Two Important Occasions

First of all, my daughter is three today! Three years has gone by very quickly. Three years ago, Mrs R and I were both exhausted. I remember this distinct moment of, "What... None of you are staying to make sure we don't mess this up?" when the last family members went home after coo-ing and ahh-ing over CJ.

I think at some point just after Christmas I'll have managed to hook CJ onto some kind of RPG; we're already making up stories together, and she's interested in board and card games too. Some kind of ten or fifteen minute RPG with some minis or toys, plus simple dice or yes/no questions to resolve things should be doable. I'll report back as and when we do this.

The second occasion is also interesting: today is five years since I sat down to play Apocalypse World with Patrick Stuart MCing and David McGrogan also playing. Apart from two sessions of high school D&D, this was my first game. I picked the Gunlugger class because it seemed right. (I think Dave and Patrick would argue that this first character has been the template for every character I've played since; I think things are a bit more nuanced than that)

That first session really drew me in: I was hooked. And the last five years has gone by quickly. Alas, maintaining a weekly game slot over that time hasn't been possible, but I enjoy playing when I can. I think about and read about games every day, and am still in the slow process of cultivating a daily writing process.

Five years from now, my daughter will be eight, and it'll be ten years since I started playing games. And I'll be forty... Hopefully, somewhere in that time I'll be able to play some good games with her, but also find space to play in a couple of long term games too.

To the future!
N

I miss playing Apocalypse World

This trailer has thrown a curveball at me: just abandon all prep for Hard Oort Cloud Adventures aka The Long Night aka I Have Lots Of Names For The Game I Have In Mind That Is Hard SF In The Oort Cloud and find some players for Apocalypse World?

Maaaaaaybe...

Where does the time go?

I like noisms' "generalised lament" about the amount of time that he has to run/play games (and write about them as well) - obviously not the fact of the matter, but the situation resonates with me a lot. I wonder about how things are going to change when I become a dad in a few months time. Will I be able to play in a weekly game? (nevermind run one) At the moment I am barely able to run a LotFP campaign once a week; in principle I am taking part in noisms' excellent Pendragon of Mars campaign, but in reality I'm either away or busy. I've taken part in two sessions.

Ah well! I can sit here and weep for my lack of time or I can start to think, like noisms about the five games I would want to run or play:

• Chatting after games night yesterday I realised that I would love to play some more Cyberpunk; I really enjoyed the game that we played about eighteen months ago in alternate Soviet Cyberpool.
• Apocalypse World. I'd love to play it, I'd particularly love to run it (I was hoping to run it for my nephew and his friends this summer, but think I will be too short on time).
• I've read a lot about Monsterhearts in the last few months and it really intrigues me... I might have to pick it up soon...
• Avarice Industries is an RPG that I supported on Kickstarter. It's a bit Cyberpunk-y with the twist that the big corporations (one of which the players work for) have technology that creates anything. You can ride a dinosaur to work or have a bag with dimensional pockets. Big Problem: it was due in April 2012, and it's still (as of July 2013) not here. I've had bits and pieces of pdfs but nothing playable... AP stuff that was shared looks really interesting.
• Homebrew Dogs In The Vineyard in modern day setting with zombies. I bloody loved running Dogs, we played about five sessions and it was a joy to prepare for and play. While playing it I was struck with the idea of the Dogs being able to do what they do because they have the final say about what is right and wrong (by virtue of being Followers of the King of Life). I think this kind of theme could transfer well in a zombie game; people acting as they will because there are no courts or authorities to say otherwise. I act, therefore I'm right. Started making some notes about this some time ago and tagged them with "zombies".

It's Camp Nanowrimo month and so I'm spending time writing 31,000 words about games and game resources. So hopefully, like noisms, I will find my 30 minutes a day to connect with a hobby...

Week Off

Had to cancel this week's games night. A combination of Nanowrimo, Merseytunnel tours and lack of ideas lead to no games. And I've got to miss next week too because of work.

With the holidays coming up, it seems like a regular game might be out of the picture for a while. I know that noisms is trying to marshall us for some kind of game while he is back in the north west for a few weeks, so keeping my fingers crossed.

Instead, last night I spent some time looking over and updating my notes for a short campaign based on a Kickstarter scenario that I supported. Potential players might be reading this, so I'll be a bit cagey on a few details. Here's what I was thinking:

• It's the 1930s and the Dust Bowl is hitting hard. The players all find themselves in a small town that's hit harder than most.
• Bad stuff is happening... (can't say any more due to spoilers)
• Game runs on a mix of stripped down Cyberpunk with Apocalypse World health and harm rules: so stats and skills from Cyberpunk, but only a small number of hit points.
• Weapons are classified with the Apocalypse World tagging rules. So a hatchet is say, 2-harm close sharp messy, whereas a hunting rifle might be 3-harm long-range loud big.
• The BODY stat would act a little like Apocalypse World's armor rules to potentially reduce harm, as it wouldn't be "of the time" for characters to wear armor.
• Clearly, removing a lot of the anachronistic skills, tech and gear from Cyberpunk! Also thinking that I might do away with special character classes and skills completely. Possibly include possibility for players to nominate one skill in particular that they can re-roll on a critical failure (they have to articulate why that skill would be special for that character).

