Hey Man, well this is Babylon

Check this video out. I understand it was made using Garry’s Mod, which I know little about except that it is some kind of Source engine mod to Half-Life and other Valve games.

After hitting some major design hurdles in Forevergotten, I decided to take a break from that project last night and return to my prior one: Billions and Billions of Bullets. I’m glad I did, too, because the issues that had previously halted my progress on that one a few months ago were easily overcome with time and a new perspective. Now I’m happily trucking along that creative track again, with some fresh new ideas and some fitting updates to old ones.

Probably the biggest update this time is that I’ve made a major breakthrough in redefining the four main Gun Characteristics, and how they tie into the core challenge mechanic. I’m pretty excited about this, because after a good couple of hours of work I had revamped the conflict rules and tooled them into something truly rewarding in all the ways they’ve been lacking until now. Faster-flowing, and with a speed-based strategy that I just love.

This weekend I’ll be running my very first Dogs in the Vineyard game. Judd gave me some initial pointers and it was a purely downhill ride from there to create a town that I hope will really hook the players. I’ll post the details after I run it. I’m hoping this can lead to a good three-to-five-session mini-campaign before we move to the next game in our new rotating group configuration.

This coming Monday – memorial Day! – sees the second annual May of the Dead celebration around the corner at Guardian Games. Last year’s event was stellar fun, and this year’s plans are promising to at least equal that level of awesome, if not exceed it.

My play-through of Alan Wake continues slowly, primarily because I’m playing it with at least two other very interested people watching along. We finished Chapter 3 on Wednesday night, and all were in agreement: that chapter took too damn long in comparison to the two that preceded it. On the other hand, if the following chapters are going to be that long as well, then maybe this game will have a satisfactory play length. That right now is a concern we all at my place share: that this game will be disappointingly short when played out-of-the box. My worry is that with two chapters of DLC already announced at launch time, this sixty-dollar new game might not actually be complete. If I finish the game without a feeling of satisfaction, I’m not certain how I will respond to that. The reviews have been pretty positive, however, so I’m not allowing myself to dwell too heavily on the possibility of disappointment just yet.

At this very moment, I’m glad to see that my XBox Live Gamertag here shows four of my favorite games on it, and one really awesome one that I mentioned just one paragraph above.

Here are some links:

1. Yet Another Fantasy Gaming Comic – I devoured the entire 1300+ strip series of this over the past weekend, and want all of you to enjoy it as well. It made me laugh something fierce, but actually brought a couple of tears to my eyes at various points. A damn fine epic comic.
2. Agree-a-Date – Got problems matching up your gaming schedules, or heck, your social calendars? This is the best free web tool I’ve found to organizing gatherings when the free time of the intended participants is hard to sync. I’ve used it several times, with smashing results.

In a previous post I introduced my idea for the Lifetimer, which slowly counts to 12, signaling the end of your character’s journey, be it successful or failure. This morning on the bus, I had an epiphany. I now know what the Lifetimer will be: Read more

I am seriously considering the idea of adding a form of follow-up mechanic to the core conflict system (aka the “Showdown” system). B&BoB is most certainly inheriting the core Showdown mechanic from Cannibal Contagion, in which players go around the table throwing down cards and “stepping up” the smack-taking narration until one player wins. Given the greater focus on drama and intense action in this game, I want to introduce a system to allow the losers of a conflict to take the really important battles and push them forward, transforming a horrible defeat into a costly by unexpected victory. I am currently calling this the “Press On” mechanic.

It must first be stated that the option to Press On would only be available in very rare circumstances. Since a core rule of the system is that no single conflict can be attempted twice in the same manner, the ability to actually break that core rule would have to be a special one, and not easily accomplished. My intention is to connect it to the player’s Sign card somehow, allowing “Press ON” combos to be played whenever a related card is played.

Doing this would require me to adjust the “if you can beat it, you must” rule of Showdown card-play. In Cannibal Contagion, there was no way to concede once the cards were dealt; you had to keep playing your cards until you couldn’t play any more. This rule served to further solidify the “Win Big vs Win Now” focus of Showdowns: in other words, don’t start fights you can’t win. Taking away this rule and allowing players to concede mid-Showdown would work pretty well as a companion to the “Stash” mechanics (in which players build a hand of cards they hold onto through the whole game), but it could also make such a mechanic pretty unbalanced.

Anyway, the big question here is how to implement the mechanic at all. One way would be to just extend into another round of a Showdown, but I’m not really fond of that idea, as it doesn’t bring anything new to the table.

I’ve been doing a lot of musing on the mechanics lately, and feel I should share some of that work here.

First off, I’ve decided on what I think will be the final core function of the Clip Gun Characteristics. Clip seems pretty ideal to be used as the determinant for the maximum number of bonus draws a player can get before a Showdown is played (with each draw they make giving their Hand of Fate a bonus Bullet Token to use against them. The higher your Clip, the more “potentially versatile” your Gun is, allowing more room to augment your conflict success chances at the exchange of potentially bringing on your Dark Fate a little sooner.

