little affected straight cane. The English accent's fake, but suckers lap it up. People look at me and think "money" and erudition. The tarot cards and crystal balls lead people to trust me.

What lies beneath?

I was born in the Bronx downhill from the ghetto, and learned Three Card Monty at the same age. I've been scamming since my teens, and I don't give a rat's about other people so much as my own sweet ass. Real knowledge of the mysteries of life give me a bigger boner than crying women, though; finding out the secrets of the universe would be the life.

What's your path?

What I really want is to be a true font of knowledge, but I don't admit it, even to myself. Finding out secrets is worth risking my life for, and the Truth about what it really all means is far better than money.

Responses:

Fight

Flight [] [] []

Talents:

Exhaustion Talent: Cold Reading People

Vykos is an expert at reading peoples' intent, their body language, and making incredibly astute guesses based on very little information, as well as vaguing up responses so they believe he's said more than he really did.

Madness Talent: Cartomancy

When the Mad City comes calling and Vykos is Awake, he really can tell the future, accurately, with the cards. Any cards, be it poker decks or Hallmark, just so long as they can be shuffled and pulled randomly.

Source: Stormy Weather

Source interest: "the fairness doctrine," serial killers

Premise:

The protagonists are members of The Fairness Doctrine, a secret ad hoc organization of serial killer survivors and the family of victims. Their self-appointed job is to hunt down and stop serial killers before the authorities can get there, engaging in thematically appropriate vigilante justice.

5 episode season, one pilot episode.

Setting Conventions:

Modern US eastern seaboard. Violence will be extremely graphic and occasionally gratuitous, while sex will be mainly off-screen. The seedy underbelly of suburban society should always be forefront, while the Authorities are portrayed as blue-collar heroes doing their jobs, just at odds with the needs and desires of the protagonists.

Tone:

Dark, gritty, and realistic. Dark humour is certainly applicable, but silly or cartoonish humour is not. Characters are generally average folk from all walks of life caught in bad situations.

The Cast:

Concept:

All the protagonists are people touched by serial killers in some way, either having survived an attack or having a family member / loved one killed by a serial killer.

The central protagonist starts as Bunny Ramiz, a PI whose sister was murdered by a killer called "Teeth."

---

Bunny Ramiz
Vengeful Detective

Issue: Vengeance on "Teeth" and, by extension, all serial killers, everywhere.

Traits:

Private Dick: Bunny is the epitome of the hard-bitten private dick. She knows bad people in bad places, knows how to dig up the dirt, and run a stake-out. With a phone call, she can wheedle info from the police or the local crime boss.

Trey Vander: Oldest friend of Bunny that she still stays in contact with, Trey bartends at a club called "The Barrier" in Virginia. Because FBI and other federal types frequent the club, Trey often has inside info.

Wolf Ramiz: Bunny's young nephew (14), Wolf was left to Bunny's custody after her sister's murder. Wolf considers himself "old enough" for pretty much anything, and Bunny has to ballance her quest for revenge against the need to be Wolf's guardian.

Personal Set:

An old, creased picture of her sister. Bunny pulls it out when she needs reassurance or focus.

Source: Max

Source interest: entropy

Source: Gen Lang

Source Interest: waifs

Kid Venture
Street-Smart Waif

Born on the street and raring to take a bite out of the Big Apple, Kid Venture got his start by hanging around with Doc Ravage and his crew of adventurers after his exposure to nuclear fall-out from the Trinity tests, as side-kick and scrappy youngster. After a few years, however, Venture decided that his personal bugaboo was crime on the streets and the men who made it happen. Barely 16, the Kid came back to New York and started assembling a group of savvy street-punks who shared his distaste for criminals.

Traits:

Street-Savvy 5

A child of the streets from the age of five, Kid Venture knows how to fight dirty, work the underworld, and understands who's the lynchpins in the grit.

Atomic Speedster 5

Fallout from Trinity gave Kid Venture the ability to move as fast as radiation! He often uses this power to dodge punches, zip across town, or other feats.

Fifth-Street Irregulars 3

The Fifth-Street Irregulars are an ad hoc bunch of street kids who Kid Venture can call on at need. They can provide muscle, eyes and ears, or just a wall of young flesh.

Investigation 3

Venture knows how to shake down adults for their spare info, put it together, and make solid deductions.

"Just a Kid" 1

If you con't know him, odds are you don't respect him.

Lifted bodily (and mutated slightly) from Elephant Sack, because I've been slack on writing lately.

