Elthos RPG - Progress Report

Just a quick post on the latest progress with the Web Application, now tentatively (ok pretty sure) named "The Mythos Machine".

A number of my play testers and some friends out there in Cyberland suggested that players are going to want to have the option to Allocate stats to their Characters in some kind of point buy system.  At that time (5 weeks ago) the idea was only a glimmer in my eye, and I fretted that it would take a long time to build that into the site.  But I decided it is a good idea after all.  So I programmed the application to allow the GM to choose what kind of Character Generation System they want.

1. Roll Random
2. Roll Random + Allocation.
3. Pure Allocation

Roll Random allows the Player to click a button and generate their Character's Requisites (along with everything).  The Gamesmaster can decide in their World Configuration how many Re-Rolls Players are allowed (otherwise nothing would stop the ardent Player from rolling as many as they could until they hit a Maximal Character).  The default is 3 Re-Rolls.   It lets you keep all three and then decide which you want to play.

Roll Random + Allocation allows the Player to click a button and generate their Character's Requisites, but then gives them the ability to move points from one Requisite to another in order to optimize the Character for a wanted Class or Race.  They also get to see a list of Races the GM has allowed Players to select from and will roll the Character so that it fits the selected Race's minimum and maximum Requisite limits, and does so randomly within that range.  If they roll well they can move points around to beef up (and diminish) their Requisites.   Again the GM can define the number of Re-Rolls.

Pure Allocation allows the GM to predetermine how many points in total can be allocated to the Character, and this is based on the Race Generation Dice that the GM has chosen for their World.  The Race Generation Dice can be 1d6, 2d6, 3d6 or 4d6, and there's pretty good arguments for using any of them.   The lower the Race Dice number the faster the game play tends to be as all the numbers are small and easier to work with.  It also happens that all the numbers in the game tend to track along with that choice.  For example in a 1d6 Race Generation Dice game the maximum Life Points at 2nd Level is 12 (if the Character has a 6 Strength).   For a 4d6 system the same 2nd Level Character will have 24 Life Points.   Monsters and NPCs work the same way.  So augmenting the Race Generation Dice bumps up all of the stats of everything across the World.

Which leads me to the next major change to the system.  I decided that if I was going to go so far as to allow alternate Character Generation Methods, I should probably go all out and create a method by which the GM can choose their World's Race Generation Dice as well.  Hitherto this, there was only one option, the simplified and fast-play oriented 1d6 system.   So with this change I am no longer emphasizing the ODS as "The One Die System", but instead I am referring to it now as the "The Optional Dice System".  I think this is a big improvement as I understand completely the reaction I got on a few occassions where perspective Players pretty much scoffed at a One Die Six System.  After all, they reasoned, who the heck can do anything with just one six sided die to run an entire RPG World?   Well, actually, I can.  But that's a quibble I would just assume live without, and so now we have The Optional Dice System and everyone can be happy.

What turned out to be necessary in making The Optional Dice System was I needed to factor in that Races and Classes will have to change their Minimum and Maximum Requisites Boundaries, as well as Character's Life and Mystic Points.  So I automated that process in the background.  The system will tell the GM what the effects will be if they go, for example, from a 2d6 System to a 4d6 system, or from 3d6 to 1d6, etc.  They can take a look at the effects on Races and Classes, as well as Character's Life Points and Mystic Points.  If they like what they see, and save the new setting, then all the calculations are done in the background and everything in their World flexes appropriately, including Requisite Bonuses.   It's pretty nifty and took a bit of thought to get that piece right.  (Pat on the back).

In addition, I took the opportunity to neaten up the Character Screen and make it both more orderly, and more handsome at the same time.  I'm fairly pleased with the results... not so much because it looks perfect (yet) but because in doing so I made it a lot easier for future embellishments to the look and feel of the screen, and the site as a whole.

These changes represent the last of what I have in mind as far as large-scale systemic modifications to the Mythos Machine.  At least in his Phase.   So I'm very happy that's all behind me now.  It worried me a lot before Christmas because I though these changes would take several months.  Good coding practices along the way, however, added up and it took far longer than I had expected.  Usually in the world of programming it's the opposite of that.  So another pat on the back for me.  Happy Happy.  :)

So this has been a pretty solid three weeks of effort coming out of the New Years and I'm happy with the progress being made.  Ok, that's all.   Back to the Salt Mine.

