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.

No, I’m not joking. So here’s the basic idea. The lifetimer will consist of a clock image with two main components: the outer track and the inner wheel. The outer track consists of 12 dots, one for each hour of the clock, and likewise styled as a timer. As the game moves on, and as the character “takes damage” relevant to the mechanics, the timer ticks forward, and when it gets to 12 that character’s End is “Very Fucking Nigh.”

On the inside wheel, there are six wedge-shaped divisions: 0-2, 2-4. 4-6, 6-8, 8-10, and 10-12. Whenever he character accomplishes something in the game that brings them closer to fulfilling their Driving Motivation, they fill in a wedge. Once all six wedges are filled in, the character’s main goal is accomplished. Yay!

You want your wedges to fill in faster than your Lifetimer ticks off. However, there are two major obstacles here. First, filling in wedges and getting closer to your goals is really tough, and intentionally so. Like that linked article said, you begin the game Screwed, and you have to fight hard to make things better. Second,if your Lifetimer significantly surpasses your filled in wedges, bad things happen. Whenever a dot is filled in on the Lifetimer corresponding to one of the Spokes (2, 4, 6, 8, 10, and 12), the previous wedge is crossed out. Crossed Wedges cannot be filled in without EXTREME situations and challenges, and in the end they apply adverse effects to the outcome of your Goal.

Additionally, I’d like to implement escalating levels of empowerment based upon how far along the inner wheel the character has moved. Each Character “Sign” will have six layered abilities, earned as the wedges are filled and/or crossed, so that towards the end-game, the characters will have some massive action-causing big-badda-boom abilities. Some might gain bonuses for how many of those are filled in versus how many are crossed out. Hell, some might actually become more powerful with more crosses.

Trivial Pursuit Wedges are just fucking obvious. I can’t wait to see this in action.

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.

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.

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.

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.

Since the mechanics are very heavily based on the same core principles of the previous game, it was pretty obvious from the get-go that the Kill and Savvy roles would need to be ported over. Whereas the zombie game was focused primarily on characters’ actions being based on two core instincts, in this bullet-drama game the mathematics of the action-template are the same, only substituting the “violence vs resourcefulness” paradigm of the first game with a new focus on “action vs flash.” Thus the two Active Characteristics from the former (Kill and Savvy) were easily ported into the latter (Caliber and Chrome).

However, CC also used two Passive Characteristics, which were tied directly into the Hurtin’ and Madness mechanics of that game – the higher your Grit, the more likely you were to stay alive, and the higher your Cool, the less likely you were to go insane. I don’t intend on carrying those mechanics over into this one, however, so I now must develop an alternate set of uses for the two new Passive Characteristics, Clip and Casing. In B&BoB, I’m no longer using the Hurtin’ system, choosing instead to implement the aforementioned Lifetimer mechanic. In the same vein, the Madness system of the previous game is removed, with an entirely new, intentionally much more antagonistic “Hand of Fate” system taking its place. As such, I now need to find a way to tie the two new characteristics in with the two new system extensions.

My current ideas on this are that Clip should somehow be connected to the Hand of Fate’s stash of Bullet Tokens, while Casing should be tied in with the Lifetimer. Current possibilities:

• Casing could set the number of Bullet tokens the Hand gets when you use your Gun. I’m leaning far away from this one, right now. First off, it would make it the only one of the four attributes in which having a high score would be bad for you, and I want to avoid having any of the mechanics be out of sync in that regard. Second, I still haven’t balanced out the Bullet costs of the Hand’s abilities, so I’m very hesitant to even throw such a mechanic into the foundation without a better view of the greater superstructure.
• Clip could determine how many conflicts you can play in before your Hand gets another Bullet added to his pile. This could work, but I’m a bit wary of adding in conflict-counting math to an otherwise math-light game system.
• Clip could instead be the number of bullets the Hand must use in order to affect you. Then again, this could limit the Hand-player’s desire to do things to you.
• Another idea: Clip determines the number of Bullet Tokens the Hand gets when you choose to draw an additional card in a Conflict. Hmmm… I’m finding myself drawn to this one, or a variant thereof. I haven’t put in a bonus card mechanic yet, but Cannibal Contagion had one implemented as a way for the mad Half to bribe you into going crazy. Perhaps the player can draw another card, giving the Hand of Fate a token for each one, and the Clip sets the maximum number of bonus cards you can draw in this regard? I think I like this one. Need to work on this particular train of thought a bit more.
• Casing, on the other hand, could represent how many ticks of the Timer are regained when you make a Time Check to restore it. Of course, I haven’t yet decided if I even want to implement such a recovery mechanic. In such a case, however, it could instead be a bit more Active, and determine how many cards are drawn in such an affair.
• Casing could also set the number of tokens the Hand must spend to affect your narration. This would make a bit more sense, at least as far as nomenclature is concerned, for the thicker your casing, the more bullet-resistant you would be (hyuk hyuk).

Hm. Not sure.

What do you think?

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.