The story of Alice and Kev is a story of a homeless family—a man who hates children and his hard-working but miserable daughter—played out in The Sims 3.

It’s still ongoing, so after reading through the heart-wrenching story so far, I subscribed to their RSS feed. Start from the beginning, it’s worth it.

We tried a few games of Agricola yesterday. It’s been celebrated as “the new Puerto Rico,” and I see some of why: each player is running his own economy, with the only interaction with others’ the consumption of scarce resources. Three resources dominate the interactive game: purchase of unique Major Improvements for your farm, tapping of the raw-material accumulators when they pass interesting thresholds, and access to one-per-turn abilities. Everybody plays until the end, at which point all are scored by success in agriculture, husbandry, and construction. You lose a few points for neglecting an area, but can make it up with extraordinary success in one of the other two.

The extra decks of power-ups (“occupations” and “minor improvements”) add a great deal of re-play variety. The simpler “family game” dispenses with the power-ups, and I’m looking forward to learning to play without the fluff—we saw at least one person lose a game due to focus on the fluff over the meat of victory points. The hardest part will be figuring out how to attack others: how to play a competitive game, rather than a race. Puerto Rico at least let players ride on the side-effects of others’ roles. Agricola so far looks like a parallel solitaire.

We’ve tried the newTitan. It’s a fine two-player game, and I can see it working even better with 3, 4, or 6. It is certainly a typical British/American wargame—lots more fiddly rules than the svelte and streamlined Eurogames (Tikan, Settlers, etc.). There’s a Combat Result Table. There are dice pools. Like many such games, last man standing wins. Players are eliminated in turn. Whoever is not eliminated has won by default. There are three common problems with such games, and Titan addresses each.

1. Eliminated players may be bored. By the time Titans are dying off, there are usually many powerful armies around and at least one Titan with teleportation. The end-game will be only a few more turns.
2. Let’s you and him fight. The way to win a three-way fight is to fight the weakened winner of a two-way fight. The constrained strategic movement and recruiting system makes it harder to avoid combat while the other players fight, the point system rewards early engagement, and the legion size-caps reduce the weakening from defeating an enemy.
3. Turtling. Most games undervalue the return on investment in heavy defense, particularly when combined with (2). Because you have to move to recruit, and movement zones are moderately predictable, it’s quite reasonable for two Legions to run a third to ground. Legion size and number caps also help here.

I look forward to trying a large game.

“The thing I’ve noticed about being a Solar is that you’re always either loved or reviled. Generally, both at once. And you always seem to have the choice between the bad thing and the worst thing. Generally, people seem to prefer the worst thing — so that’s what I’m going to do.” - Koyenne

Dungeon Twister is roughly in the genre of Talisman or DungeonQuest, the Game That Hurts. A couple teams of classic adventurer types loot an abandoned ruin. It’s nice to leave with the treasure, but it’s pretty good just to make it out alive. I’m ridiculously hopeful about this genre. I buy or try game after game, but they all share a series of problems: low interactivity, excessive randomness, and low replay value. Talisman can be played solitaire without much loss of fun. Frankly, it can be played with no players at all. DungeonQuest is equivalent to a coin flip. Heads, the dragon eats you. Tails, you get the treasure and then the dragon eats you. Edge, you make it out OK.

Dungeon Twister has very little randomness: only the initial board setup is random. There’s a little bit of hidden information in initial placements, some of which may not be revealed until late in game (Where’s the enemy Troll? It’s got to be in one of those two squares, but it can’t hurt me if I don’t wake it up…). Everything else is visible, planned, and interactive. The game framework is a race. You start at point A. Your opponent starts at point B. You want to be at point B, and he at A. Half of your team is under your control at the beginning. The other half is scattered in the dungeon to be discovered in play. Each of your characters has a special power: the Troll can regenerate, the Wizard can fly and use the fireball wand if he finds it, the Cleric can cure, and the Warrior can bend bars/lift gates. The Goblin’s special power is “Worth 2 points if he and his one hit point make it across the victory line.”

Five points win you the game: one point for each character across the enemy line, one point for each enemy you kill, one for each of the Treasure objects, and one extra if your Goblin lives.