Since I didn't actually get to run My Life With Master at D*C, I thought I might post a few of the characters as I envisioned they might be and some notes that were floating around my head.

Skullcrusher Mountain

Inspiration

Skullcrusher Mountain

Welcome to my secret lair on Skullcrusher Mountain
I hope that you’ve enjoyed your stay so far
I see you’ve met my assistant Scarface
His appearance is quite disturbing
But I assure you he’s harmless enough
He’s a sweetheart, calls me master
And he has a way of finding pretty things and bringing them to me

( Read more... )</u></font></a></span>

Master

Antoine Marsepain M.D. (Brain / Feeder)

Description and Background:

Antoine Marsepain graduated from the university of medicine in Antwerp near the top of his class, his reputation amongst the teachers and students was sterling, and no one had a bad word to say of the young man. That was, until the accident he suffered when a young woman of his acquaintance struck him violently as he attempted to rape her. She persisted with her untoward response until Antoine was driven out into the street, where he was run down by a handsome carriage. Dragging himself out of the muck of the gutter, he nearly bled to death and his limbs were set awkwardly by a near-quack in a neighboring hovel, leaving him with twisted, spindly limbs, a gaunt, pale, and hollowed visage that never really recovered, the inability to move about without pain, and a burning desire to be accepted by women everywhere as their protector and saviour, just before using and consuming them for his momentary gratification.

Wants:

The approval of the "beautiful people," as a member of their elite and a desirable sexual partner.

Needs:

A supply of beautiful sexual trophies, protectors, gifts, flatterers.

The Outsiders:

A coterie of the beautiful and the rich. Their main interests are always themselves and occasionally whether or not someone is worthy of being considered one of them. In behaviour they are barbaric while offering the trappings of the most refined and effete.

Fear: 5

Reason: 4

Minions

Scarface

Description:

A hulking, man-ape of a being, Scarface was cast out of the village below Skullcrusher after accidentally killing a girl with a hug, and his face was beaten and cut savagely by the expulsive mob. Antoine found him outside the castle atop the mountain and nursed the poor thing back to health, earning Scarface's eternal gratitude. Of course, Antoine's primary interest lies in using Scarface to acquire beautiful women and girls to impress himself upon.

Self-Loathing: 3

Weariness: 0

More Than Human:

Inhuman strength and physical power, except against men.

Less Than Human:

Hideously ugly and repulsive, except when seen with a child.

Connections:

Infatuated with the sister of the girl he accidentally killed.

Often feeds a stray dog that wanders in the forest.

Half-Pony, Half-Monkey Monster

Description:

Constructed by Antoine as a gift for a potential paramour, the HPHMM is a terrifying stitched-together thing that barely seems coherent, yet manages to hang together. Not quite self-aware enough to despise it's existence, it nevertheless manages to want some degree of acceptance or, at least, to be put out of others' misery with all speed. Antoine sometimes uses the HPHMM as either a threat or "reward" when courting.

Self-Loathing: 0

Weariness: 3

More Than Human:

Invisible to sight, except when standing on or under stone.

Less Than Human:

Obviously an abomination in the eyes of Man and God, except at night.

Connections:

A blind child in the village which thinks it's just a horse and sometimes feeds it apples.

An old man who wanders in the forest by the stone stables.

Wolfram

Description:

Four-feet tall, hunched, and covered with light grey fur, Wolfram is one of the few experiments that Antoine has engaged in that turned out to not end up in the basement of the castle, screaming in constant pain. Electrifying wolf and human tissue together in a crucible, he managed to create a fetal mass which he implanted into the womb of one of the pretty things Scarface brought in. Having ripped it's way out of the girl's belly, Antoine doted on the feral thing until it was old enough to run on it's own, whereupon Antoine turned him out to the snows. Wolfram now leads the wolf packs on the mountain at the Master's cruel bidding.

Self-Loathing: 2

Weariness: 1

More Than Human:

Faster than the eye can follow, save when in an urban environment.

Less Than Human:

Cannot communicate, except as an animal might.

Connections:

The forest-dog, which believes Wolfram to be it's pack alpha.

The village harlot, Ella, who feeds him scraps.

Ilsa

Description:

Not every woman that Antoine has abducted and abused has died under his tender ministrations, or been used in experiments, or gone insane under the strain. Alright, yes, they have; Ilsa is a representative of the last group. Her mind broken open and ravaged just as her body was, Ilsa became slavishly devoted to Antoine, willing to accept the most perverse abasements just to continue being near him. Antoine, of course, considers nothing less his due and Ilsa's ongoing devotion is never acknowledged or commented upon even in its hideous excess. Still beautiful, despite her madness, Ilsa lives in the castle and breathes at Antoine's command.