Casing… I’m still working on that one. My initial desire was to have it set how many tokens your Hand of Fate must use to mess with you, but I don’t like that so much as it could make the player of your Hand less likely to even bother – and that would be detrimental to the intended inter-player dynamic of the game. My current idea is to have it give the player one or more “Bullet Dodges” – one-time-only effects allowing them to ignore any single increase to their Lifetimer. I’m not sure about this one yet, and I still need to mull it over some more. Any suggestions?

I’ve also decided to tie the Stash limit to the current position of a character’s Lifetimer. The closer you are to your inevitable doom, the larger the size of the allowed “Stash” of cards you can hold on the side. If your Lifetimer is in the first quadrant, your Stash size is only one, but by the time you make it to the fourth and final quadrant, if has increased to four cards. My intention is to have this make the conflicts at that stage of the game even more intense, by giving the characters more options and “aces in the hole” to play with.

I’ve also been musing over the differences in play template that I want to bring in with the “Director’s Cut” game mode. In “Theatrical Mode,” each player gets their own personal Hand of Fate, and another separate player functions as a GM. In DC mode, the Hand of Fate role and the GM are merged. Each scene is spearheaded by a new player, who temporarily takes on the role of the Hand of Fate. While normal play gives each HoF their own pool for screwing around with their chosen character, DC mode would have a central pool available to whoever takes on the role for that scene. The Pool would then pass to the next HoF for the following scene, and so on.

Of course another idea would be to scrap Theatrical Mode altogether and make “Director’s Cut” the game default…

I end this musings post with the following newly-developed back-cover blurb:

“This is a game about knowing the difference between when you should pull the trigger, and when you should empty the clip.”

I fucking love it.

I have some ideas for changing the flow of the Showdown mechanic for this game. Instead of a continuous round-the-table flow of back-and-forth smack-talking, I want something with more of an “eyes-over-the-cards” tension feel. I want there to be a bit of “What’s she got up her sleeve?” questioning on all sides of the conflict. To better enable that, my current idea is to change the flow to one more suspenseful.

Here’s the idea. After all sides of the conflict have drawn their cards, each side then picks a number of cards from their hand equal to the number of players involved in the conflict, and then lays those cards face down on the table. The first player then narrates their involvement in the conflict, followed by the second player, and the third, and so on. Once all have narrated, each player reveals one of their cards at the same time. Whoever got the lowest is removed from the conflict – their removal from the conflict must now be narrated by the player with the highest card. If this does not end the conflict, then the higher-card player then narrates their further involvement in the conflict, followed by the next-highest, and so on again. Again a card is revealed from each side, and the results are handled as before. This repeats until the conflict is resolved.

When it is finally over, I’d like to be able to somehow involve an assessment of all the cards played. I want the “ultimate winner” to be able to make some kind of mechanical use for any pairs, straights, sets, and so on that might arise from the revealed cards. I have had more than one player of Cannibal Contagion state that they would like to see some use for matches and pairs in the final Showdown results. I intend on introducing such a rules extension in a planned future expansion to that game, but for this one, I’d like to involve something like that right from the start.

While the proposed above procedural change remains to be tested, I think it could add a lot more suspense and strategy to the flow of the game.

Lately I’ve been heavily musing over what each of the four core Gun Characteristics should mechanically bring to the table. Like with Cannibal Contagion, Billions and Billions of Bullets will give each character four core numerical attributes, called Characteristics. Unlike CC, in which the characteristic scores are manually assigned by the player at the time of character creations, in B&BoB these numbers will be determined by the Guns the players pick (or better yet, randomly draw).

I’ve settled on the names I want to assign to them: Caliber, Chrome, Clip, and Casing. Caliber and Chrome will function very much like the Kill and Savvy characteristics in CC, directly affecting the number of cards drawn during in-game conflicts. Clip and Casing, however, are giving me a bit more difficulty. Read more

Before the game was really given more than an initial “This would be cool!” thought, I knew I wanted it to use a variation of the same basic playing card mechanic that drives the conflicts of my first game, Cannibal Contagion. The short form of this is that each player involved in a conflict plays a round or two of cards, until one player has won by throwing down the highest card. It moves pretty quickly and involves a lot of cross-table smack-talking as each player “steps it up,” adding increasingly over-the-top narration with each consecutive card-play.

I want to enhance this mechanic a bit in Billions and Billions of Bullets to add a bit more strategy to the play. Ultimately, I want to stick as close to the core speed and flow of Cannibal Contagion‘s mechanic as I can, replacing the tongue-in-cheek description of the former with a cooler, slicker flavor. To add a bit more player strategy to the cards, each player will now have a variable-sized “Stash” of cards that they get to hold onto between conflicts. When the time comes to actually play cards, they will draw more based on whatever relevant “action” Characteristic is involved, adding the cards temporarily to their Stash. Cards get played from the Stash, allowing the player a bit more versatility and strategy in their approach to the Conflict.