There’s a nice microgame of action point allocation, and a further complication in that the rooms can be rotated—either from their own center or from the center of the room of matching color. The strategy involved in allocating action points so as to twist a room and run in or out while the doors line up is neat. And it’s a wonderful teaching tool. You learn very quickly that the enemy’s gate is down, and to keep your eye on victory points. Running around to pick up armor and weapons doesn’t get you points. Murdering the enemy Goblin doesn’t get you many points either, and neither does healing your own people.

Kat and I have greatly enjoyed a few games. We may try the timed or handicapped games next, but so far this is scratching a great itch. It turns out to not be a dungeon-crawl game like I’d expected. It doesn’t share enough of the flaws to really earn its place in that genre. It’s a suitable “Dragon Chess” game, though: a little bit of randomness, a little bit of hidden information, a lot of choices and planning, and a dungeon theme.

The excellent game Weapons of the Gods has some neat systems. I’m not playing WotG right now, but I am playing Exalted. I’d like to use some of these ideas in my Exalted game. Some of the ideas translate easily. Others require more work. The games use different dice systems. When a WotG book says “made a Moderate (20) roll,” what difficulty do I use for Exalted? For those interested but unused to these games, Exalted uses a simple die-pool system: you have a number of ten-sided dice, 1-15 or so. You roll these dice. Each result of 7, 8, or 9 is a success. Each 10 is two successes. You therefore expect a number of successes equal to half your pool size, with a bias towards occasional great success. Player characters who specialize have about 13 dice in their specialties, 8 dice in things they care somewhat about, and 2 dice in fields they choose to ignore. Most tasks have a “difficulty,” a number of successes required to complete the task.

WotG uses an unusual system. It also uses ten-sided dice, but it’s rare to have more than 6 in a pool. You find the largest matched set in a roll. Your result is ten times the number of dice in the set plus the name of the set. If you roll 4,4,4,7,9, you have rolled 34. If you roll 0,4,6,8,9 you have rolled 19. Everyday tasks that might be completed by the untutored have a difficulty of 18. Moderate tasks requiring training are difficulty 20. Hard tasks are 30. Legendary results require a 40. Impossible tasks require a 60. The impossible is made possible by various tricks for shifting dice from one roll to the next. Those who focus on a skill have 6 dice. The completely untutored have 1 die. Those who care only a little have 2 or 3 dice.

I don’t require an exact conversion. I just need something I can use for play. Will I regret using the following table?

WotG Name	WotG difficulty	Exalted difficulty
Trivial	10	0
Simple	15	1
Everyday	18	2
Moderate	20	4
Hard	30	8
Legendary	40	12
Impossible	60	16

Many have written about the effect that the works of Gary Gygax had on their lives. Cartoons like xkcd and Order of the Stick have expressed the feeling of the gaming community very clearly, more so than most texts I’ve seen. Steve Jackson’s words on the subject set me to thinking: what did Gygax bring to the hobby? I know what insight the boxed Basic Set gave to me:

Formal systems describe worlds, characters, and stories.

That idea has shaped the last twenty years of my life. When I was about nine, I spent days with the character and dungeon generation tables rolling up burrows full of orcs and ghouls, unsorted heaps of glittering shinies and their magical adornments, and the heroes who could conquer them. I wrote programs in BASIC to explore the spaces described by those tables. I linked those together, stacking them one upon the other until a few keypresses could generate a dungeon, a party, send the party through the dungeon, and repeat until the characters leveled and leveled and died.

When I saw the term Context Free Grammar a few years later, I knew CS was the field for me. Here, again, recursive application of formal systems spin out whole worlds, full of all the glory and horror we bring to them from our own.

For that insight, for the connection between formal systems and the act of Creation, I am thankful.

Our first big combat happened last night. Three PCs (a Servant, a Thief, and a Vagabond) were in the sewers trying to clear their names by finding the real killer. They came upon a Skaven hive. One guard saw them and sounded the alarm, so they ended up fighting half a dozen common clanrats and a visiting dignitary assassin-poisoner.

The battle had several points of tactical interest—especially as I’m still trying to learn what makes for good play for tactical players.

