The Power 19 for Hostargo (4-11)

The Power 19 are an excellent set of questions that every RPG designer should aim to have answered - eventually. I've already answered the biggest three questions for Hostargo, and now it's time to drill down into the details.  As you discover a little more about my game, I hope my answers get you excited to jump into the world of Hostargo!

4) What does your setting do to re-enforce what your game is about?

Hostargo - the city/setting - IS what the game is about. It pulls a lot of random people from all over the world into a small mining town and says: now what? But that's not everything. The magnetic technology allows for airships and weird science, the arcane magic allows for otherworldly encounters and ancient ruins, and the exploding advancements allow for wild west cowboys to have cybernetic body replacements. It's all for the rule of cool: giving players awesome and surreal abilities. Add in the bubbling pot of trouble, Hostargo itself, and the setting oozes adventure!

5) How does the Character Creation of your game reinforce what your game is about?

Character creation starts with the character's born somewhere else in the world. They end up in Hostargo just like most of the people there - by either the lure of fortune and opportunity, or simply following the flow of jobs or research in their respective fields.

Past that, every quirk, gear, and life path decision drive the idea that everyone is unique, and has a unique set of abilities to bring to the table. The class/calling pairing system is about giving people weird abilities while maintaining a party balance (perhaps that's more along the lines of just a good multiplayer experience, but still).

6) What types of behaviors/styles of play does your game reward (and punish if necessary)?

The game aims to provide a broad toolset for players to solve problems. They have mental, physical, and social attributes. They have social connections as well as combat gear. But the biggest reward, XP, is given only for accomplishing goals. Likewise, the characters can only "Rest & Recover" when they've gained XP, so this idea pushes along interesting stories and objectives more than any metagaming grind.

7) How are behaviors/styles of play rewarded or punished in your game?

Characters are rewarded with XP when they make progress in the story. This allows them to R&R, recovering per-rest abilities, their effort pools, and even gives them a bonus luck point (each unspent XP also acts as a re-roll mechanic). Then when they accomplish a major goal, they gain 5XP, and have the opportunity to spend it on character advancement: increasing their stats and/or gaining new abilities.

8) How are the responsibilities of narration and credibility divided in your game?

There are three distinct styles of play which govern whether the GM or the players have more narrative control. There is always a GM, and there are always heroes, so a pretty standard RPG in that regard, but if you read my answers to "the big three", you'll understand how the narration is split up in each.

9) What does your game do to command the players' attention, engagement, and participation? (i.e. What does the game do to make them care?)

This again is based on the three styles. In the first, the players are there as paid hires, so the GM has the freedom to throw almost anything at them. The players care because their characters work for their corporation. This is the easiest but potentially the least solid version.

In a crew style game, the players work for themselves. They only go after jobs that they want, but they want to take jobs as presented by the GM in order to gain coin, which allows them to upgrade their tech trees and eventually work towards a life of retirement.

In a gang style game, the players are there to shape the world. They take direct actions to implement agendas that they themselves come up with, so they inherently care.

10) What are the resolution mechanics of your game like?

The resolution mechanic is a single die roll, low is better. On 1's, the characters "Ace", and get to add special effects to their actions. As character skill increases, the size of die the player rolls goes down (d12 -> d10 -> d8 -> d6 -> d4). This allows for more skilled actions to have less variance, which was a side design goal I had when I started this project.

11) How do the resolution mechanics reinforce what your game is about?

The resolution mechanic is aimed at making the players feel good about what their characters are good at. As skill dice decrease in size, the probability of rolling an Ace is increased, giving more and more actions to have those extra special effects. While this mechanic has nothing to do with the setting part of "what Hostargo is about", it has everything to do with making the players have fun.

Thanks for your time!
As always, I love comments or feedback! And I'll be back next week for answers 12-19!

Why Tabletop?

Advancements in video game technology have given us unlimited possibilities for high quality entertainment. The drive of the AAA tech giants and the hearts of every indie developer have already given us more content than we could possibly dream of experiencing. With all of these virtual worlds, stories, and adventures... why would we ever find ourselves sitting around a table?

When it comes to entertainment, the tabletop medium still holds a large sway over where people spend their time. Why they do so is an important question for developers of both virtual and physical games. Understanding the reasons behind this choice can help us develop better content for both.

There's nothing video games can't do, and generally do better, than tabletop, in terms of mechanics, graphics, and immersion. Tabletop RPGs can claim that their "loose rules" style is nearly impossible to mimic in a video game, but the bookkeeping, character placements, and even visual aids can be done "better" with the assistance of virtual content.

Luckily for tabletop, there are two things that it does have over it's cyber-based sibling: face-to-face time with people, and a player-focused approach to entertainment.

We can have as many online and virtual meeting experiences we want, but being face to face always gets more personal; the participants get more out of it. Couch co-op video games have this advantage over the rest of the market. This personal, shared experience is even why we watch TV or movies in the same room as each other. But tabletop puts the entertainment in between people, rather than in another direction. It's not just a shared time-space, it's a social connection through a simple catalyst.

Which is where player-focused design comes in. Even the fanciest board games, with complicated rules, hundreds of miniatures, and thousands of dollars of professional art, produce an experience where the game is secondary to the players' interaction. You are forced to look at the other players (or at the very least be in their presence). You are forced to communicate with them, in order to keep the game moving. With video games, the screen is the focus; you never need to look at the other players, and the machine abstracts away most communication and game flow.