Self-Loathing: 1

Weariness: 2

More Than Human:

Incredible, radiant beauty, except when she speaks.

Less Than Human:

Emotionless, except when expressing an extreme.

Connections:

Her father, who still lives in the village.

The mayor's son, who is a beautiful blonde Adonnis.

Hopefully, I'll get a chance to run MLWM at some point. It has a lot of potential to be exceedingly rewarding for my twisted nature.

Lifted from the Dark Conspiracy ML, in a post by Lee Williams (no relation):

Yoinked from the Delta Green list:

"The gun nut in your group says he wants to carry a shotgun and a pistol under a
trench coat. Referee disallows the idea, thinking there's no way to do that.

Then the gun nut shows you this...."

http://www.andrewsleather.com/firepower.htm

Cool no?

I just love stuff like this. In fact, if I were more of a costuming geek, I'd feel compelled to buy something like this, just for the cool combination with the inevitable sweep of the black trenchcoat.

I'm such a geek.

I just needed a quick read to suck up an hour or so of my time, so plucked this thin folio off my To Be Read shelf and started reading through it.

Then I did a double take, because it was breaking my brain.

Night of the Ninja, by Tom Wall and Standford Tuey. The subtitle is Reality Role Playing Game. That's right, it purports to model the reality of Real Ninja Action, busting out the weird and obscure weapons and the jumping and the leaping and the bad-assery.

Publication date: 1986.

Yes, I have here a twenty year old RPG. And if anyone ever asks you what's "really" killing the RPG industry, you might mention to them that I just plucked a twenty year old RPG off my shelf, read through it, was entertained, and briefly considered the advantages of giving it a spin, in all its BFACA (BoldFace All-Caps Acronym) glory. (Hey, it was 1986. For the time, a d100 system with relatively simple resolution mechanisms was minimalist design. And all in only 68 pages.) The fact that, effectively, RPGs never really go away, no matter how limited the print run nor obscure the subject matter, means that there's an ever-shrinking pool of target genre niches that haven't been done better before. New editions continue and will continue competing with their previous editions -- and if you don't think so, you never dealt with Mage 2nd zealots vs 3rd crusaders.

Don't even get me started on NuMage.

The shift for small publishers into PDF and PoD systems simply makes things worse.

You know what really amplifies both effects? The increasing simplicity in searching for and locating such materials. Google is the Lord of Finding Shit. If you make that your first stop whenever you're thinking about buying something -- and these days, who doesn't? -- you're likely to find something other folks like much better than what you were considering and did a point-by-point comparison review besides.

The solution? There really isn't one. Its endemic to any market where the market's memory keeps getting artificially extended by technology. The music market has it even worse, since while a 2nd Wave RPG design still is reasonably serviceable, the latest system mechanic designs have decades more polish, music still hasn't evolved to the point where it measurably gets better as you go. The upshot is that creators in all such markets just have to expect to work against an ever-deepening pool of competitors, sometimes the inhabitants are themselves.

I have several bad habits. Among those habits is having a certain distaste for certain segments of the gaming industry and, moreover, certain members of those elements which really get up my ass because they haven't quite wrapped their heads around the fact that, no matter how much you beat your gums, you don't get traction in the real world that way, save by actually doing. You have to keep doing, though, or you fall behind.

Chief exemplar of that dire state is Ron Edwards, author of Sorcerer and Trollbabes. Ron would pretty much have you believe that he, single-handedly, is responsible for both creating the indie RPG movement and the most important theory in art, saving gamer-kind from brain damage caused by other, lesser, games.

No, seriously, that's what he thinks.

So, its in that knowledge that I read and post at The Forge, the nest of the Cult of Edwards and where, yes, I'm aware, he is a moderator on several fora. I really enjoy the individual game fora for Capes and Primetime Adventures, where Edwards has neither sway nor interest in treading (as it seems neither Matt Wilson nor Tony Lower-Basch make proper obeisance before the Great Man; an attitude I can embrace), but I do read Actual Play and Playtesting, because, darn it, I like to know what other folk are doing.

Some of them, it seems, are playing Shadowrun and getting pissy because the gun-bunny types are having fun and they're not.