PS - the site will be changing over to an Open Beta in the not too distant future as we polish  up the look and feel and get it into a final shape that I feel is acceptable enough to show to the general public.  I hope people will find it a useful and enjoyable RPG System, and I think it can easily be used in conjunction with Virtual Table Top systems like Roll20.  We'll see.  I'm of course hoping so, but frankly, I won't know until we put it out there and get some real world reactions to it all.

Ok - salt mine is calling.  Ciao!

Elthos ODS Rules: Skills & Kills: Calculating Experience Gains

I'm currently working on the Experience Gains section of the Elthos ODS rules with the help of my play testers.  The results have been to simplify the Experience Gains system considerably, and I believe that the math is now both easier to perform, and also the results align better with the Experience needed for Leveling in the ODS System.  Before continuing I should point out that the numbers are very small, and that is by design.  What follows is my current draft of the revised rules that will go into the Elthos ODS Rules Book:

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Skills & Kills: Calculating Experience Gains

When Characters successfully use Skills or Mystic Powers that they have learned, they gain Experience Points, however, the successful use of unlearned skills is considered pure luck, and does not earn experience Points, though the GM can override that rule if circumstances warrant. Calculating how many Experience Points are gained is easy. In the case of non-Combat skills is simply the value of the Difficulty Level of the task succeeded at (which is a value between 1 and 6 points). In the case of Combat Skills, Experience is earned when the opponent is killed, and is calculated by adding the specified stats of the all of the Vanquished Characters together as follows:

Total Vanquished Experience Gains = SUM(Character Level + Armor Class + Damage Absorption + Modified Dex Bonus + Strength Bonus + Wisdom Bonus)

Note: default Base Kill Gain Multiplier = 1 but can be adjusted to increase or decrease the rate of Levels advancement. The higher the BKGM the faster the Characters will gain Levels. The default of 1 seems to provide the best value for Campaigns where the expectation that Characters will advance to 6th Level (maximum in most cases) in approximately a year of play.

Example Experience Gain Calculations
Character: Tang (CL: 4, AC: 1, DAB: 1, MDB: 0, STB: 0, WSB: 0) is defeated by Gorgar, then the calculation is:  

XP = 1 x (4 + 1 + 1 + 0 + 0 + 0) = 6 Experience Points

If a Character wins a Solo Combat, such that no other party members are in range to provide support, then the experience is not shared, and the value of the Experience Gain multiplied by 2. Otherwise, however, Combat Experience is shared with all of the members of the party equally.

Calculation for Learned non-Combat Skills
If a Character tries to perform a learned skill such as swimming across a fast moving river, which the GM has assigned a Difficulty Level of 5, then if he succeeds by rolling above the Chance to Succeed value, he accomplishes his goal and gains 5 Experience points.

Calculation for Special Cases
A special case might constitute any situation in which the normal amount of Experience Gain seems insufficient. For example, if the opponent in a combat situation is using magical weapons or armor, the GM might add a bonus Experience Point for each bonus value of the magical item. Conversely, if the Victor was using a magical weapon or armor the GM may wish to reduce the experience gained by an equivalent value.  The use of Mystical Powers earns Experience Points as does any other learned Skill or Combat Skill depending on the nature of the Mystic Power.

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To give you an idea of how these small numbers of Experience Gains relate to how much Experience is required for Character Leveling here is the Chart. You will note that the top value is the Experience Base for the Class, and it doubles for each level, which makes calculating the required amount reasonably simple. Remember that the idea of the Elthos "One Die System" is to keep the numbers small so that they are easy to handle during the game. The current configuration should allow Characters to get to Level 6, on average, in about 1 year of play if the GM runs the game once per week, more or less.  

	Fighter & Thief	SpellChanter & Cleric
Levels	20	30
1	0	0
2	20	30
3	40	60
4	80	120
5	160	240
6	320	480

Note that Multi-Classes combine the bases -10 / additional Class to so that a Fighter(20)-Thief (20) has a base of (20+20)-10=30, a SpellChanter(30)-Thief(20) has a base of (30+20)-10=40, and a Fighter(20)-SpellChanter(30)-Cleric(30) has a base of (20+30+30)-20=60.

