Specifically, I am trying to do a quick series of promo shots for the upcoming Motobushido Kickstarter. The photos will only be used as part of the requisite promotional video on the kickstarter page, and will not be included in any actual published material aside from that video.

Lemme know if you have the armor and are interested!

Eden Log: This was recommended to me because of my intense love of the movie Pandorum, but man, I just couldn’t do it. It’s too slow, too hard to see. I got bored with it 15 minutes or so in and moved on to…

Up: I finally got around to seeing this, and I’m glad I did. 11 minutes into the movie I had to pause it so I could curl into a ball on my couch and have a good cry. The rest of the movie was accompanied by squeals and peals of laughter. This is, in my opinion, Pixar’s Big Fish, their magnum opus. I wonder if they’ll ever be able to top it? And I do hope that other studios and such catch on to the fact that ye, our elderly are the most interesting people alive and we need more stories about them that aren’t just geriatric comedies.

Juno: Somehow I managed to completely miss this one when it came around. I loved the entirety of it, but I found myself more taken in by Jennifer Garner’s character than anyone else. She did a damn good job of making you feel the longing and desperation of her character, and want her to succeed.

This past weekend was Gamestorm 2012, which I like to call “Portland’s Annual Gaming Convention in Vancouver.” You can read about the convention in my post history and on its own website, so I’m just gonna skip on ahead to the highlights.

For me, the biggest and most awesome parts of the weekend were the two first-ever public playtests of Motobushido. I finally got to put my newest creation in the hands of total strangers who had never heard of it before. The results were pretty powerful: after two full sessions of play, I walked away not only with pages of rules tweaks and updates, but with some damn fine gaming memories as well. I found it interesting to see how the same basic scenario idea was so drastically altered between the two different groups. I’ll definitely be fleshing that one out a bit more and including it in the core book.

Aside from those demos, I really spent most of my time at the Indie Hurricane booth in the Dealer Room. I met some great new local gamers, and had some good discussions about gaming-related ideas that opened my mind to new perspectives. Some thanks and acknowledgements:

• Many, many thanks to Hans Otterson for the rides to the convention.
• Even more thanks to Joel Shempert for making the Indie Hurricane booth run smoothly, and for putting the whole effort together.
• Thanks to the guy at the FaceEater booth for finally teaching me how to play this game. It was a lot of fun, and I look forward to more games with my local pals.

I walked away with some cool swag from the GM Gift Room – namely a copy of Feng Shui, which I’ve been meaning to grab for some time now based on the recommendations of many. And of course, after the con, there was much sleeping.

I’m really eager to build some new semi-regular game-nights with those of you that I’ve just met. Let’s make this happen, folks!

Failure Padding is based upon the concept of “degree of failure” – not a new concept to many of you, but folks whose only RPG exposures come in the forms of D&D, Pathfinder, and other similar games might not have this term in their current notebooks o’ gaming lexicon. “Degree of Failure” is a way of measuring the distance between your failed dice roll and the difficulty target number you actually wanted to roll. This is usually handled simply by subtracting the number you rolled (dice result, successes, hits, what-have-you) from the number you needed in order to succeed. Thus if you needed eight successes to get the result you wanted, but you only got five when your dice hit the table, then your Degree of Failure would be three (8 – 5 = 3). Or if you needed a roll of sixteen but only scored a nine after all modifiers, then your Degree of Failure would be seven (16 – 9 = 7).

Using this degree of failure, you can very easily eyeball “how bad” your failure actually was. Some RPG systems already have rules in place for determining grades of failure, but that’s okay, because Failure Padding isn’t as concerned about grading that failure as it is about transforming that failure into hard-earned success. In other words, Failure Padding is about re-imagining your failed dice rolls as very price-heavy victories, “padded up” with collateral damage.

Let’s say you roll eight successes, but you needed eleven in order to shoot the terrorist who is currently using your girlfriend as a hostage human shield. That’s three degrees of failure, which would likely have resulted in the terrorist getting away, with your girlfriend in tow. Instead, the GM lets you “spend” those three degrees of failure to buy other consequences related to the situation, each raising your original roll up to the required level to succeed. So in this case, you buy off those three needed successes, and you and the GM work out that you shot him but the bullet went through your girlfriend’s shoulder, he got a shot off at you which went straight through your thigh, and as your girlfriend is running away another terrorist grabs you and throws a bag over your head. Your initial goal was accomplished, but now the situation remains interesting and the story evolves.

Using this mechanic, the GM offers to “sell” you extra successes in exchange for you agreeing to additional consequences of your success. Each degree of failure is one such consequence acquired. In games with greater number scales, the degree of failure should probably be based on a range of numbers. Say, every two points missed in a D20 test is one degree of failure, or every ten points missed is one degree of failure on a D100 test.

Here are some various ideas of things that can go wrong for you – consequences you can take in order to pad up the failure:

• You take additional damage in the strained effort to succeed.
• Some piece of important equipment takes damage, or is rendered temporarily useless or inaccessible – armor degrades, greaves seize up, electronics malfunction, zippers get jammed, etc.
• Your situation is made narratively worse somehow – enemy reinforcements arrive, the bridge collapses, your vehicle’s airbag unexpectedly deploys, etc
• Some threat level is increased, if your game system keeps track of that kind of thing.