First, a character’s chance to hit in WFRP is solely dependent on his skill. There are defenses—but they’re not rolled off against one another, as in Exalted. And there’s no AC, as in d20. An attacker rolls against his own Weapon Skill. If he succeeds, he hit. A single bit flies from attacker to defender. The defender may make a defense roll. This is only against his own Agility (if he has the Dodge Blow skill) or his own Weapon Skill (if Parrying). A single bit flies back to the attacker. Then a damage roll is made. This makes for tremendously fast gaming: you don’t have to ask the target what his AC is. You don’t have to tell him what your result is, and wait for him to compare. Running 7 opponents, I could play them very quickly, interacting fluidly with all the players.

One player commented today that this made the boss brutal: if you did anything overly aggressive near him, you’d die. He had a 60% chance to hit, two attacks per turn if he didn’t move, and did enough damage to kill quickly. So if you sacrificed your defense for a +10% chance to hit, you’d hurt him and then he’d probably kill you. In fact, if you didn’t have both Dodge and Parry (and only one character in this group has Dodge), you’d be in terrible danger from him. Even with just the one attack, he was exactly twice as likely to hit each PC as the clanrats with their 30% chances to hit. The PC with the 60% chance to dodge was half as likely to be hit by any given attack as the PC with the 20% chance to parry.

This independence makes statting up characters a breeze.

The players also got a nice introduction to shields, tunnel fighting, why you don’t want to be surrounded, how fighting in tight lines might be useful, and the difficulties of mixing ranged and hand-to-hand combat. I do think they’ll try much harder next time to ensure that the bowman and the slingers are back from the melee, able to keep and control their range.

I got to learn something about satisfying player desires, clarity of statements, and what happens when the PCs get surrounded. When a line of PCs met a line of rats in a tunnel, the players of the PCs at the back complained of boredom. If I’d left them that way, the PCs could have safely chewed threw the line of rats: the PC in the front outclassed each rat, and the PCs in back were better with bow and sling than the rats in back were with thrown rocks.

Since the player at the back complained, I let the rats run on walls to move into melee with him. I gave them some penalties for doing this, like saying it took one hand and both feet to hang on to the wall, so they could neither parry nor dodge. But it let the rats surround and out-number the PCs.

It felt for much of the fight like I might kill the PCs. I think I’m learning that most good fights will feel that way: putting pressure on early, but slackening as the mook NPCs fall down. Eventually, the PCs outnumber the big bad guy 3 to 1, and he goes down.

From a thread on rpg.net, I begin to see why Exalted has some of the disconnection it does. It doesn’t make it a bad game, but… well, look at this quote from John Snead, one of the authors:

…As long as there are applicable stats (charisma and wisdom primarily, and a variety of social skills (bluff, diplomacy, gather information, intimidate, & sense motive) then you have all you need, the rest is roleplaying, which for me is far more important in social sequences than in combat, because social sequences are the more interesting portion of the game, and thus the place where I want rules to have the least affect. I love Exalted, but I’ll never use Social Combat, and argued successfully against anything remotely similar being included in Blue Rose.

I do not in any way understand the idea that the focus of the mechanics are the focus of the game, for me mechanics should be easy and fast (both true of True20) and should serve to specifically handle those sections of gaming that are not the primary focus of the campaign. The major (and fairly long) climactic scene of the best session of Blue Rose I ever ran involved not a single die roll - everyone deeply got in character and roleplayed marvelously, which was especially surprising since it was at a convention game at Origins, and so was with totally unfamiliar players. In any case, so-called "mechanical support" would have gotten in the way and made that scene far less interesting and powerful than it was.

Anything this man writes about mechanics or system is going to be worse than useless to me. I’ll need to excise it from my game, since it’ll be otherwise constantly getting in my way. I want rules to mediate and schedule the interesting parts of my game. If we’re bargaining for influence, make it currency! If there’s tactical positioning to do, give me a map and some system for movement.

The funny thing is, he’s a systems guy. He wrote a bunch of the magic rules for Dying Earth, and they’re fantastic. They’re not the core of the game—that’s snide remarks and hat design—but they’re certainly important to getting the feel right.

