TIME IMPLOSION: THE GAME

Last night, under the influence of a variety of liquors, we managed to play a game of Mini Six. As you might have guessed, the theme was TEMPORAL CATASTROPHE, and I told my players to peruse the book and make a character from any time period because they're all going to be unstuck from time and working together, like the Scooby Doo gang, to make things right again.

whowowowoaahahoh- time itself is in trouble!

 Good god though- it went terribly.

The first, and I think largest problem, is that Mini Six as a ruleset is TERRIBLE. I feel awful for recommending it and I feel awful that the author of the system will probably read this, since role-playing is a small community and word gets around but dude, this ruleset is not good. I know it's based on another system that probably gets a lot of love for whatever absurd reason but this incarnation is not written clearly at all. It took us entirely too long to figure out if we added our weapon skills to our attack rolls (still not really sure), and the system itself is like really cheap underwear- it doesn't support you where you need it. When are you supposed to roll? Do you combine attributes and skills to kick people? Why is there such a difference between high and low rolls? Why is this so much worse of a generic system than Risus?

The second problem is that nobody really knew what to expect from a time implosion, and although my liberal borrowing of Zladko helped the framing and created a bizarre character and half-true tale that everybody liked, it wasn't quite enough to help the group's cohesion. A belligerent Hunnic warrior and a timid Arabian street rat don't really mix, and between the dozens of tangents and distracted discussion and a general lack of direction the game went nowhere fast and we all got bored. They liked Duke, the absurdly tall be-suited man, and they enjoyed my rendition of the Cave of Wonders and also how the genie of the lamp turned out to be a re-skinned Hades, but the fact is that the session got off on the wrong foot while I was trying to feel out the party composition and the way that the session was going to happen. By the time I figured out how to sate the Future-Sikh and Hun's appetite for violence and reconcile that with the Arab and Spaceman's need for adventure, the session was more than half over and everybody was tired. Oh, well.

The fast-talking and probably treacherous genie of the lamp, not that this went anywhere

Next time, I'll start with a stronger call to action than a fumbling Russian man (although I'll probably re-use him, since the Soviet Union is such a rich and interesting place for people to come from), and probably try and include more conflict in general, especially conflict that doesn't involve battling things. And maybe I'll make the characters myself, and let them choose between them, so we end up with characters that are planned out and the feeling is more of a "oh man Time Itself chose us to fix it!" and I can semi-plan out a course of action that lets each player do something neat (or fuck up massively, with equally exciting results)...

But the real net benefit is that we're back on to Dark Heresy next week. So more procedural work, more scouring the galaxy, and more general 40k weirdness. They're on the cusp of discovering what, exactly is happening, and that's a fun place to be. Hopefully they like what's going down! I know I will...

The Feeling Wheel (with bonus Random Emotion chart!)

This is, apparently, called the Feeling Wheel.

There's a lot of overlap between Psychology and tabletop games, and this wheel categorizes emotions in a way that I'd honestly never thought of. You could turn this pretty easily into a "random emotions" chart. Just take the chart and roll 1d6 if you want your basic emotions, or consult this longish chart I created if you're looking for a more subtle emotion for your randomly generated needs.

Not bad, right? Randomly generate a person using your favorite ruleset and then give him a random emotion to be in the throes of when your bold adventurer's party meets them. Help visualize the emotions of the mighty villain you just rolled up by randomly generating him a dominant emotion! Why decide between Guilty, Frustrated, or Joyful when you have this chart?

Create a Helm of Emotions and have the players be in-character consumed by a completely random emotion each and every morning!

Or possibly something you just thought of now that's probably twice as creative as what I thought. It's your game, probably. If it isn't, maybe it should be?

Anyways, here you are. Please enjoy.

 

Guild Wars 2

I've been playing (and thinking about) Guild Wars 2 instead of tabletop games.

If you've been living under a rock, Guild Wars 2 is a non-subscription based MMORPG that manages to feel completely different from World of Warcraft and its multiple clones in a couple of really massive ways. Luckily for me, they're also great ideas in their own right that can be used in your average tabletop game. Each of these are pretty big ideas, and they really each deserve their own article- but lemme give you the quick overview.