Much like the most common go-to, alcohol, tabletop games are a social lubricant that can bring together strangers and families alike. We can "pick our poison" and share that poison with good company (and normally less caustic side effects). Knowing this helps developers design the right systems for both tabletop and digital consoles.

Having Fun Designing: The Rule of Cool

Getting excited to work on your project shouldn't be hard, but sometimes it's not at the forefront of what you want to do. For professional game designers, I could see this as a real challenge trying to push forward. But for us hobbyists, it perhaps means somethings wrong.

The Rule of Cool is something RPGs are known to throw around. Saying "screw the rules": as long as what's happening is cool, allow it! But what if you're trying to come up with those rules? In general, we're trying to shape the rules so that scenes, player power, and really the story as a whole doesn't get out of hand. We want our rules to enable the rule of cool, not always be beaten back by it.

Trying to design rules like this can be draining, even when our hearts have already been poured into our work. Sometimes, there's a blockage of creativity that forms as we design, slowly building up fear that our rules aren't perfect. When enough of this accumulates, it slows your fun designing, possibly even clogging it right up.

The best solution is to re-open the flood gates; wash out that fear. Go back to why you are doing this in the first place, and start again there. Anything that's not working towards that goal: scrap it. Something preventing you from having fun designing? Get rid of out it. Do the work you want to do. Apply the Rule of Cool to your design work. If it's not fun, kick it.

I recently had a flood gate open the past couple weekends, and I went back to designing the core character abilities in Hostargo. These are the awesome powers, magic, and technology that are really the reason I want to play Hostargo. I get excited when I think about playing with these abilities (and GMing them, which is just as important!). When I re-focused, I started cranking out progress like none other.

It won't last forever, sure. Eventually I'll have to get back to some of the finer details that I just have to be patient with to get through. But I think with every refocusing, every "washing" of the fear, the final task gets easier and easier.

The Big Three for Hostargo

A friend recently reminded me of The Big Three questions of RPG design. These questions are the basic, must-have-answered problems when creating a new RPG. And they're hard. Following these are The Power 19, which is a broader set of questions designed to really dig into the details. But since the big three are by themselves just as important, I'm going to start with just those for Hostargo.

Question 1: What is Hostargo about?

Hostargo is about characters living in a chaotic city with too many people and not enough space. It's a wild-west town turned gold-rush, and with the influx of new people comes new technology, magic, and problems.

Question 2: What do the characters do in Hostargo?

That depends on which of the three play styles the group decides to run. This makes Hostargo ultimately three times as complex as it might have been, but it's that much more flexible!

While working for a corporation, the characters investigate and combat issues that hinder their corp's progress. For the SEA corporation, that's simply trying to maintain peace and order in a city whose chaos is ever expanding.

While working for a crew, the characters take on missions for profit. They perform investigation, espionage, and sabotage to complete their objectives and gain power for their crew.

While working in a gang, the characters take actions to advance their own agendas. Doing so earns them respect and power, allowing them to advance even further. With each push comes backlash, so characters also handle any fallout that results from their actions. Ultimately, they drive the city of Hostargo in whatever direction they see fit.

In all game modes, characters will interact with NPCs, explore areas for story points, and deal with dangerous threats through combat encounters. Each character uses their special abilities, such as magic or tech, to help overcome their challenges.

Question 3: What do the players do in Hostargo?

This also depends on which of the three play styles the group lands on.

While playing as a corp, the GM creates problems for the players to solve. The players drive their characters to solutions to those problems.

While playing as a crew, the GM creates missions for the players to go on. The players first devise a plan, then roll to see where it goes wrong. From that point, they drive their characters to the mission's completion.

While playing as a gang, the players first create agendas they would like to push on the world. Then the GM creates the world's reaction to those actions, and all players work together to set up scenes on how any conflicts would resolve.

In all game modes, players will roll dice to resolve conflicts, with the GM choosing challenge ratings & target attributes, and the players choosing which skill best applies. Players also get choices through effort pools, called shots, a menu of "ace" effects, luck re-rolls, magical runes, equipment, NPC contacts, and special abilities. When adventures finish, the players choose upgrades for their character, and the GM gives the whole group access to new items and abilities.

Build em up, Break em down!

Thanks to a few other fun game design ideas I've gotten to work on the past few weeks, my mind has taken a solid break from Hostargo, and is now itching to get back to it, refreshed and revitalized. Unfortunately, when I opened up my "core rules" document, I was slightly disgusted with what I found there.

The last I had left Hostargo, I had been crashing through design challenges and knocking out content at top speed. While I'm proud of my progress, I was a little too over-zealous in some areas. For example, I had added in an extra die to roll, extra sub-stats, fleshed out a combat system with extra damage rolls and (shudders) division based armor. Like I said, it was a bit of a face -> palm moment for me when I had realized what I had done.

Despite the immediate whiplash, there were a lot of good ideas hidden in and around those rules, and more importantly, there is now a good deal of actual game content (e.g. weapon modifiers, backpack sizes, lists of items and gear). So now it's time to dig those gems out of there.

The key word in my discoveries above is extra. Extra rolls, extra stats, extra math. I immediately stripped all of that as a first-step, and took a good look at what was left. Sure, now all of that content is "broken", but I can see where those ripped up mechanics left holes. This allows me to actually think about each hole, and decide to fill it in with something good, or find that it's just not needed.

A good example of this is my character gears mechanic. I had a whole extra die just to tie it in, and there were a few other stretches to bridge the gap. Instead, I can safely remove the whole thing and possibly add it in as an "optional" rule for those groups that want more in-depth role play and character development.

I'm excited to get back to it! Next up, that damn armor system...