Catz

I like The Black Hack, and I think The Cthulhu Hack is a good read for combining a simple ruleset with a bit of focused setting and tone. Of all of the *Hack products I've seen so far, The Cat Hack has hit me the most as a game that I want to run. In 16 pages you've got rules, a theme, some neat innovations around equipment, magic and more. The classes are really clever, and not just feline versions of fighters, rogues and so on. The Cat Hack stands out to me as something to be explored - you could read it once quickly and miss a lot. If you get it, take your time when you read it, there is a lot of really neat stuff in there.

I'm going to run it sooner or later; I have a particular setting in mind for a game of it though. I like The Walking Dead and real-world zombie fiction, and there's something neat in my mind of mashing that with The Cat Hack. The dead rise, the humans in a neighbourhood are scared and wondering what to do when Mr Jones starts snarling and chasing after his wife with blood running down his face - and a group of cats work to try and help their owners escape and survive. I've no idea where it would go in play, although I would lean on it as being serious rather than a comedy game (even though the PCs would be semi-mystical cats).

I want to find out how well it might work for a setting. I have a three week gap in my "working away" schedule coming up, so if I can find a good day there, I might try to run it on G+/Hangouts. Stay tuned, drop me an email or comment if you're interested.

And check out The Cat Hack: it's small and perfectly formed, interesting and innovative and it's $1.95 on DTRPG! Total bargain!

Dead Dogs: Rumours

More speculative ideas for a zombie game mostly based on Dogs in the Vineyard.

At the start of a campaign, the players have some typical set-up; stats and so on. The GM has had some set-up as well. The basic setting that I am proposing is that the players play characters that exist in the most well-known city to most of them. This is the starting point, somewhere familiar.

Then you take that familiar place and take it to zombie hell.

If the game was to be based on Dogs then it would be good to still include a version of the initiation stage that each character goes through (more on that some other time). I have an idea for a quick card game that could help steer the tone or the setting. The GM will have done some scenario generation just like any sandbox game, and things will change as the players interact with that world and define their own goals. But right as things get going five minutes are spent to see what the characters have heard.

Dead Dogs: 1

For a long time I've been thinking about running a sandbox-y zombies game. And for a long time I've just been making notes in various places, scraps of paper, little journals - even the odd page of a Moleskine.

And then I thought, why not share some of that thinking here? See if other people can spot good ideas or spot obvious drawbacks. There are two main game systems that have influenced my thinking so far, Apocalypse World and Dogs in the Vineyard. If you've read this blog before then you'll know that AW is the game that got me into RPGs and Dogs is the first game that I've GMed for a campaign. So maybe it's natural that they're the ones which are leading me in terms of system.

I started making notes earlier this year convinced that AW was the way forward for a zombie game. Archetypes abound in zombie fiction, and so the playbook style characters for a zombie game would work quite well. Couple that with what I still think of as the best dice mechanic in a game, and a system of experience that creates cinematic, larger-than-life characters (without feeling like they are overpowered superheroes), and there starts to feel like the bare bones of a zombie game.

More recently, having GMed Dogs, I'm more inclined to go with that as the basis for a zombie apocalypse game. The main reason being a game mood one: in Dogs it is not the place for the GM to pass judgement on whatever the PCs do, only to respond in-game. The Dogs are the Law, in a world filled with sinners and demons, what they say goes. It struck me that in a post-apocalypse filled with the undead hungry for the living, there are going to be difficult decisions everywhere. And there is going to be no-one to judge those decisions, save for how others respond. So the mood of Dogs might be relevant - in which case the game mechanics might also be relevant... (if mechanics and mood have any connection at all; I don't know if they do, I don't know if they don't)

Anyway. I'll spew out thoughts about this over the next few weeks and see if any of it starts to make sense. I know that there are other people who have hacked AW and Dogs for zombies games, and I'll link to those or interesting bits in future posts too. And I know of All Flesh Must Be Eaten! but haven't been able to find a copy in the past; plus I think I'm more interested in something with a The Walking Dead vibe rather than out-and-out archetypes or cliches, which is what leads me more to Dogs than Apocalypse World I suppose.

Anyway (take two). Thoughts? Suggestions?

Ammo Maths

Almost as soon as I posted Tracking Ammo it dawned on me that an obvious series of questions arises:

• If I find a handgun with a 5 rating, what's the likelihood that I will get at least ten shots from it?
• If I have a shotgun with a rating of 3, how many shots am I likely to get from it?

More generally:

• If I have a gun with a rating of X, what is the probability, p,  that I get N shots from it?
• If I have a gun with a rating of Y, how many shots, Z, am I likely to get from it?

These questions are all inter-related, so a bit of thought on one or the other will start to get some answers. I'll have a think and get back to you over the coming days.

Tracking Ammo

I've been throwing ideas around for a zombie game for ages, ever since I heard of All Flesh Must Be Eaten but was too cheap to buy it.

I circle around hacking games that I already know about - Risus, In A Wicked Age, Apocalypse World - and would want to use Liverpool as a setting because (a) that's where I live, and (b) I think it would be neat to have big city centre maps that get updated over time to show what has happened where - where there are road blocks, where other survivors might be etc. I'm still testing ideas out on paper with different systems, and aim to share these as time goes on.

Anyway, that's all preamble. The thing that I want to share is an ammo tracking mechanism. I thought it might be a nice halfway house between the "infinite ammo until you really fail a roll" that I have experienced in Apocalypse World and the "track every single bullet you fire" of Cyberpunk.

(not that there is anything wrong with either of these, of course)

Ammo is by default very rare. A gun has a rating from 0 to 6. After each time a character fires their gun (by whatever in-game mechanism that has) they roll a d6:

• If they roll higher than or equal to their current rating, they reduce their rating by 1.
• If they roll less than their current rating they stay on that rating.

So, if a person starts with a 6 their clip/magazine etc is effectively full. As time goes on, after every roll they make, the chances are that they are going to have less and less ammo in their gun. When the rating gets down to 1 they know that the very next time they shoot the gun it will be out of ammo.

I think that this mirrors the way that hit points and damage were presented to me in the past: when you have only lost one hit point, that's like a scratch or a graze; when you're down to less than a quarter you could be in serious trouble. In the same way with ammo, on a 4 you have let some shots off but you're alright; if you're in a pitched battle and your shotgun has a 2 rating you had best find a way out of the danger zone.

Anyway, I'm sharing this for a reason: what do you think? Any thoughts? Any tweaks?