Fairly standard is the way that you can pick race and class, so I'll skim over that. Each class is available to each race, and, interestingly, each race has optional abilities that they can eventually learn, in about the middle of their progression. A Norn can eventually learn to turn into a bear or a raven, if they want, or stick to the regular abilities they'd normally learn through their class.

Once you start the game, you go through a quick introduction that serves to immediately let you know what the major conflicts in the world are. Humans fight some invading centaur (which feature heavily in the human zones, but I'll get into that later), Charr battle against the ghosts of the king they slew to reclaim their ancestral lands, Norn fight an enormous ice worm, and so on. The things you do in your "personal story" always take place in single-player only scenarios, and serve as a unifying thread to the things you're doing, which is pretty useful, because the entire rest of the game is fairly open world.

There aren't quests, in the traditional sense (except for your personal story); instead, you travel to a level-appropriate zone and either react to events or, if nothing interesting is happening, then you can help nearby people with their problems. You can easily identify what you're supposed to do, because you can either go close to them or just look at the top right of your screen when you're somewhat nearby. It'll tell you who the person is, where they're hanging out, and what they want you to do. The things they might ask you to do range from the oddly mundane (water my crops, remove graffiti, check the fish traps in the river) to the actually heroic (help the Seraph kill the centaurs, assist the wounded, recover stolen supplies).

The neat part, though, are the events, which happen at any time and generally actually have an effect on the world. If centaur are invading, for example, you can get experience and "karma" (an abstract non-gold currency that can't be traded but can still be used to purchase items) for helping the defenders out. The awesome part is that the events chain into each other. If nobody helps the defenders, then the centaurs will take over and the inhabitants will flee, rendering that settlement useless until you recover it. If you win, then the settlement will occasionally send out strike teams to try and push them from nearby caves as well, and eventually mount an attack on the centaur settlement as well. If it succeeds, then the centaurs will be a non-issue for a while- until they attack again. And the events scale in difficulty, too, so you might be able to help out with a small skirmish on your own, but when the big guns show up, it's a group event and you're going to either hope some more adventurers hope up to help too, fight your ass off and try to win anyways, or just let them take it and come back later.

This sort of push-and-pull combined with actual effects on the world around you means that as you're exploring and trying to find things to do, you're met with multiple choices- and sometimes they work together. If bandits have put up a roadblock and are killing all the travellers, and this part of the area you're in wants you to help travellers or kill bandits, fighting in the event lets you double-dip. I've personally finished multiple "hearts" by participating in a single event.

The other neat thing is the way that groups are assumed to work. Each class is responsible for their own survival and for dealing damage, meaning that there are no required classes for group content, and there is no "niche protection," to use a tabletop term. Nobody is standing in the back healing. Nobody is standing in the front getting beat on. The DPS isn't standing behind the boss and hitting them as hard as possible. Every class is maneuvering around, attacking when they can, dodging when they need to, and laying down combo fields when they think it's useful. Instead of the top-down design of "bring 1 tank, 1 healer, and then as much DPS as you can handle," the game says "bring what you prefer," especially since changing up the weapons you've brought drastically changes what you class can do (plus you can bring two weapon sets, anyways.)

So you're thinking of the classes in terms of what they actually bring: what boons they can grant your party, what kind of combo fields they can place and what finishers they have access to, and what kind of conditions they can apply to your enemies. You're thinking about the classes in terms of their class, not in terms of their broad type. You bring a longbow on your warrior so you can set down a fire field that other classes can use blast finishers in to give you all some Might. You bring a staff on your elementalist because you see that your thief is using a shortbow and can blast them repeatedly. You see the other elementalist switch to staff so you equip your scepter and a focus, so you can use the finishers in the fields he's placing down. And so on.

So that's quite a bit that you could add to your game. Planning out dynamic chains of events is something that people have been doing for a while now, and it's actually exactly what Dungeon World recommends in the form of its Fronts. Really, every dynamic event in Guild Wars 2 is a smallish Front in disguise and it's one of the freshest and most fun ideas in the game. So why not add a similar thing in your game? All you need are some things to happen and some people who need things done, and your players will happily occupy themselves and decide what it is that they want to do in the game.