You know me. I've never been one to suffer fools gladly. I hardly suffer fools to live, much less gladly, so I have a certain number of pointed responses in the ensuing thread, but its noteworthy to point out that, for once, I'm not exactly alone in my feelings on the matters. There are several other posters and respondents, and we pretty much come to the consensus that the issue is social more than systemic, though SR doesn't exactly prioritize the kind of play the guy seems to want to get out of it. Oh, yeah, and his GM sucks. But things were pretty much winding down because, really, we've all said about as much as we can about the guy's direct problem and things have settled to that level of low bubble that suggests a few folks have some refinements to add, but the salient points are touched.

And then Edwards comes in.

All right, that's enough.

There is way too much implied ownership over Shadowrun in this thread. Everyone's prancing about talking about the way "it's" played and what characters are right or not right for "it" in the most vague-ass, nonconstructive way possible.

Get back to the thread topic. This one guy's game. This one play-group. This one composition of issues which were raised at the beginning. Next meatbag who sounds off about how "in Shadowrun, this kind of character is good for blah blah," that's the meatbag I'm gonna teach which ass cheek is which, with Vibrum soles.

You! The one who started this thread! Front and center! Describe an actual session of play.

Best, Ron

I really hate people who are more arrogant than I am. I really hate "moderators" who ignore the fact that others have actually made significant contributions to the thread and wave it away as if the electrons never died to reproduce their words because he doesn't like them. Mix the two, and you have a recipe for me trying to get myself kicked off The Forge.

(The following is probably more meaningful if you know that one of the great battle-cries of The Forge and Edwards' brand of gaming theory is "System matters!" That's with the exclamation-mark, by the way. Its become a mantra of sorts. Thus, my invocation of it is akin to taking one of Edwards' hands, thwacking him across the face with it hard enough to bruise, and saying, "Why are you hitting yourself?" Nothing pleases so much as rubbing an animal's nose in its own poo.)

Quote from: Ron Edwards on Today at 04:29:03 PM

There is way too much implied ownership over Shadowrun in this thread. Everyone's prancing about talking about the way "it's" played and what characters are right or not right for "it" in the most vague-ass, nonconstructive way possible.

That's actually funny, Ron, since on more than one occasion you've defended the statement "System matters!" If system matters, then its perfectly valid to talk about what it matters, what it supports, and what it undermines, both intrinsically and in terms of genre and thematic appropriateness. Or will you now pronounce "System doesn't matter!" and bring the Forge into a New Age of Enlightenment(tm)?

There's no prancing here. We're bringing "it" to the table and saying exactly what we mean. If anything, this thread has been a focus of candor and straightforward statement, with little to nothing in the way of prancing. "SR doesn't do that well, and the genre in general doesn't focus on those issues" is not only not "vague-ass," its true. You may not like the answers, and you may dispute the truth, but you cannot defend the position that its been anything but us responding to Precious' original post in an honest, straightforward way.

Well, you could, but you'd look goofy.

The reason we're not carrying on at length about what you might construe as constructive is that pretty much anyone that's cared to so far has agreed, for the most part. Precious needs to step up and deal with the issue out of the game. Its not an issue, at core, about gameplay. Its about the social context of the group and its social interactions, with a smidge side of story-affect expectations. But having been said, there's more stuff to talk about actual play of SR and cyber-genre games in general, and some of us are exploring those indirectly.

You might not find those interesting. Fine, don't read the thread anymore. It remains about "Actual Play," you're just not interested. Fair enough.

Quote from: Ron Edwards on Today at 04:29:03 PM

Get back to the thread topic. This one guy's game. This one play-group. This one composition of issues which were raised at the beginning. Next meatbag who sounds off about how "in Shadowrun, this kind of character is good for blah blah," that's the meatbag I'm gonna teach which ass cheek is which, with Vibrum soles.

Which we disposed of neatly, because "system matters," and further "genre matters."

You may have Vibrum soles, but no need to show off your Mister Snake in the forum just to flex the moderatorship, Ron. You could, possibly, actually contribute something meaningful related to the original post, I reckon, because its not as if Precious hasn't posted enough to actually talk about.

chadu has some experience with dorks making sure you can't engage folks in a public forum because you don't get down on your knees and give them the tongue-worship they think they deserve. His travails with RPGNet probably deserve to be entered into the annals of gaming history as a cautionary talk about dealing with dumb-asses. I can but aspire to his mastery of the field, but I think I'm working my way along the ledge to that general area.

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

chadu has produced the most brilliant of RPG scenarios.

Snakes on a Plane: the Adventure

C'mon, folks, there's snakes! On a plane! Its the perfect movie, and the perfect adventure.

Oooh, I've finally been moderated by Ron Edwards at the Forge!