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Elthos Guild Classes

I've been tooling around with my Play Testers on the question of Guild Classes, and how much Experience it should take to go up in levels.  I think we've made some great progress on it, and so, as a kind of teaser, I'm going to toss up the Guild Class Configuration Screen from the Elthos RPG "One Die System" Web Application.

In the not too distant future I'm going to ask for Gamesmasters to Beta Test the system.  I have no idea, really, how the application and the rules will be received, but I'm hoping that if people are willing to give it a try that they will find it useful and give it a thumbs up.  The system is mostly geared toward people who would prefer to play with a rules set that is traditional in nature (based largely off of OD&D) and with small numbers to keep the math easy.   The combat and skills resolution system is very easy to work with, and the character generation can probably be described as medium weight in terms of complexity... but there is the Web Application which does all of the heavy lifting, number crunching, and record keeping chores.

And so, there you have it.  Progress is being made, and I'm hoping to make the system available to Beta Testers within the next few months.   If you happen to be interested in becoming a Beta Tester, please drop me a line via the Blog and I'll add your name to the list to be emailed when it's ready.

:)

The Sisyphus of Game Designers

- Sisyphus -

One profound lesson that I've learned during the course of this project is that it is really impossible for me to tell how long something is going to take.  A very good example is my current efforts at play-testing my Elthos RPG skills system, taking the feedback I got from my play testers, analyzing it, and then integrating the recommendations.   Wow!   Recommendations finished rolling in last Thanksgiving!   I'm still working on it!  Almost finished, but still!   WOW!   That's a very, very long time!

What took the most time?  The analysis, of course.  Actually, once I determined what needed to be programmed, it was difficult and tedious and time consuming (and not quite finished yet), but in all it did not take that long really.  Only maybe 10 hour stretched over 3 weeks.   That's not too terrible.  If I were not working a day job, and taking Wudan classes (which requires a lot of practice time), a some fascintating but time consuming personal matters, and family & friends, well, of course that 10 hours would have taken maybe 2 days instead of three weeks.  But as it is my calendar is packed solid every day, and so real life has a way of interfering with my fantasy life (of finishing this project in time for my fellow human beings to actually get a chance to try it out, hopefully before the world ends).

But really, it was the Analysis that took most of the time, and I did not expect that.  I should have expected that, but when I got my first set of emails on the skills system the ideas seemed reasonably simple enough to parse through and organize, so I expected the process to take maybe one month.   Hah!   Took a lot longer than that!

One take away from this was that communicating with the Player Testers by email has distinct pros and cons.   The positive side it is easy and the play testers can just jot down their thoughts and send them along very simply.  On the negative side it created a huge mass of emails that had interwoven comments about different facets of the problems (of which there were more than a few interlinked with each other) that had to then be tweezed out into individual (yet related) statements that could be analyzed.  That document in the end turned out to be 11 single spaced pages in MS Word!  Holy Macrel!   Unexpected!   That's what I'd call A LOT of information to analyze.  In case you're interested you can find the analysis on the Elthos RPG Forum here.  All of it, by the way, was really excellent information and feedback, so I'm very happy I have play testers willing to dig in and help me think through the issues!   It's absolutely great!   But it is also time consuming.  Not complaining, just explaining, so don't get me wrong.  I am writing this just as a hint and reminder to those who may also want to program their own game system in the future that these are the kinds of things that you can expect to happen along the way.   I didn't expect them, and so I was surprised.  Maybe you won't be quite as surprised as I've been.   Doubtful, but maybe.

Anyway, of course the analysis in the end distilled down to only a few statements.   And finally, it distilled down to two very simple formulas.  Hah!  The joke is on me that later people will scratch their heads and wonder, Gee - these two formulas are so incredible simple, so basic, so fundamentally no-brainers - what in the world took you so long!?   Next lesson learned:  sometimes to road to simplicity is very circuitous, winding, and torturous.  It was in this case fo'shizzle!

Don't get me wrong, though.  All of this effort was necessary in order for me to derive a simple system that actually balances and hangs together nicely.  It's just that this process of analysis and resolution took me a long time.  Especially when I have to balance the working on the project with my real life.   Were I to live in a cave with no day job, no family, no girlfriend or any friends at all, and a meager supply of food and water, then it would take much less time.   But that, friends, just ain't how my reality is configured.  Nor would I want it to be.  So the result is that ... it's slow.  Maybe if I had a team of top-flight programmer analysts to help me it would also go much faster.  You know, there may just be something to that!   But how to get from here to there?   Clue-free.