Weapon swapping and weapon-specific skills wouldn't be terribly difficult to implement either. There are a couple of similar styles in any system of D&D you care to mention- with a bit of love, they could be as intuitive and as tactically interesting as Guild Wars', in that they become a toolkit to be changed during certain situations instead of a dull bonus to the only weapon you ever use. For example, instead of making a warrior choose between weapon feat chains, why not let him take them all simultaneously as he gains levels? Why not add different bonuses to weapons as the warrior levels? Why not let spells have a broader effect than stated, and let them be pushed around, thrown, blocked, or otherwise interacted with?

There are a lot of good ideas in this game, and I'd be very surprised if most of these elements weren't already inside of a half-dozen excellent tabletop games already.
 

Warning: Ruminations

I feel like running a very low-magic fantasy game with a very simplistic resolution system. Maybe something with d6 dice pools, and some sort of way of making what you're wearing and being protected by important.

Maybe something where your character's level is defined by the number of d6s they have to spend, and your weapons and armor are their own sort of thing, so you could have a guy that had three dice in Sneaking and two dice in Suave and he's got a bow with Accuracy 2 and Power 1, and his buddy in the picture is a dude with Beardliness 1, Strong Arm 1, and Tenacious 3, and he's got a sword with Sharpness 2 and Crossguard 1, and his shield is Stout 1 and Sturdy 2, and so on.

It kind of seems like a good bit to keep track of, but it's really not so terribly bad. You could sort of nest it into each other in the same way, so that you could buy a Rank 6 sword and then assign the stats, and nobody really cares what your sword is like (other than its relative quality- I.E. its rank) until it's time to swing the bastard around a bit, just like nobody really cares how charming you are until the Duchesses' (or Duke's, whichever you like) undies need to hit the ground.

And that means that you could have a couple of sub-systems that get put away until it's time for you to need them, like in very old-school D&D. Like your character is Rank 7 and that means that you have 7 dice to distribute between your qualities, so you pick three Social qualities and two each of Physical and Mental, and you can drill down into each category depending on what's going on. So you've essentially got three different parts of your character, and each one can have different benefits and maybe even spill over to the next ones...

The fun part is that this can go up and down each way, too, so that if you ever get to the domain level of the game you can separate out your character's Leadership qualities and Personal qualities, so you can have a guy who's not really smart or really personable but knows a thing or twelve about how to lead, or maybe a Barbarian King who's a whole hell of a lot better at decapitation than at decisionmaking...

I'll play with it more. Don't mind me.

The Hard Sell

How on earth do you sell a domain-level game to your players?

"Oh yeah, you guys don't play as adventurers or detectives or knights or anything, you play as noblemen and Barons and Dukes, see, and you give commands to other people to solve problems, and build walls, and levy armies, and elect people from the populace as reeves and sheriffs and magistrates. That still sounds fun, right?"

And to the right person (me, for one), it does sound pretty fun. I remember using the excremental 3rd edition D&D rules to whip up some quick conversions and figure out how long it'd take any given group of craftsmen to construct a wall, for example, or how much gold some miners could dig up. I even ran it once, for my brother, although that abortive campaign really went nowhere fast for some reason. I can't remember why, honestly, because it started out pretty well.

But I digress.

Part of the problem is that the players are no longer working directly together. Instead, they are directly pitted against each other in a sort of ethereal board game, or perhaps they form a sort of cooperative ruling class where the main gameplay is arguing about stuff and waiting for their underlings to do things. The best case scenario I can think of is that one player is a sort of king, and the others are ministers of a certain part of the government (like the general of the armies, or the Head Reeve, or maybe the Lord of the Merchant's Guide) so that each player has a separate job, and they have to decide how to partition out their money and time and experts so that each person is accomplishing plenty of things without stepping on each others' toes or feeling useless...

But, really, at this point we're playing a really huge kingdom simulator, and I don't know if I'm able to simulate an ancient-worlds kingdom from a high level. It's a huge job, and would probably require a lot of reading and memorization and knowledge if I wanted to avoid the typical fantasyland boringness of "nothing ever changes unless something Named and Powerful does it," which I do.

