The Mysterious Lever: August 2016

Wednesday, August 31, 2016

Animancy, Memory, and Bones

While my other 'callings' (archtypes) are relatively straightforward, I often still go back to the Animancer and think that something's not quite right. My design goals for this calling are:

* Powerful spells
* Rituals
* Manipulation of spells
* Reactive casting
* No limited resource

The thought to solving all of this was to "gather" memory for a couple of ticks (actions) as described in my action economy post. But, discussing this with friends revealed that this would most likely result in people doing nothing but gathering memory, essentially skipping their turn, in order to do something cooler on the next turn(s).

Further brainstorming lead to the idea of tying memory to objects - let's say bones for dramatic example. If objects could store memory, animancers could store bones on their person, which fits into the game's idea of "pockets" for inventory management. However, this idea alone violates the last design goal of no limited resources.

Putting two and two together: if animancers could use pre-stored memory from bones, or use time to gather memory, this prevents them from ever running completely out, but also lets them do quick bursts of powerful spells without just waiting around.

The pocket limit for each character prevents this from ever getting completely out of hand. Animancers who walk around with a backpack full of bones need to take actions to get those bones out of the pack and into their hands or pocket, so they could have just been gathering the memory they needed from the surrounding area instead.

This all adds up to a simple solution that doesn't change much of my other design choices. We'll see in the next playtest!

Tuesday, August 23, 2016

Convention Material Generation

On Saturday I received an e-mail notifying me that a few people have signed up for a game of Hostargo during my local gaming convention: GrandCon! This is both exciting and nerve-wracking news. I've run plenty of games of Hostargo before, including at GrandCon last year, but my stomach always twists when I know I'm up against a completely random stranger - worse yet one that has paid actual money to play this game (no event ticket price, but the price for time at the con anyway).

So that means I need to shift gears a bit in my work. I have been focusing on content generation - artwork, maps, and the core abilities & items in the game. But now I have to focus on getting prepped for the things I'll need to run a convention game. My list so far:

* Updated character sheet
* New playbooks for character archetypes
* 3 more minis
* Finish painting 5 minis
* Flesh out new adventure

An updated character sheet will solidify new rules into place and ensure that, at the bare minimum, we can actually play a game. Last year I had pre-generated characters, but this year I want to test out the character creation system. It should be fairly quick given a few random rolls. In order to support the players learning quickly about their characters, however, I'll need new playbooks that spell out each item and special ability they'll have access to during the game.

Miniatures are the stretch goal. They're unfortunately almost always on the back-burner, but I've managed to get 1.9 done already, and the idea would be to have 6 total to choose from, one for each main archtype. While it would be great to have custom minis eventually, right now I'm just using standard wild-west Reaper Bones minis with custom painting.

I have one really standard, short adventure that I've been using to play test ideas and generally run the game up until this point. However, it's almost too short to really dig in, and this year I've schedule a couple of late-night games so that it can stretch on if need be. So, I need an updated adventure, one with both action and intrigue, so that the players will leave feeling like they've accomplished a game, rather than play-tested a scenario. 

So much has changed in the last year, it's almost like I have to everything for the first time. But that's great - it means progress!

Wednesday, August 17, 2016

Collaborative Design: Learning from Fantasia

As I've been designing Hostargo, I've found that it's been harder and harder to pull new inspiration. Some of the main people I talk to have already heard everything I have to say, so it's hard to drum up new topics. Opposite of that, random people on the internet aren't generally concerned with your in-depth design discussions, as they'd have to learn a ton of background before being able to contribute new material. So what's one to do?

Recently I've had a string of very lucky encounters with some talented artists, and working with them has led to some of the most interesting design choices I've had in a while. Especially in terms of world setting - cultures, people, items, and technology - I've let go of trying to control or supply the little details. Instead, I've been pulling inspiration for these things from the artists! When you give people general guidelines, an idea and a "feel", they tend to take it in unexpected directions. Sure, sometimes you have to backpedal a bit, but especially when your inspiration wells are running a bit dry, this usually results in a flood of new content to think about,

I've heard around that you shouldn't be trying to tackle large RPG projects alone - and while I'll still maintain my "lead designer" role I am very quickly seeing the benefit of not only letting artists come up with their own ideas about the game, but also molding the game around what the artists produce. This idea reminded me of visiting or viewing some sort of Disney "how-it's-done", where they explained how Fantasia was produced to be such an epic masterpiece.

The directors and producers would go to the artists and musicians with the general idea, the feel, and maybe some main points they wanted to hit. Then, the artists would go brainstorm, and so would the musicians. Next, the two groups would get together, and go back and forth on their ideas to produce the actual video: the artists would have a storyboard of what would be happening in the scene, then the musicians would go and make a soundtrack for that scene, and then the artists would take that soundtrack and create their final animations based on the soundtracks, so that the two would match up perfectly.