Of course, the risk I run is that because I am working on this project pretty much solo end-to-end, with few resources other than my own tiny fingers and a few pretty messed up computers (another reason for the delay was two severe computer crashes that cost me a lot of time), that I will get this project out into the public domain just in time for the sun to go into it's Red Giant phase, and our poor little world will be engulfed in a magnificent sea of scintillating fire.  Well, I hope I can get it finished before then.   That would be nice.

In fact, I hope to have it finished in time for people to try it out sometime soon.  Right now Elthos RPG is actually on the web.   It is in beta test mode.  It works, and does a pretty nice job, but I would also say that it's still got a lot of rough edges that need polishing.   I should probably mention that I started Elthos way back with my original rules system (still inherently intact) in 1978.  I began programming the system in QBasic in 1994.   I then converted over to Visual Basic in 1995 and finished the VB Application in 2000, and then extended and enhanced the application through 2005.   I should also mention that I did manage to play some pretty spectacular games with it over that period of time.  But anyway, I then began working on the simplified rules and Internet application for the "One Die System" which I created for use by the Literary Role Playing Game Society of Westchester in March of 2006.   So now it is an astonishing 2011, and I'm still not finished!  Yowza-Crikey-OMG!!  Good thing this is a really tremendously fun hobby!

Anyway... last lesson:  Keep At It!  It may seem like you'll never achieve your goal sometimes... but if you stick with it, eventually, one day, hopefully before the end of the world, you'll make it.  And then you'll be proud to look back and say, well, no matter how long it took, how difficult the challenges, and how discouraged I may have felt at times, I achieved my goal!  So...

Don't Rush Me!!  I'm working on it!  
hehe... :)

Sincerely,
Sisyphus of Elthos

Ethos ODS Tarot Deck !

It is very gratifying as a game designer to finally have a tangible and beautiful manifestation of their work. I am very grateful to my artist, Jason Moser, who took my written descriptions for each card and turned them into an exquisite deck of Elthosian Tarot Cards. It's fabulous. At the moment we have only printed the major arcana, which are 24 cards, and the only ones actually needed for the Elthos Cosmological system. Nevertheless the minor arcana are already finished, but no printed into cards at this point. This was a test batch to see how the Major Arcana cards look when printed. I just received 10 decks in the mail. I am absolutely delighted with the results!

Here is a sample of the six of the cards starting with the back face... 

I could not be happier!  Thank you so much Jason!   Two decks are heading your way pronto!

Elthos ODS Tarot Deck

I'm very excited that we are moving ahead with our first physical print test of the Elthos ODS Tarot Deck.  This is one of the aspects of the system that I've most enjoyed working on.  It ties together a whole set of Elthosian World Weaving Development Tools into a relatively easy to use and coherent system.  I will certainly post more details about this later on, but for now suffice it to say that 10 Elthos Tarot Decks are soon to be printed, 2 for the artist and his lovely wife, and one for my dear mom, several for some friends of mine who have been very supportive of the game development, and of course one for me!  :)

It's an exciting development and I'm looking forward to seeing the results of the test print. Here you can see The Emperor Card.  You may notice the circle at the bottom, which demonstrates the card's astrological alignment, and key correspondences.  The images in the card reflect additional correspondences as well.  The entire deck was designed to give the Gamesmaster an easy visual reference to a correspondence system that can help to keep the back story of the game coherent over time.  It does a few other things to help with World Weaving aspects of the game as well, but more on that another time.

The Cards are designed by yours truly, and the artwork was done by Jason Moser of Ellium Fame at Asylum.Net.  Jason is a wonderful artist, and exceedingly professional in his dealings with me.  It was delightful to work with him on the Tarot Deck, and I look forward to working with him again on other aspects of the Elthos Project.