The other part of the issue is that the genre as a whole is heavily skewed towards playing as an exceptional individual doing individually exceptional things. It's all about personal glory and personal belongings and very rarely about doing anything for one's society or even group. Maybe I've been reading the wrong games? Who knows.

Still, a man can dream.

Terraria Distraction

I've been playing a lot of Terraria recently instead of paying attention to the community recently, so if there have been any kerfluffles or minor crises that you'd like to read about, you'll have to do it somewhere else, because I'm going to talk about adventure and mayhem.

Terraria is great because it's what Minecraft was supposed to be all those long years ago. It's an actual building and fighting adventure game, and it's absolutely brilliant. It's always got something for you to do, it's always got something for you to work towards, and there's always something awesome to discover.

Part of what makes the game work is that it has a certain structure to it, and it's sort of built into the game. You find natural caves and so spelunking for a while, looking for treasure chests and for valuable ores deep in the earth, which you mine and then transform into more useful equipment and weaponry. But unlike Minecraft, you eventually hit your peak with those weapons and armor. Where do you get more?

By fighting through the Corruption/Crimson and getting it, of course. And this entails you having built housing for a couple of NPCs, who form a town for you and provide their services. If you've built enough, you can get the Demolitionist to move in. And with his bombs, you can blast your way through the super-hard corrupt blocks and get to the Orbs/Hearts. Destroying them gets you gear, and also summons the bosses, who attack you with a vengeance. Beating the bosses nets you some supernaturally powerful ore, which you can make into weapons and armor.

But once you have beaten the bosses a couple of times, it becomes easy. Where to next? Why, the Dungeon, of course, where you'll fight the dungeon boss and make your way to a place with more treasure chests, traps, and powerful enemies than before. Eventually, of course, you'll master the Dungeon and where does one go next?

One goes to the Underworld and mines Hellstone and fights Imps and Demons. And the game continues like this for quite some time, all with a common theme; when you master the content you're given, there's always a place with greater risks and greater rewards around the next bend. And each place requires a different approach, a different style of moving and fighting, and different ways of building and digging. It's frankly brilliant, and it's always rewarding.

There's a lot we can learn about this sort of thing in our own homemade sandbox games.

Always Include Something Else

Not every game has to be about "progression" in the sheer gaming sense of getting new items and more levels so that you're strong enough to get new items and more levels. But it should be about progression in the real life term, where you're always trying to do something new and get something accomplished. A game where people sit around and contemplate their satisfaction with the way their life is would be interesting for perhaps a session, in a philosophical kind of way, but hardly the sort of thing you'd talk about with your buddies for the next ten years. It's kind of boring, right?

Similarly, a campaign where your characters sit around going "where do I even go next," is kind of boring for everybody involved. You're being entertained on a moment-to-moment basis, sure, but because you're not connected to the world as a player, neither are your characters. You're kind of aimlessly floating around, because you're not engaged to the world around you, and you don't know where to go next.

In Terraria, you're rooted to the world fairly quickly. You have to build a house to get shelter from the Zombies and the Flying Eyeballs, so you're connected to the place. It's not much, but it's alright. It's got a workbench and a door, and maybe a furnace. But soon you realize you need to expand, so you make it a little bigger. And then you realize there's a guy wandering around outside and so you make him a house, too. And then, next thing you know, somebody else moves into your house with you, and you realize that you need to keep building up your town so that more people move in.

And next thing you know you're part of the world. You explore and wander and discover, and then you go back to the town to store your belongings and sell them to the NPCs, who sometimes die and who have things happen to them. The world is its own character and has a very real impact on the way the game unfolds.

Speaking of which...

Put the Fiction First

The Corruption/Crimson are great in Terraria, because they spread slowly across the surface and actually change the world in its wake. The monsters are noticeably different, the ground itself turns into a strange and hideous color, and the background and music change. Everything is different, and it's obvious that you should check it out. If the monsters are too tough, you know you're not ready, so you head back into the natural caverns. This time you've got a purpose. You're not just getting strong so you can fight the zombies and flying eyeballs that were plaguing you, you've got to fight some bigger, tougher monsters.

