Tag Archives: Game Design

Speeding up the dice

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After getting my first tournament under my belt for the last two years, I’m excited to be getting back into Kings of War again. The clean rules allow for quick play, so our 2250pt games (which is similar in size to a 2,999 point army in WHFB 8th edition) were able to be played in two hours. Aside from the movement phase, which is usually the phase where I spend most time thinking, I found that I was spending a lot of time counting dice.

So, here’s what I’m going to do for my units going forward. I’ll start with a set up of dice that looks something like this (the colors are entirely arbitrary):

Color Number
Red 1
Green 2
Purple 3
Yellow 4
Blue 5
Black 10
White 15

Every unit will have a pattern of colored spots painted on the edge of the movement tray that corresponds to the number of attacks that the unit has. So for example, my Palace Guard Regiment has 12 attacks, so the pattern would be ■ ■. That way I can very quickly grab exactly the right number of dice without having to count them individually.

This puts the onus on me to make sure that I have the right number of dice, but if I’m only bringing that number of dice to the table, then the worst case scenario is that I’m rolling less dice (and not more) by accident. I suspect it will save me 5-10 minutes per game.

But wait! I hear you say in my head … what about things like Brock Riders with 26 attacks! And I’m flank attacking! Well, pretty much every game I play has flank attacks at some point, but inevitably I end up counting out exactly the same number of dice as a regular attack and rolling them twice. As for Brocks, the pattern would be White, Black, Red (gasp! 3 dots!). I don’t know if there’s a unit that has more than 30 attacks in the game, but if there is you could adjust the number of dice in the color table to suit your army and your dice collection.

Let me know in the comments below if you try this technique, and what you think of it!

Current games in development

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As mentioned a few posts ago, here is a list of the games that have gone through our idea filter and dropped down into the Book Development stage. If you’re a regular reader, the chances are none of these are of surprise to you, although I’m not sure we’ve blogged about all of them. So, in no particular order, here is the list.

  • Illusion (working title) – Set in the 19th Century, players are in some way involved with a magical stage act. A game of secrets and showmanship, where nothing is ever quite what you expected. Uses a thematic system based on playing cards (although dice-based rules are included).
  • Additional 23rd Letter Material (working title) – The game of psychics and conspiracies. Over the years, we’ve written (and rewritten) a bunch of source material that was never published. The Projects Sourcebook almost saw the light of day, but not quite. This body of work includes detailed information on playing Network and Project campaigns, revised psychic abilities, GM information on the Powers, Terata, and more.
  • War of the Worlds: Earth (working title) – Set after an invasion by Martians which has left physical and ecological devastation. Based on H. G. Well’s “The War of the Worlds”, characters pick up the pieces after that novel. See the War of the Worlds: Earth category for more info.
  • ERIS – The system used by The 23rd Letter, War of the Worlds: Earth and others. This book will be available for free PDF download.
  • 6 – A spy game, set in the height of the Cold War. For advanced role-players only, this game uses a very narrative system and Tiered Play to create intricate plots in an atmosphere of fear and mistrust.

There is no set publish date for any of these, but if there is any game that you’d especially like to see first, please let us know in the comments. War of the Worlds: Earth is likely to be the last of those games to be published, just looking at the amount of work still needing done.

Originally written for lategaming.com.

How we design a role-playing game

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I thought I’d share a bit about how our game design process works and (in a subsequent post) what we’re currently working on. This is not necessarily the best way to design a game, and we’re always looking at ways to get more stuff done, but at the same time we are only two people, geographically separated and both with full time jobs and families. This is what works for us.

Idea

We have lots of ideas. Any time we have an idea that might be game worthy, we put it on our (private) Wiki. Currently we have around 40 ideas that are worth making an entire game from. At this stage the idea is simply a 1-4 line premise. This could be as simple as “A spy game” or as in-depth as

Status: Refugee (working title) – Set today, the Solar System is destroyed by a nova. Luckily for us, the Interstellar government intervenes and transports all 6 billion of us off-world, in the very short space of time we have left before the Sun explodes. We all then become refugees spread across dozens of worlds, with no clue about laws, customs, aliens, technology, where our families are, etc. Many, many campaign and adventure possibilities.

Germination

We let the ideas sit on the ideas page for a while to germinate. Because we tend to read that page relatively frequently, we’ll see something that catches our eye and remember something to add it to the idea. Eventually, one of us will write a piece of fiction or a scrap of a system or background, often as a blog post. This gives the idea enough weight to drop into …

Development

At this point we give the idea it’s own wiki page and move any content to there. Usually we’ve had enough work done on this point to at least fill one page. Our wiki sends us updates via RSS any time someone makes a change to any page, so that’s usually what sparks things off. I’ll check out an update Matt has made, then I’ll add a bit to what he’s done, based on whatever goes click in my head when I read (and vice-versa). This tends to be bursty, so we get 4-5 “bits” done at a time, where a bit can be anything like a collection of relevant links, a piece of relevant fiction, some background notes, or even an entire system.