To enhance the narrative feel of the conflicts, I’m considering expanding the ground that the players are allowed to traverse when “stepping it up” during card-play. While conflicts in Cannibal Contagion consist of immediate concerns that can be easily resolved, I am thinking that I want B&BoB‘s conflicts to be built upon a greater scale. I’m wanting each stated “action” to involve more than just one thing – I want a larger scope of narrative empowerment.

There’s an example I frequently use when describing the versatility of the Gun as a focus to problem-solving: “Your girlfriend of four years is breaking up with you, and you don’t want her to – what do you do?” Of course you could shoot her in anger, or threaten to do so, or take any of a similar arrangement of more direct-violence actions. But you could also murder her parents secretly and frame it on some other goons, who you then make a scene of publicly murdering, and thus win back your girlfriend’s love and trust by getting “revenge” for her sake. Complicated, yes, and in other games this would require numerous conflicts, numerous uses of the mechanics, and numerous chances for failure. In B&BoB, I want this grander scope of conflict narration to be able to be handled with a single go at the cards. I want each conflict to be able to handle that span of time, effort, expenditure, and more, and I want the involved “stepping-ups” to encourage that.

The question I pose to myself, then, is how to frame conflicts that have a larger scope than those that I have been used to until this point. Because of this new “expanded territory” idea, the basics of scene-framing might have to be seriously revisited and adjusted in the new game. In Cannibal Contagion, a scene is very much like a scene in any movie or TV show, comprising of a set period of immediate time and focus. Looting the sporting goods store might be a scene, breaking into a hangar and stealing an airplane might be a scene, and so on. The focus in that game is always in your face, and once that core focus is settled, the scene ends and the next one is set up.

If I’m going to bring in an adjustment to the scope of the conflicts, however, then I’m going to need to expand the scope of the scenes that contain them. I’m still musing on this one.

Initially, one of my ideas was to have both games be ultimately interchangeable. But as my vision of B&BoB has evolved, I recognize that it is now most definitely its own game, and the direction it is heading right now is quite divergent from the action and zaniness of Cannibal Contagion. However, I’m pretty certain that the games could serve as great companions to each other.

From the very first moment of the very first scene, every character in Billions and Billions of Bullets is royally doomed. This is one of the very first design ideas I had for the game since its first conception. I have always loved the tragic destinies of gunslingers and anti-heroes in most of the bullet dramas out there, and wanted to make such a concept a Major Theme of this game.

So to thematically simulate this and tie it directly into the systemic core of the game, I’ve drafted up the Lifetimer mechanic. Using this mechanic, everyone has a twelve-point clock called the Lifetimer. As the game flows, the clock fills up, and once the stroke hits 12, the time of the character’s demise has arrived, and she must have her final Fate narrated during the current or next scene of the game.

The Lifetimer counts up with every scene that passes. Additionally, certain powers and abilities may affect the Lifetimer for the better or the worse, and in-game narration of conflict outcomes can potentially modify it as well. It is the job of the character’s Hand of Fate to try and push that lifetimer to the limit, so they can bring about the character’s tragic destiny before that character fulfills her goals.

A major goal of the game, then, is for players to try and resolve their personal and scene Purposes before their time is up. I’m currently trying to tie the resolution of goals into the mechanics as well, possibly as a modification to the current incarnation of the Lifetimer. One idea I’m harboring is having each “quadrant” of the Lifetimer linked to one of four wedges. As the character grows closer to fulfilling their goal, they fill in the associated wedge – possibly by taking the “inner circle” of the Lifetimer and just dividing it into four pieces. Accomplishing major achievements in the narrative will fill in wedges, and once all four have been filled in, their personal Purpose is near completion.

Different mechanics could then be put into place that somehow connect the two tracks (Lifetimer and Goals). For example, the Lifetime could move slower if it’s associated Wedge is already filled in, or the Wedge could be more difficult to acquire if the Lifetimer is much further along the count. Something like this would make the Lifetimer and the Goal wedges mechanically interconnected.

The ultimate goal, then, would to make them both suitably elegant without too much complication, while giving the players a reason to actually care about either. The players must want to accomplish their goals, while the Hands of Fate must want to make their “pawns” suffer terrible fates, and yet neither side must be afraid of either outcome. So yes, the characters start the game screwed, but now I have to work “being screwed” into the system in a way that makes them like it.

I think I’ve decided what the core 13 guns of the main book will be:

1: The Assault Rifle
2: The Crossbow
3: The Derringer
4: The Handcannon
5: The Hunting Rifle
6: The Magnum
7: The Minigun
8: The Shotgun
9: The SMG
10: The Sniper Rifle
11: The Twin Cobras

As for 12 and 13… well, I’ll keep those as a surprise for the time being.

If you have any suggestions or alternate ideas, let me know!