Mind you, its exactly on a subject and in a way that reminds me why I've largely disdained and ridiculed the place for, well, years.

Key line:

Zamiel, your post is the problem. Gareth did not say "awful and abominable and wrong," when he wrote "alien and unacceptable" to him. Quit defending against perceived insult, especially on others' behalf.

I mean, ignore the utter lack of reading comprehension involved in not catching the slightly mockingly exaggerated style of the whole of my post, but to put these two phrases in juxtaposition, along with the whole of the context where the person I was replying to repeatedly said, "I don't see how anyone can play that way," well, Edwards was never known for his sense of irony.

Frankly, me, I'd rather have something called awful and abominable and wrong than "alien and unacceptable." If its wrong, it can be made right. Alien and unacceptable suggests its just wholly detached from the world of the sane.

Actually, scratch that, I'd far rather be considered alien and unacceptable. But I'm a unique case.

[just shakes his head] This is why I've been way more critical in my RPG dialectic consumption for years. Time to go back to reading nothing outside of the few venues that don't make me want to slap down folks for their stupidity. Damn, that means nothing. Bugger.

Yes, its time for more discussion of Capes. Or at least, time to share with my readers some of the work going into This Present Darkness. As much of the ongoing library of goodies is being placed on a private wiki, it would be inappropriate for me to link directly to the site. But that doesn't keep me from posting material to my blog, since I've written most of it so far!

Eric the .5b was good enough to transfer over an organization that he remembered from the SF of his youth.

Homo sapiens argentatus - developing human subspecies first observed in the mid-1980s. Due to a remarkably consistent mutation that occurred in 1 out of every 400 embryonic exposures to Ty-Pan-Oromine, a painkiller discontinued in the late 1970s, perhaps a few thousand people born in the United States during the 1970s share two unusual traits. First, the irises of their eyes are a distinctive silvery-gray, regardless of any other coloration. Second, they all possess psychic abilities - telepathy, telekinesis, and extra-sensory perception.

Upon initial discovery of such individuals, the federal government quietly gathered and segregated members of H.s.a. in special primary (and later, secondary) boarding schools. The primary stated goal was to prevent members of this new, peculiar minority, apparently prone to social isolation, from becoming alienated enough to become a threat to society at large. This seems to have largely succeeded, with the first generation of H.s.a in their early thirties and with very few instances of criminal or violent behavior.

Public knowledge of H.s.a. as a phenomenon is limited. Most H.s.a's are a bit wary of fully interacting with normal society, much less publicizing their differences. The majority live in either of two small towns constructed by the government in the early 1990s. The actual scientific study of the population has been largely classified, though oblique references to this development have turned up in unclassified material that's been largely overlooked. However, upon the births of the first second-generation H.s.a.'s, some voices within the little scientific mini-community have argued for making the public more aware of the next - or at least, a next - step in human evolution.

Well, there was no way I could let that go without elaborating on the implications, now could I?

Jacobin Washington
Psychic Enforcement Officer

Abilities

• 3 Telepathy (P)
• 4 Telekinesis (P)
• 2 Precognition (P)
• 5 Federal Authority (P)
• 1 Silver Eyes (P)

Styles

• 2 Calling In Reinforcements
• 1 Aura of Creepiness (P)
• 4 Psychic Tactician (P)
• 3 Just a Soldier

Attitudes

• 3 Calm
• 2 Intent
• 1 Distant

Background

In his late 20's, Jacobin was raised, like the other members of Homo Sapiens Argentatus, in a government-controlled and isolated town. Like the others, he has always had socialization problems, not only because of his innate disconnection from Homo Sapiens Sapiens, but because the community of people who don't discover means to separate their minds from one another and all sport telepathy rapidly becomes intolerable.

Partly because he's always felt beholden to the government and partly because he was looking for an out, any out, from the insular community he was raised in, Jacobin signed up for the Men in Black program as soon as he completed a degree in criminal science. Leveraging his particular talents and hiding his tell-tale eyes behind the trademark mirrorshades, Jacobin acts as the subtle fingers at the end of the long arm of the law. Personally, Jacobin is content with his constrained responsibilities.

Having had a taste of creating whole organizations, however, I just couldn't stop. Thank Hades for Wikipedia, however, since it provided me with the historical backgrounded I needed.

( The Pact of Warsaw, its Leader, its Soldiers, and a Special Guest )

There's just something gratifying about doing chargen when the inspirations are so brutally intriguing. I just can't seem to stop coming up with ideas. At least in Capes, my creativity goes into the common character and idea pool, and anyone in the game can use the results to their own ends.