I wonder if part of this is due to different definitions of "system". After all, the most fun part of Shadowrun is the prep and planning. There’s no dice-rolling then, but plenty of IC arguments… backed up by a rich system of price and availability. When it starts to get un-fun, an OOC argument over wise plans, is when I find myself wanting more system, not less. By calling on a system agreed upon in principle beforehand, we resolve a conflict and get back to the fun part. I think we’d agree that the latter part is system, but I’m not sure he’d see the former as system. He might characterize it as a very well-established setting.

I don’t have links to the threads mentioned above handy; I’ll edit them into this post Thursday some time.

Burning Empires didn’t work out too well for my group. More on that at a later date, perhaps—I’m reluctant to write about stresses and tensions until I’ve thought about why that game failed for this group.

One bit that everybody agreed worked was the World Burner, a collaborative mechanism for setting design. Kasumi, a regular poster to rpg.net, wrote a variant called Apotheosis for use with advanced Exalted games. It’s wonderful. The important part to look at there is Step Two, where everybody’s nominating important components: factions that are involved, can’t be involved, etc.

I’d like to do something similar for a campaign I’m working on. A few years ago, I ran a game called Conspiracy Theories. It was quite successful. I wasn’t thrilled with the ending, but I learned a great deal from the process of running it. I and most of the players seemed to have a very good time. I liked it so much that I haven’t run anything in that genre since. Now I’m reading Harry Dresden books, and would like to do something like that again.

These, therefore, are thoughts on how to construct such a setting.

Publicity

How public is magic, sorcery, the otherworldly, in this setting? Do vampires appear in People, like the Anita Blake books? Are they hidden, as in Dresden Files or Buffy? Is there any public supernatural activity at all, like Dresden’s yellow-pages ad as a Wizard?

If the magic is occult, why? General agreement? A faction of guardians protecting it and killing anyone who might step out of line? A natural force, like Paradox? The flavor of the occult, like GURPS Voodoo, where magic never has definite effect? Collusion between the aliens and the opposing government, both of whom find secrecy to their advantage?

Magic Style

What is in the world, and what’s available to the PCs? Collectively figure out what might be there.

• Dresden-style sorcery, immediate and powerful in its application?

• Bob Howard (Atrocity Archives) magic, with slow rituals and lots of reading ahead of time?

• Advanced technical gadgetry, requiring some skill and significant infrastructure, but usable by those not able to replicate that infrastructure (see the old Conspiracy Theories for some of this)

• Psychic powers

• I’m missing many things here: hereditary shape-shifting powers, sacrificial summoning… it might be best to start by letting each player throw in something in addition to those above.

It’s very possible that only some of these will be available to the whole PC group, and that others will be used by particular factions. If you’d like some to not show up, ban them in the "Factions not Present" section below.

For any that are present, it’s fair game for a PC to buy into them: the one PC psychic, alien, witch, whatever. See Giles and then Willow, for example.

Backing and Cohesion

Are the PCs lone occult investigators? Backed by a government agency? Cooperating agents of different governments? Part of a supernatural conspiracy, like the Illuminati?

Allied Factions

Go around the table. Each player may nominate a faction allied to the PCs. The group should sketch out a leader or point of contact for that faction, and his relation to the PCs, before proceeding to nominate the next faction.

For each such faction, one PC should either have a tense and conflicted relationship with the named NPC member, or should have a hostile history with the faction itself.

Opposed Factions

Go around the table. Each player may nominate a faction opposed to the PCs. The group should sketch out a leader or point of contact for that faction, and his relation to the PCs, before proceeding to nominate the next faction. This doesn’t mean nobody else will show up, but narrative conservation will ensure these are the most common antagonists.

For each such faction, one PC should either have a friendly relationship with the named NPC member, or should have a friendly history with the faction itself.

Principal Opposition

Together, decide on one Big Bad—Lo Pan, the Bat Thing, the Grey Aliens, the Vampire Queen Bianca, the Mind—this can be an individual, a faction, or a faction with a named proponent as above.

Note: this part’s not well done yet. It may be best to have surprises, and I’m not sure how to handle that.

Factions not Present

Go around the table. Each player may nominate a faction or plot thread which will not appear in the game. For example, those playing in my games might want to know that Lectroids will not appear, nor will this turn out to be a game of Mage: the Ascension.