Elthos Web Application Progress

Ok, things are moving along slowly but surely.  I was very happily working on the next set of enhancements to the Elthos Web Application when I found that my hosting company, Arvixe, has been updating their database system.  So I ran into a big fat hairball when I tried to deploy my changes to the production system.  Oh joy.  That took about a week of communications, research, trial and error to resolve, but finally - the site has been updated.  The new feature is to allow Gamesmasters to select one of a number of Skill Learning Point Advancement Rate formulas from the World Configuration page and apply them to their World.  It's probably something of a senseless feature that I will eventually remove, but for now, while still in the testing phase I think it will be handy to use to compare the different formulas.  I may keep it anyway.  Depends on whether or not Gamesmasters actually wind up needing it.  My guess is that they will use the default.  But then again - maybe not!  Time will tell.  In the meantime, I'm pretty happy with the functionality so far as my own purposes as concerned.  :)

Strangly Coincidental News

This News Just In...

"Australia's Darling river is running with water again after a drought in the middle of the decade reduced it to a trickle. But the rains feeding the continent's fourth-longest river are not the undiluted good news you might expect. For the cloudbursts also create ideal conditions for an unwelcome pest – the Australian plague locust.

The warm, wet weather that prevailed last summer meant that three generations of locusts were born, each one up to 150 times larger than the previous generation. After over-wintering beneath the ground, the first generation of 2010 is already hatching. And following the wettest August in seven years, the climate is again perfect. The juveniles will spend 20 to 25 days eating and growing, shedding their exoskeletons five times before emerging as adults, when population pressure will force them to swarm.

It is impossible to say how many billions of bugs will take wing, but many experts fear this year's infestation could be the worst since records began – 75 years ago. All that one locust expert, Greg Sword, an associate professor at the University of Sydney, would say was: "South Queensland, New South Wales and Victoria are all going to get hammered."

A one-kilometre wide swarm of locusts can chomp through 10 tons of crops – a third of their combined body weight – in a day. The New South Wales Farmers Association said an area the size of Spain was affected and the Government of Victoria alone forecasts A$2bn (£1.2bn) of damage.

Though locusts move slowly when the sun's up, at night they can fly high and fast, sometimes travelling hundreds of kilometres. "A farmer can go to bed at night not having seen a grasshopper all year and wake up in the morning to find his fields full of them," said Professor Sword.

All locusts are grasshoppers, but not all grasshoppers are locusts. The difference is a suite of genetic changes that kick in when population densities cross a critical threshold. In some species, they produce physical transformations – the desert locust of North Africa goes from green to black and yellow, for example – but the Australian plague locust merely reprogrammes its behaviour, from solitary to gregarious.

Swarms probably make use of the available food more efficiently as the leading edge is constantly pushing forwards into new vegetation. It may be fear more than hunger, however, that drives the locusts.

Locusts are highly cannibalistic, says Professor Sword, and any that stay still too long are likely to get nibbled. "Swarms are like lifeboats," he says, forging a gruesome metaphor. "If you're the only one in the boat, you could easily starve. But if you've got lots of company, you could be the last to survive. We call it travelling with your lunch."

REF: http://www.independent.co.uk/environment/nature/australia-faces-worst-plague-of-locusts-in-75-years-2089919.html

Coincidence ... or ... ?

hmmmm... sometimes news from the real world intersects strangely with an RPG World. This is one of those cases. Those of you following along with Juliette and Storm Wizard of the 'Steel Wool Sheeps' Adventure Group in the Elthos Play Test Campaign will know what I mean.

It's Alive (again)! (elthos web application news)

Ok this post is about the trials and travails of hosting Elthos RPG Web Application out there in the horrible "real world".

First off the hosting company migrated my project to a "new platform" in mid April. Fine. Except: they broke the site in numerous ways that made it all but impossible to work on, or even get to, for quite some time. You have no idea what I've been through with this. Good thing I don't have any users on the system at this time. Whew. Because otherwise I'd have been S.O.L. It took until two days ago (July 19) for them to get the site back online. That was April-July. Wow. That's like totally crappy service! Amaaaazing.

But anyway, after much gnashing of teeth it is online again. Superior! I can now go back to what I was working on. My World.

And now for the good news. I really like the Elthos RPG Web Application. I mean like A LOT. Why? Because it does quite a lot for me. The coolest thing, I think, that I realised today, is that it stores my world information in a nice tidy place so I don't lose stuff. Instead my stuff accumulates over time. In a nice easily accessible-from-anywhere location online. That's pretty sweet. So I can be on go, and see something that gives me cool game-world idea and through the website I can update my world. I can upload photos of places I see along the way from my phone, if I want, and add them to my world, too. That's just freakin cool, as far as I'm concerned.