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.

Everyone needs an example of things to start off with, and it seemed just that I start with myself.

Alexander Voynich
English Teacher / Occultist

Abilities

1 Teaching
4 Mythos Occultism (P)
2 Linguistics
3 Willpower

Styles

1 Social Censure
3 Obnoxious Arrogance
2 Commanding Voice

Attitudes

4 Arrogant
1 Angry
2 Frustrated
5 Obsessive
3 Charming

Drives

3 Justice
3 Truth
1 Love
1 Hope
1 Duty

Background

Born Alexander Williams, with a marked physical disability that left his arms and hands virtually unusable. Driven by an obsessive nature and the overwhelming drive to bring order to his world, he stumbled over HP Lovecraft's "Cthulhu Cycle" writings in his early teens. Intrigued and tantalized, Alex shifted his focus from computer science to more occult explorations. After several years, he finally acquired a copy of the Necronomicon of the Mad Arab and began unraveling its secrets. After nearly a decade of study, he was ready to work the foul tome's greatest rite, the Hasturian Elevation.

Unfortunately, the rite was interrupted by the scions of the Cult of the Elder Worms, a foul accumulation of the worst elements of society. In the fractured sorcery, physical aspects of the Elder Gods infected the form of Alexander, transforming him into a hideous monstrosity and consuming his mind. When he came back to himself, Alex realized he'd destroyed those who attacked him and left his childhood home ruined and burned.

Hearing of the possibility of a ritual that would strip the detritus of the Elder Gods from his astral form, Alex went underground in his search, taking the name of one of the greatest of Mythos texts as his own, the Voynich Manuscript.

( Nachtmaren / Cult of the Elder Worms / The Voynich Transfiguration )

That seems like it should be pretty much a fine example of how much madness one can cram into one character and its Nemesis. And to think, I haven't even created any Exemplars! (Those'll have to wait until I see what other characters are in play.)

Poor Tony Lower-Basch. Having been tormented by the most active poster on the Capes forum being a psychotic drooling geek, he unmasks himself as a fanboy and discovers my secret agenda, getting to write the next edition of Capes!

Or, er, some such madness. More accurately, I asked some questions about the uses and applicability of multiple Characters, each representing some aspect of a narrative character, and he had a geeky fanboy moment with me, which is all kinds of flattering, I'd like to note. None of you have revealed yourselves as Evil Squid Fanbois/goils. And why is that?

Having discovered the secrets of multi-aspect characters, however, it occurred that I really needed to do some write-ups of more traditional characters in the comic medium, and introduce what I think may turn into the next Big Game I Run(tm).

Multi-aspect Characters are an interesting idea at the core of it all. The obvious applications are for those characters who have a secret identity, Peter Parker / The Amazing Spider-Man being the best known example of the medium.

( Friendly Neighborhood ... )

Given the above write-up, its interesting to note that two characters could very well play each aspect of Peter Parker / Spider-Man in the same scene, narrating actions and thoughts for the same narrative body. Since, conceptually, Peter and Spidey have ostensibly different goals -- at least in the sense of Peter often wanting to have a "normal life" and the Spider-Man persona, necessary as it is, interfering with it -- the idea of them having different players and being in mechanical opposition over Conflicts makes perfect sense. The Conflicts would play out largely as internal dialogue between the conflicting parts of Peter's emotional self. From a meta-game perspective, the presence of both aspects of the character appearing in the same Scene is an indicator from the beginning that the conflict between Peters' needs will be manifesting in-game.

Tony's cited example from the Forge thread I linked to first in this post approaches the other clear use of aspected characters that I had, the presence of "modal minds." Tony's Doc Achilles and her multiple personality shadings is an excellent example, as is the idea of a secret agent who is both a deadly combatant and seductive socialite. In both cases, the different aspects of a character capture one mode of thought that the character can express, and whose baggage can come from either side. In fact, there's no reason that an entire Scene couldn't be wholly populated by players playing aspects of a single character, their narration bringing in conflicts from the outside while the resolution of those conflict elements represents the tug-of-war between the aspects on the fabric of the story.

An extended example likely belongs here, but I'm awfully tired to be writing up one of those. It'll wait until later (and this might become one of those arcane bits of marginalia that linger until after my death with people wondering what I meant).