This type of collaboration is exactly what is needed in an RPG as well. In order to line up the artwork with the game, the art has to be produced based on the game, and then the game has to fill in the little details to match up with the art! Where two "game designers" might clash heads more than make progress, an interested artist and an open-minded designer working together can create masterpieces.

I look forward to working with these new talented people to explore the possibilities of Hostargo and the world of Oriya!

Tuesday, August 9, 2016

Clockwork Dice Mechanic

It's been a joy riding to and from work everyday for the past few months, as I've been listening to the funny dudes over at System Mastery Podcast. Once at work, of course, the happiness factor drops considerably... but at least I can mull over what I've learned from some old role playing game. A while ago there was a very neat mechanic that I thought I'd explore for my own game(s).

Initiative and Actions Per Turn are always mechanics that differ greatly from game to game. This old RPG had a system where the players have a pool of action dice (I think it was d10), and at the start of each "round" they would roll them all. Then, the GM would count down from 10 (9...8...7...etc) and at each interval would allow players to act with any dice they had at or above that number (essentially letting them save dice for later). Somewhere in there the monsters would take a turn, and the players would have to risk whether to act fast with fewer dice, or act later with a higher chance of success (or more actions - I don't remember exactly).

This is brilliant (I think)! Immediately my mind jumped to d12s and a clock system. I think overall, a really clean system could be built this way.  The real issue is, that despite it's neat mechanism and decision space, it would end up being more of a slog than it was worth. In an RPG, there's already so much going on, any chance to slim chunky mechanics is a good one. Unfortunately, this mechanic is chunky.

But, I think it could work great for a board game, either a cooperative dungeon crawl or competitive race. It's brewing my mind, so let's hope something comes of it!

Tuesday, August 2, 2016

Rewarding Player Behavior in Mechanics

Ironically, after my last post about rewarding good roleplaying, I noticed here and there other forms of "positive reinforcement" psychology being applied to role playing. These discussions brought, to the forefront of my thoughts, the necessity of rewarding your players for doing the things you want them to do.

This is often called a "reward cycle", and most often is applied to the in game experience or treasure players get to progress their characters in power. But one thing that I haven't thought enough about is how to reward the players by playing the game "well". I've created an "aces" system that acts much like the standard fate point, benny, or cypher XP. This is a good mechanic, as it rewards players that make the story more interesting by highlighting their failures and later letting them emphasize their awesomeness.

But there are little things we can do to the core mechanics to get the most "fun" out of each little action the players take. First, I decided to take out "disadvantage". Advantage rewards the players, but disadvantage only serves as a take-that punishment. Instead, I will choose to increase the difficulty ratings, which players are already expecting. This both simplifies my rule set and removes an unnecessary deterrent.

Second, we award advantage to players for good role playing and good combat tactics, but what about good exploration? First, what is good exploration? Is it finding all of the traps? Uncovering the whole map? Is it discovering all of the clues within a messy, chaotic scene? While story elements can always reward players for exploring, I want something more mechanically driven. So, we should make sure to give advantage to those players who do something specific: run their hands along the walls looking for switches, look under the rug for a trap door, or break all of the jars to see what's inside.

But, some might ask, if the players do these things specifically, why not just automatically give them what they're searching for? Because, I say, for the same reason we do not automatically give players who role play well an automatic success. Player skills should have an effect, but not be the only factor in play. Even if you are looking directly at something, your ability to perceive what is around you can affect whether or not you realize what you're looking at (i.e. a perception or search skill). Anyone who's been locked up in a mystery room knows how true this is!

Another reason is simply that in playing role playing games, we play to find out what happens. This means rolling the dice and letting fate decide, no matter how close or obvious the players think something is. It also gives opportunity for "exploration" type characters, such as investigators or scouts, who specialize in exploration type scenes. In this way, you don't also have to make the rogue character a DPS fighter.

Unfortunately, another simple thing you can do is use a "roll over" system and go big numbers. While obvious, I'm going to take the hit on this one and keep with my inverse dice mechanics. I balance this with an increased critical hit rate due to the higher chances of rolling a "1". Hopefully this and all of my other efforts offset the unfortunate setback of low success numbers.

What are some other simple rewards players get mechanical rewards for playing a game the way it's designers intended? What other mechanical bonuses have you seen in games? Remember, we want to avoid the complexity of +2 +2 +2 +2, but still give players little boosts here and their so they're not always counting on the next level up for a confidence boost.