Hope it works out for you!

…and yes, I have a Gamestorm 2012 post coming very soon.

Combined with the other two concept pieces, I am confident that Rick has perfectly illustrated the game concepts as they exist within my mind. In fact, these three pieces have, in return, given me far more inspiration for the project than most of the previous media sources from which I’d been drawing (samurai movies, mostly).

I’m still neck-deep in this game’s pre-production process. Playtesting is sporadically underway, and while the process is slow, it is certainly gaining momentum.

7. Afterfall: Insanity (PC)

This game received very little fanfare, and still doesn’t have an official support or community discussion forum anywhere online. It’s a damn solid third-person horror game, which clearly takes immense amounts of inspiration from the Dead Space series, especially in controls and user interface. The action is fun, the scares are scary, and despite some kinda lame writing, the story is actually pretty interesting. I look forward to seeing more from this studio.

Link: Afterfall on Gamersgate

6. The Elder Scrolls V: Skyrim (PC)

I can think of at least a dozen close friends who would lovingly place this one at the top of their lists, easily, but for me, the end result of the game didn’t live up to the hype. The combat gets repetitive easily, and when you realize all the unpolished exploits that sit right in front of your eyes, it becomes difficult to ignore them, like a four-year-old pulling hard on your leg and begging for your attention the entire time you’re playing. Despite that, the exploration of the game is second to none, and I’ve paid more to MMOs just to wander around in that open beauty. I highly recommend the PC version, because as with all Elder Scrolls games, if you miss out on the mods, you are missing out on over half of the intended gaming experience.

Link: Skyrim on Steam

5. Dead Island (PC/X360)

While this game certainly did not turn out to be anything at all like that trailer, it did end up being one damn fun game. Two parts Borderlands, two parts Left 4 Dead, and a little dash of Grand Theft Auto thrown in for good measure, I had quite a blast running around on Bamoi Island and murdering zombies. While it certainly had its flaws, I found it to be a more effective zombie survival game than, say, the Left 4 Dead series. This was one of the first games I tested out with my new FragFX 360 game controller, and it worked so well that way that I ended up buying it a second time on the PC.

Link: Dead Island on Steam

4. EYE: Divine Cybermancy (PC)

This one really took me by surprise. One of my close pals recommended it to me, and I’m extremely glad that he did. This indie title is a first-person rpg-shooter hybrid, built in Valve’s Source engine. This game does not hold your hand one bit after you complete a very minimal tutorial mission, and I’m totally on board with that. There are so many elements to this game (hacking, leveling, cyberware, research, psi powers, etc) that new players to it will likely be very confused at the beginning. I was, and I almost put it away for good after a few tries. But I stuck with it and figured out “the trick” to it, and from then on it became one of my favorite all-time shooters on the PC. Best part is that it completely lacks a manual save function – in other words, your actions and decisions count, and when the shit hits the fan, you have to try and deal with it right then and there.

Link: EYE Divine Cybermancy on Steam

3. Deus Ex: Human Revolution (PC)

I was trying to think of a “I didn’t ask for this” joke, but the truth is, this game is exactly what I had been asking for for some time. Pretty much everything about this game blew my mind, and I devoured it hungrily and happily. Even the boss fights, which everyone else hates, weren’t enough to mar the final experience for me. Hardcore fans of the original game like to bash this one, but it’s hard for me to accept most of that bashing as anything other than grognardian teeth-gnashing. WHile the original had some important elements that were handled better that first time, this game stays true to its roots, and delivers one hell of a noir-esque cyberpunk ride.

Link: Deus Ex: HR on Steam

2. Dead Space 2 (X360)

Visceral Games somehow managed to take one of the most concept-perfect games ever (the original Dead Space) and make it even moreso. I don’t have a single complaint about this game. Not one. From the game’s fucking insane opening sequence to the very last line uttered in the game, it is action horror at its very finest, and I can’t begin to imagine how the upcoming third game could top it.

Link: Dead Space 2 for Xbox 360, on Amazon

1. Bastion (PC)

If you are a fan of Zelda-like game play, you are doing yourself a great disservice by not playing this game. I didn’t even touch it until the last handful of days of 2011, but that experience was enough for me to crown this my top game of the year. Everything about it amazes me, from the spot-on music to the story-meets-gameplay-without-pause narration, to the fun mechanics and the beautiful scenery.

Link: Bastion on Steam

Coming up next, perhaps a post on my favorite tabletop moments? Who knows…

I’ve been using Catch notes up until this week. Their devs really dropped the ball on their latest UI overhaul, and have most likely just lost themselves a customer. The new web app is hideous, and full of features that are completely unnecessary to the solitary note-taker – aka the majority of their userbase. Sacrificing quickly-accessible tags and making the app completely unusable on a 10-inch netbook screen in order to add in facebook-like collaborative “streams” is not acceptable to me. Unless they change it, and soon, they have lost my continued support.