Regardless, this is a particularly unique facility of Capes and one I've seen be even addressed in many other game designs, though I'm told Universalis has a similar non-GM'd structure and focus on story as the mechanical inspiration. The ability to decouple the aspects of a character from the control of a central player goes one step beyond the decoupling of Characters from specific players; as a result of this second-stage decoupling, more complex stories arise naturally from the interplay of players and mechanics, without being forced by the imposition of some external structure such as one finds in With Great Power while still emerging in a way that provides a coherent story.

A design with the ability to emergently encourage traditional story-structure without forcing it is a pretty incredible thing.

And that brings us around to the idea I had for a game ... but that'll be the next post.

Well, since I've been on such a Capes kick lately in the mornings, it would be remiss of me not to do so again while I'm waiting for my 750mg of muscle relaxant to kick in, so today we'll be looking at those mysterious entities called Non-Player Characters in Capes.

What are Non-Player Characters? I'm so glad you asked, Sherman! NPCs in Capes are not GM run characters, which would be complicated if they were, since there are no GMs in the game at all. Instead, they are active story participants which aren't embodied entities. Locations are one kind of NPC, like the Abandoned Amusement Park which has Abilities like Conceal and Attitudes like Lost. Phenomena are another type of NPC; like Martial Law, or Virus. Virus is an interesting Phenomena, in that, like other NPCs, it gives up a column of traits (Abilities, Styles, or Attitudes, in this case, Styles) in exchange for an associated Free Conflict that can be brought into play at the beginning of a Page by the player. Virus' Free Conflict is "Goal: Contain the Infection" which is intriguing, in that the infection, by definition, can't be contained until the Goal is resolved once it hits the table, and the containment, technically, only has to hold until the beginning of the next Scene. Situations are the last kind of NPC, and they tend to be the most nebulous, because they don't have much of an embodiment at all. Social Function is a great example of a Situation, with Abilities like Mingle and Dance, Styles like Alcohol and Three's a Crowd, and Attitudes like Loud and Annoying.

Also of note is that if the NPC has a Free Conflict associated, when the Conflict is resolved, the NPC leaves the table entirely. That doesn't mean it stops being important to the narrative, but it can't be used to influence Conflicts for the rest of the Scene. That is to say, once the Virus has Contain the Infection resolved against it, its player can no longer Lie Dormant in someone to try and gain more Inspirations or Story Tokens. NPCs would seem to make great things to take as your character if you're the scene-setter, and occasionally difficult to work in if you're not.

Technically Things are the first type of NPC, but frankly I don't think they're that non-person. The Millinium Falcon is as much a "character" as Han Solo, and the Enterprise is certainly moreso than any redshirt we see on Trek. As such, I'm departing from book-canon by not lumping my previous ships and such in here, but feel free to if you're a stickler.

So, yes ... all the NPCs mentioned before are in the book. But I don't write this stuff up to not get to write my own, so ... on to the NPCs!

( Places, Situations, and Phenomena, Oh Boy! )

NPCs in Capes are interesting for many reasons, but from a pure game-tactics point of view, they're excellent ways to start collecting Story Tokens from the other players by introducing a story-centric counter-force that they will care about. If someone sets the scene with some space combat and you drop in an asteroid field, they'll start seriously wanting their ships not to be getting rocked by rocks. Further, NPCs make excellent second- or third-characters that you bring in with a Story Token, letting you work up a collection of Inspirations by playing off yourself. This is good tactical sense, letting you gain resources with relatively little danger, especially once you note no NPC has "Powers," or traits they can spend Debt with.

A particularly evil scenario comes to mind wherein the scene-setter opens with a traditional urban street, and drops Zombie Plague, the second in turn plays a Zombie Horde as a multiple "person"-character, and the third goes for Joe Average, representing the poor benighted normals in the city. A brutal, if amusing, scene suitable for opening the play for the evening. Might make a fun Convention setup, too.

So, yesterday's mild gaming epiphany was the realization one can do Sorcerer in Capes.

That's just too easy.

How about space combat?

"Space combat?" you say. "You mean, with fighters and capital ships and blasting lasers and the like?"

Absolutely. And even taking into account the differing scales of various types and styles of ships. How? The key is understanding that ships, even -- maybe especially -- those who are piloted by story-centric characters are characters in their own right. In fact, there are definite differences in similar ship-types piloted by different characters. The fact is self evident; if there weren't, we couldn't tell them apart. Yet, we do, so ... QED.

How does this apply to ships of different scales in Capes? Well, in the same way that it applies to characters of different scales. It doesn't matter that Batman and Superman are of wholly different scales of physical ability, in a story where they're pitted against one another, they each have a roughly equal chance of coming out on top (depending on whose author is penning the ish this week). If Batman wins, its because he's used his agility, planning, and cleverly concealed bit of kryptonite at the right time, despite the titanic fists and inhuman strength of the Man of Steel. Likewise, if Supes brings it home, its because Bats pulled out the stops and the Man of Steel had to pull out all the stops, even though he was only up against a piddling mortal.