And so you head back to the Corruption and head down the tunnels, fighting the monsters off at every step. And you see in the caves these enormous glowing things. What are they? What  do they do? You try a couple of things out on them, if you can reach them (and if not, the Demolitionist that moved into your town will sell you some bombs), and when you smash them you get messages on your screen and a neat magical item. Smash enough, and it's boss fighting time. The boss, of course, drops more magical items and some magical ores that you can smith into improved armor.

You can see, naturally, how the progression is obvious and clear, and how the game is designed to present you with the next step not by some sort of shoehorned "OH WOW LOOK ITS THE NEXT BOSS AND HE'S HERE FOR YOU TO FIGHT HOW CONVENIENT," it's presented as a natural and insidious part of the world you live in.

I illustrate the entire chain of events because it's basically the way every good threat in your game should work. If your players aren't aware of it, it's not in the game. If it doesn't noticeably change the game world in a way that the players dislike, it's not a threat, it's background. And players probably aren't interested in attempting to change the background.

This leads me to my last point.

Use Rewards

Some DMs like to use punishments to keep players in line. To wit, I recall reading a post chain on Reddit's /r/RPG board about "keeping it interesting," and what to do if the players are being boring in a sandbox game. The link to the pertinent part is here.

Ivaclue is doing fine until he says, in response to "but my players don't respect authority and would probably kill the guard captain for talking to them like that," that the guard captain should just be stronger and more powerful than the party, common sense be damned. And the worst? The advice "Make him and indestructable force. Make them stop disrespecting you." Frankly terrible.

What should happen is that you reward the players for everything they do. Not in the sense that they get rewarded in-game, but that they get rewarded with fun. Let them kill the guard captain- they obviously don't want to be model citizens. And they're rewarded with the fun of killing him, then the fun of escaping the town, then the fun of being fugitives who (as far as anybody can tell) blew up a tavern, killed a guard captain, and fled the city. Isn't that more rewarding than "you attack the guard captain but he counterattacks and knocks your weapon out of your hand and tells you to do as he says or else?"

That's what I thought.

Terraria, of course, uses the rewards of better gear and neat magic items to keep you on the right track. For the most part. Some parts (like when the flying skulls kill you when you're at the Dungeon without fighting the boss, or the way that the Underworld is almost silently hidden away deep underneath the earth) aren't perfect, and are of the "you just plain can't do that" section.

But most of it is ready for you at any level. You can tackle the Dungeon in wooden gear. You can ignore the Corruption and head straight for the Jungle. The game doesn't change based on what you do and it doesn't shoehorn you into a single path the way that Ivaclue from Reddit apparently thinks is the best way to run a sandbox game. The entire world is there for you. Some parts are harder, and some parts are easier. Take on the challenge you think you can handle.

Anyways, I hope this all gave you food for thought. This one kind of got away from me, so enjoy this unusually long and dense post.

Sinkholes

For some reason, I've been thinking a lot about sinkholes, to the point where I've actually been fleshing out the skeleton of a story about them.

In the story, this young man walks through his backyard and he sees this sizeable hole in his backyard where there used to be nothing more than a smallish tree and some grass. And the weird thing is that it's pitch black all the way down. He can't even see the reflection of the sunlight off of the sides of the earth, so he goes up to it, right? And it's completely pitch black. He can't see anything. He tries kicking some rocks into it, but still nothing. He goes and gets a flashlight, but it's nothing. And he's too creeped out to get closer to it, so he calls apartment management to try and get somebody to look at it, and then he goes back into his house.

It's not long until the maintenance guy gets there, but he's stumped, too, so he calls another guy to come look at it. The two of them bring a length of rope and a flashlight, but can't figure out anything and they're both creeped out by the fact that the light doesn't go anywhere. They were going to climb down but now neither of them want to, so they call management.

Management calls the police, and the police set up the crime scene DO NOT CROSS tape, and try and figure out what they're doing. They call in some geological surveying types, but they're confused as hell, too. They've got a camera with a light on it, attached to a pipe that's attached to a machine, but they're getting the same nothingness. It's like reality just stopped inside of that hole.

That's not the end, of course- the protagonist goes back into his house and can't sleep and things start getting weird from them on out, but I haven't decided exactly how. I'll get back to you on that one.