The other things I like:

1. The math is simple so that even though the computer does the math, with a little effort I could easily do the math too. But the computer is faster, and makes fewer mistakes than I do, so still the computer is a plus on that.

2. The Web Application lets me print out my stuff in quick, but convenient (though not very fancy looking) format. So I can print-n-run to the game, and I know I have everything I need.

3. The Elthos Rules can be played pretty much on a picnic table with minimal equipment or books. That's a plus.

4. The rules are simple enough so that I can be reasonably sure how to build scenarios that balance without struggling with a zillion gotcha-rules. It makes improv-GMing much easier.

5. And it's must faster to generate monsters and NPCs using the Adventure Group Generator. The nice thing is that it gens not only the NPCs randomly, but equips them based on their race or class as well. So minimal post-gen work is needed. It doesn't, for example, assign spells or miracles to the mystical classes.

6. It's kind of fun to use, to. Oh, and if I do the data entry, it also keeps a nice historical record of what has transpired during the campaigns, and what each character did, and even records stuff that lets me determine the alignment of actions taken and adjust the character's alignment accordingly - automagically. It's a neat feature, though I suspect not everyone will use it. It's not necessary, but it's still pretty neat. And for my World of Elthos, Alignment makes a difference, so it works for me.

So anyway, enough about how great this is... the game sessions continue at pace, and we are making good progress through the Game Testing Phase (one of them, anyway). So that's great too. I'm pretty thoroughly psyched.

The bad news: I can not for the life of me figure out at this point whether or not I should throw the doors open to the world and let the Application out into the "wild", or if I should (and must?) get a patent, and build up a legal framework by which I can continue to control it going forward.

There are Pros and Cons on both sides, and I'm having a devil of a time working my way through the details via research and conversation with those who may know something helpful. It's a slow process.

But in the meantime, things are going well. The master is pleased.

:)

Tinkering

Well, things are coming along, the website is up and working, but I'm having some technical issues with the application. Just a few, but still they're quite annoying. I have on my development server code that works fine, but when I put it on the production server being hosted by a third party company, bang, stuff breaks. Their answer: "Recode". I'm like... uh, I shouldn't need to do that. But that's how things go in the real world. SO I'm working on getting it all together and making a final round of fixes to the last short list of stuff that doesn't work yet. The good news is that 99% of the site does work. Yay. :)

The Prismatic Wall

Ok, well things are moving along with the legal stuff in regards to the Elthos Web Application project. It's very complicated stuff. Much worse than physics or neuroscience (which at least makes logical sense). I call it The Prismatic Wall. You go in thinking it looks pretty and colorful, and you come out with seven kinds of fatal injuries. Yay. But anyway, I'm slogging through all that slowly (and expensively). Once I'm through with that then I can launch the site in "Closed Beta" Phase. However, even then, I still have some thinking to do regarding working with The New York Group. Wanna do it, but the terms are too difficult for me. I'll try negotiating. More on that topic another time...

Elthos Website...

Well, making steady progress on the Website. While it's not really complete yet, and has a few place holders with blurbs rather than information, it does seem to be shaping up nicely.

I'm also going through the Elthos ODS Rules Book and weeding out extraneous stuff, and slimming it down even further. So that's coming along nicely. Soon...

On other fronts: I finished reading "Dogs in the Vineyard" and am not onto "Shadows of Yesterday". These are two Indie RPGs that have gained a lot of popularity in certain circles and so I want to see what all the hubbub is about. I really must say that in the case of DitV it's got a lot going for it. What I particularly like is the scenario development process. The way DitV establishes scenes along psychological and moral lines is intriguing. I am going to consider that methodology and try to genercise it for my game.

I've only just started with SoY so I'm not sure what I think of it yet. However, I did notice at least one thing of interest, in relation to recent discussions on Lessons in the LRPGSW. The Rules for regeneration of Character points is based on doing things WITH someone else (only). There is a reason for this, and I sense that the author has a "lesson to be learned" from that particular mechanic. Hmmm... interesting.

Well, back to work for me. :) Yay.