Hey Man, well this is Babylon

This morning I hit what I think might be a minor breakthrough in the design blocks I’ve had lately on this project. A lot of my process as of late has been held up with a lot of inner conflict on what kind of play template I want this game to support. I have a few previous posts on this subject. This morning, a new idea came to me, involving splitting the meta-game functions among all the involved players.

I’m calling them Roles of Authority, and every player gets one – maybe more – at the beginning of the game. These roles assign various functions and authority domains to each player that extend above and beyond their standard character-focused realm of game control. For example:

The Mistress of the Rules: Her Role gives her the authority to make rules calls mid-game. She is responsible for reading the book, keeping tabs on the rules, and cutting short any rules arguments or look-ups that happen in a session. When she makes a call, the players must accept it and then return to the story.

The Master of the Many: This guy’s Role gives him the final call on any involvement of “The Many.” In this game, “The Many” is a term applied to any multitudinous force in the game’s setting and story: Noble Houses, riotous mobs, wild tribes, the Unwashed Masses, and more. Any player can involve The Many at any time during their narration, but the master of the many has the final say on such things, if he chooses to execute it.

The Master of the Action: His authority is over the framing and establishment of new scenes. While everyone has the ability to introduce new scenes and add elements to their framing, the Master has the final say, and is responsible to taking all the input and assembling it into something initially cohesive.

Mistress of the Fates: This player is responsible both for calling all ties and for inserting an element of the unexpected into scenes and challenges. Whenever the variables of a challenge are declared, the Master of the Fates can choose to insert one unexpected element into the middle of things, if so inclined.

I have a handful of others as well. The Roles are intended to be broad (mostly) in spectrum. I want there to be gray areas of contested authority. In those cases, anyone with a legitimate claim should speak up, and the authorities should work together to design an outcome.

I’ve read a handful of gaming blogs and campaign-mastery essays online which recommend doing things like this in most every game you play, but my intention here is to incorporate these roles into the very rules of the game, and have them directly affect the atmosphere of the mechanics themselves.

This is good. This breaks my current stalemate with myself. I like this, as it allows me to more freely distribute “central meta-game authority” to everyone at the table, and move back to the subject of actual in-game mechanics and flow.

Following up on the ideas from my last post on this project, I’ve been musing a lot more on both Play Focus and Player Roles. Until now, I’ve been operating under the idea of the players filling the roles of adventurers or wanderers of some sort, going out into the world under the guidance of a GM. I don’t really feel comfortable with that one, though.

So to get myself focused on the proper design mindset, I took some time out to write a first-draft of the back-of-the-book blurb this morning:

“You live in Shroud, a world completely forgotten by its own inhabitants, your pasts lost to the great Unknowing. Every year there are three months of Night, during which you stay inside, because that’s when the Horrible Things come out. But this year, their coming will be the worst ever, and you must push them back, or all is lost. The only way you can overcome them is to tell your stories and, by doing so, remember the Forevergotten.”

This is a game about uncovering the secrets of the forgotten past to defeat a great approaching darkness that can destroy everything you know – which isn’t much to begin with.

Read more

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

In my last post, I spilled out an extremely short-form bit of musings on a new game and setting that has been the most current subject of my creative attention. I am currently calling this project “Forevergotten,” and I’d like to now take a few moments to spill out some more ideas. This time, Let’s focus on what the players of this game actually do.

I have always been an ardent believer in at least one tenet which sets down in words something that I believe all game designers should be able to tell anyone about their games: “In this game, you do ___.” With very rare exception, I will not put money down on a game which can’t fill in that blank for me within the first five minutes of perusing its pages. Preferably, I want that information to be found right smack on the back cover, and if not, within the first three pages of the game’s text. I want to know what a game is about, and I want to know what player actions and ideas the mechanics and setting primarily emphasize. As such, I want to be able to define this on my own game before I spend any more time working out more mechanics. Read more

Lately I’ve been directing nothing short of a Furious Hellstorm of creative energy into a (relatively) new design project which I’m code-naming (and likely sticking with) “Forevergotten.” I’ve jammed out a whole slew of ideas, and now that I have gained enough of comfortable creative foundation, I want to share some of my notes. Some of this will likely be a bit rambly. Read more

This weekend’s gaming holds much promise. Starting tonight, I’ll be making my sixth attempt at running a Burning Wheel game. For the past few months, I’ve been running a “meet when we can” adventure campaign set in the Palladium Fantasy setting. Until now we’ve been using the KnownWorld house rules posted elsewhere on this site. However, I realized that as the game progressed, it was being played (at least by me) more and more like Burning Wheel, so I finally made the call: we’re switching. After I ported over all the characters (which was surprisingly simple), tonight we’re giving it our first go.

I am extremely hopeful. This will be my sixth attempt at getting a Burning Wheel game going, each of the priors being stymied by any number of organizational or game-idealogical setbacks. This time, it seems most everyone is on board. Cross your fingers.

Tomorrow night, the gaming continues with my first ever all-girls game night. I know a surprising numbers of lady gamers who rarely, if ever, get a chance to play. I figured this would be a great opportunity to get them together and let them play without dealing with “The Dudes” who usually grace the table, myself excluded. And given my own *ahem* tendencies, I am slightly less part of that latter crowd than most. I’ll be kicking it off with a one-shot of Cannibal Contagion, with the hopes of gauging their individual gaming styles while having a plain old good fun time. It’s my hope that this can be a semi-regular thing, maybe even allowing me to get my feet wet running 4E for the first time.

Also, Mass Effect 2? Fuck. Yeah.

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 released the first two chapters of Cannibal Contagion as a free PDF preview download. These two chapters cover the introduction to the game’s concepts, setting it all up, and character creation.

Click here to download it!

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.