Our projects hang out in this stage for a while, until they gather enough of these bits that the wiki starts to become an unwieldy place for them to gather any more. We currently have 12 games in this stage, some of which we have blogged about (as seen under our Game Design category). This is one area where we are inconsistent on what happens next, but generally we go into …

Book Development

We create a book outline (with all four parts of course) that gives us some idea of how big the book is likely to be. Then we’ll slot whatever blog posts and wiki material we have into that book outline in a desktop publishing app.

From there we keep adding written material, look for artwork, rewrite things we don’t like and so forth. We currently have 5 ideas in this stage, at various stages of completion. We expect to see one of them drop out of this part of the funnel and into print Real Soon Now.

Originally written for lategaming.com.

WotW: Earth – System Proposal

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Here’s a simple system that would get a WotW: Earth game up and running. Before I go into the details, here’s what was going through my head as I designed this.

  1. WotW: Earth is set in turn-of-the-century England
  2. Player characters are likely to have a base set of skills which can probably default to stats
  3. Highly technical skills don’t really exist, and science is still the realm of the wealthy
  4. Skills matched career very closely, and people generally had one career
  5. My feeling (from reading what Matt has written) is that this is a game about normal people in an abnormal situation, so there won’t be much difference between the characters

And now the system …

Continue reading →

System junkie

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I looked up the definition of the word junkie. It says “Drug addict, esp. heroin”, and the term gets used to describe addicts to anything – adrenaline, sports, whatever. I think junkies (of the heroin type) are looking for the perfect high, which is what I mean when I describe myself as a system junkie.

The system of any RPG is at one and the same time the best and worst part of it – the most interesting and the least interesting. OK, I’m going to stop with the Dickens. What I mean is I don’t buy a game because of the system, I buy it because of every other factor: background, artwork, genre, even print quality, all go into my decision to buy a game. System never enters into it.

However, there are lots of games out there that miss out on greatness because their system lets them down. This doesn’t stop me from playing the game, but it usually means picking out the good bits and running it in a different system, or leaving out / creating house rules for large bits of the system.

SLA Industries tops my list for this – I love crunching numbers as much as any geek (actually, probably a bit more than most, as Matt will attest), but SLA character generation took the biscuit. Other systems had more numbers, but SLA had a poor layout for the information you needed, and even when you’d done it a dozen times it didn’t get any quicker. (Also, the first edition had pretty poor binding, so the char-gen section was the first to split – now it’s all in a binder).

I’m in search of great systems. Not all systems work for every game (which is why not everyone likes GURPS). Pendragon is a great example – you couldn’t (or shouldn’t try to) re-use the Pendragon system in any other setting (with the possible exception of George R. R. Martin’s Westeros books). Likewise, Marvel Super Heroes FASERIP system works really well for the Marvel background, but poorly elsewhere, even within the genre. And yet I like both of these systems, for very different reasons (Pendragon for the passions, skill perfection, criticals and skill checks, seasons, glory, children; Marvel because I do everything with one roll on one table).
Matt and I have been bandying about ideas for a system (as he’s mentioned). In this case, the system is for a super-hero game. I know it won’t be perfect. I just want it to give a good approximation of super-hero reality, without having to be a 300 page tome. We’re only going to write it if it fills all our criteria.

Got a favourite system? What’s good and bad about it? If you were writing it now, what would you do differently? These are the same questions I’m asking myself.

Originally written for lategaming.com.

Keeping track of time

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One of the more challenging aspects of being a GM is ensuring the game world retains its believability. Mature players (by this I mean anyone who role-plays, rather than someone who plays a one-man-army war-game) demand a world in which things happen much as they do in this world–all actions have consequences (some of which are unforeseen), and much more is happening in the world than what the characters see.

Part of creating this illusion is of course in your world building, but an equal part is time management–keeping track of all the events that you have planned to happen, and making up new ones based on the actions of your players.

One method I’ve used to do this is a simple table of time/characters. With time along the top of the table and characters (including PCs and NPCs) down the left, it is simple to prepare before the start of a session by jotting down what the NPCs will do assuming the PCs do nothing. As the session progresses, you can modify that based on player activity. One thing to be careful of is the linear nature of a table can lead you to linear thinking on the part of the NPCs. This might sound dumb, but having a table like that will literally encourage you to think within the box.

Another method I’ve used is more like a traditional brainstorm–bubbles with text associated with arrows. This means you can keep track of NPCs actions (and even non-action things like desires and intentions) in more of a flow-chart. Drawing new lines of association between bubbles as different events occur to change the landscape means that it’s more likely that things will be less linear. However, little bubbles scattered over a page make it harder to keep track of the times when events are going to occur.

Finally we get to the method I currently use, which is a mash-up of the two. I use bubbles to note down events and ideas, and a table to tell the order in which they will happen and did happen. That way the game flows freely, I can make notes quickly and still tell where everyone is at any given time, and when the players are talking among themselves I can update my table as I go.

I’ve found that having the bubbles makes it much easier for me to think up sub-plots and micro-plots on the fly, and to ensure that the characters that are relevant to that plot are available at the right times to be involved.

Originally written for lategaming.com.