The game would be a bit of investigation, some conflict... Have you ever run a game that takes place during a particular historical period rather than a completely fictional setting? What have you done to try and convey the time? What are the important details to put across?

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?

Random and Biased

Following on from my post "Different Dice" a few days ago, I think there is another important distinction to be made between the ideas of random and biased.

For example, if we roll a fair d6 - i.e., one which is not weighted in favour of any particular result - then whatever it lands on we know that it the result is both random and unbiased, because the die is fair. If we roll 2d6, paying attention to the sum as the result of this event, then while the result itself is still random it is biased. Because of the different ways that you can make a total of 7 from rolling two d6 dice, a 7 is six times more likely than getting a result of 2 or of 12 (both of which have only one way of being achieved).

I'm interested in this kind of bias a lot at the moment; I was tinkering/hacking together a zombie game* based a little on Risus and a little on Apocalypse World. Apocalypse World works well with its main dice mechanic because it is so straight forward: for around 60% of the time on a general (unmodified) roll your action carries - or at least you get some success. For less than 20% of the time the dice give you exactly what you want. This seems like a neat way to do it: the outcome is random, and there is a slight overall bias towards success.

But in the messed up post-apocalypse, maybe those are the kind of odds you need.

*more on that setting/game another time!

Someone I Was

Chaplain was my Gunlugger in Apocalypse World. In other games he might almost be a Solo, or a Warrior. I think that in Apocalypse World's messed up future he might even be close to a Paladin (if you really, really squint). Maybe I am only seeing what I want to see. He was a damage sponge, things just didn't connect properly. He always tried to do the right thing, but according to his own rules of what was right.

Chaplain was the first character I ever created in a tabletop RPG (I leave aside a Mutants and Masterminds game noisms and I tried to play over Facebook messages). His first action in play was to draw a gun on someone who was beating up someone else in the street. It felt right, the more that I went on, that he was just trying to do the right thing - not necessarily for himself (to profit by things) but to ultimately keep other people safe. And most of the time, him being a Gunlugger, that meant having to do something violent. When he came into contact with a Hive parasite he argued his way out of being killed, put on a pair of gloves to avoid touching others, and then worked to see how long he could survive. Along the way he developed a small amount of psychic talent (via a Brainer move upgrade), which was explained away in-game as a gift of the Hive parasite.

I hadn't read the Apocalypse World manual when I realised something very clear: moves snowball (which is pretty much the exact term in the playbook). It wasn't obvious to me when I first started playing RPGs. There was a hangover from things like Final Fantasy X and the like, that you as a player have wiggle-room, but ultimately you're moving at the MC's pace. But of course, this isn't true - and I can't imagine playing an RPG now where it was the norm that you were forced to do X at location A, and then attempt Y at location B (proceed straight to set piece C).

Chaplain was someone I was. He didn't die at the end of the chapter actually, although for a time it looked like none of the characters would survive. He came out of it worse for wear, nowhere to live, no great possessions to speak of, but he was alive, the parasite was dead, and even his friends pretty much didn't like him (although I would like to think they realised just how useful he was). I'm not sure I would take him up as a character if/when we return to Apocalypse World, but I know he'll always be there, hiding in the background, waiting to walk back on-camera and go aggro.

Different Dice

I've been thinking about notation. A quick Google shows me that there are lots of people out there who are interested in probability questions with dice - and by extension with RPGs. Or perhaps that flows the other way, they are interested in games, and then start to get interested in how probabilities come from dice mechanics.

In either case, there are people out there who are interested in these areas. It's not my interest largely (when it comes to maths and RPGs) but it is definitely a good place to start, and one that throws up interesting points. Dice have different contexts. Rolling 2d6 in Apocalypse World, when you want to know the sum, gives you a value from 2 to 12, and those 11 values are distributed unevenly. In this case, you don't really care what either of the dice actually gives. You care about the total.

Rolling two d6s when you care about the values of each dice gives you a different proposition. Picture having a red d6 and a blue d6. Rolling 2 on red and 5 on blue results in something different from 5 on red and 2 on blue. Rather than have 11 values given by the sum of the faces, we have 36 possibilities, each with the same probability of occuring.

For future posts then we can consider 2d6 in the normal way and, to be clear, two d6 for the situation when we care about each individual result on the two d6s. Or three d8s. 3d10 is different from three d10s. A numeral in front of a die size will indicate that we want to sum them, a number in words will indicate that we want to use each result from the dice.

All sound fine? It might be a basic sort of thing to write about, but this is the foundations: important in games (of all kinds) and maths. On foundations we can extend outwards, upwards and in as many ways as can be supported.