Consider, if you will, Battlestar Galactica.

( BSG Battle Fleet Hidden Within )

The interesting thing here is that it becomes very easy to see exactly how the various events you see in the TV series could come to be. The Comics Code just needs to include "Core characters cannot be killed, but their ships can be destroyed."

Scene: Deep-space asteroid field. There's a mining vessel that needs to be protected as it does its thing. Opening scene, so folks need some Story Tokens to burn later.

Alice picks a Generic Viper to be on patrol in the field. Bob picks a customized Raider to trade Debt for Inspirations. Connie picks another Generic Viper to be Alice's wingman.

Alice: Drops "Goal: Vipers discover Cylon patrol."

Bob: Goes off of Erratic to try and get a die on the Goal.

Connie: Calls the Raider "Scar" and drops "Event: Viper One gets blown to shit."

Next page. Alice claims Discover. Connie claims Viper One. Bob claims the other side of Discover from Alice.

Bob: Rolls something on the opposite side of Alice on the Goal. He rolls well, and describes it as his pilot screwing up. Alice Reacts, and they have a bit of a back-and-forth as they vie for control of the conflict. Bob eventually holds it.

Connie: Scar pops shots at One and the die come up decent, but she pushes, stakes two Debt and splits. A bit more back and forth with Bob, but his options are limited as are Alice's. Connie's holding One in her sights.

Alice: Bangs at the Discover conflict a bit more, and Bob responds. More back-and-forth, but Alice can't sustain it.

End of page, Viper One takes it in the bobo from Scar, Alice gets two Story Tokens and Connie gets at least one decent Inspiration. Bob gets a single Inspiration from the Discover ... and turns out they discover the Raider the hard way.

And there's your opening scene.

The scary thing is exactly how much this makes sense, in the sense of story construction. Playing the mechanics to maximize your profit creates plots which make sense in traditional story structure.

The other scary thing is, even if all three players took Generic Vipers, they could introduce Conflicts where they were shot down by or shot down entirely notional Raiders ... and that too would be appropriate for an opening scene.

Its all rather cool.

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]

Been a long and rambling day, but saving folks from the rambling-piece of it, I figured I'd mention the rather amusing bits.

I ran Capes tonight.

Players: Myself, Mike, Morgasm.

No real setting setup, and I really didn't set much out in the way of Comics Code. We stopped by Wal-Mart, picked up a few packs of line-less 3x5 cards, a small card box, and a pack of clicky markers to write characters on said 3x5s, as well as scrawl down Goals and such. One colour each made it easy to tell who'd introduced a given Goal or originally written a character, since I wasn't mandating the "everyone gets a privileged character" house rule, more out of a sense of experimentation than anything.

First scene: I introduce it and go with the old stand-by, "Its a bank, being held up by [scrounge, scribble] Brother Bug."

Brother Bug was a fairly straightforward Animal Powers/Curmudgeon with a few tweak. Power of and over insects, obviously. Decided he was crazy as a, er, bedbug, and wanted nothing more than to kill innocents, which was directly at odds with one of the CC entries, "Innocents cannot be killed." I figured on some fine Gloat to get Story Tokens.

I was wrong.

( Tonight's Capes run tucked neatly within ... )

So, how'd Capes work, in my opinion, you ask?

Disturbingly well. In neither scene that was set did a lot of what's normally considered superpowered mayhem occur. In fact, the Conflicts introduced mechanically were largely unrelated to the usual crazed slug-fests. The scene with the bulk of the involvement was, in fact, the scene with Mrs Bug taking Brother Bug apart, with the Stench trying, in vain, to save the poor bastard through distracting her a bit and ending up in their clutches, himself.

No one ever appreciates help.

The speed at which Capes keeps things moving and people very clearly, very deliberately involved is really incredible. No one is ever sitting out a scene because they don't have a character with an excuse to be involved; everyone has the ability to get involved with a single character, of any degree of involvement, at any point. Moreover, scene-setting is no one person's responsibility, it has to be a group effort.

I like it.

As ever, first sessions with freeform systems tend toward the slapstick and surreal. People tend not to go for the serious until they're more comfortable with understanding what they can accomplish, how, and when.

I'm looking forward to putting together the next session. There's lots of potential to be had.