Posts Tagged ‘game design’

I did not fully complete my Vegas After Midnight writing assignment last week, regrettably.  However, the fact that I dug in and tried to complete it – and actually got a lot of it down on digital paper – means I was still able to accomplish the actual goal of the exercise, which was to put VAM back onto the front burner of my creative stove.

As a result, I’ve got several creator/writer musings and mini-epiphanies swirling around in my brain, and I’d like to process some of those over the next few days by sharing them here.

The first mini-epiphany I’d like to spotlight is this:  last week I realized that I am no longer creating a game that I want to RUN. Instead, I am creating a game that I want to PLAY.

I’m not sure how to unpack that yet. I’m also not sure if the nuanced change-of-approach will make any material difference to the end-user, for that matter. I just know that my personal relationship to my own creation has evolved from “I wanna codify this thing so that I can run it for people and get accolades as a world-creator and a good GM” into “I wanna play this game. I wanna hand this inspirational/evocative skeleton of a setting off to somebody like Rich Rogers or Judd Karlman and sit my butt down with some of our friends, make some characters, plant some situations, and create some damn fine fiction together.”

Don’t get me wrong, in my opinion this is a good thing. I think. Hmmm.

You know, it turns out that I’m writing this while the whole thought process is still very unsettled/unfinished in my mind, and I doubt that I’m going to actually draw any conclusion here and now. The “theory” promised in the title isn’t cooked yet, and won’t appear here after all. So possibly I might be frustrating some of you who’ve read this far into the post and you’re discovering that I’m not really going to make any kind of useful point, because I don’t even know where this line of thought is going yet myself. If that’s you, I apologize for wasting a few minutes of your time. But if you happen to be someone who is on some level grokking what I’m dwelling upon (even as I’m not sure I grok it myself) then please, feel free to reach out and thwack me on the head. Maybe we can unpack some of this together.

This post from Matthjis Holter [Story Games for Everybody - The indie contract]  has me totally percolating. As a consumer of indie games and a casual observer and acquaintance on the edges of the scene, I’ve experienced several of the things Mattjis brings up, and I’ve heard various designers in interviews who specifically espouse several of the viewpoints mentioned.

On the one hand, I respect the hippie designer’s right to do what he or she pleases with the product. But as a fan and consumer, yeah, it can be pretty frustrating and sucky to never know what to expect from the creator when you get interested in the creation.

Note: as I write this, I’ve only read the OP and not yet any comments, so my post here is about the OP only.

Originally published at TGTMB. Please leave any comments there.

Busybusybusy!

I’m putting it together, though, piece by piece, getting ready for the playtest release and the GenCon sessions.

Most of the progress I’ve been making can be seen on the Vegas After Midnight site, where earlier today I posted several things, including a mini-progress report, some new and updated maps, and a table matching the twelve main factions to their suits of influence.

The big focus, though, has been with fleshing out the factions (much of which is updated on the site) and re-working the pre-gen characters for the GenCon sessions (which are not yet on the site, but will be).

At this point, I want to shout a big thank-you to Mr. Vincent Baker. His blog anyway has long given me scads of thought fodder and inspiration overall, and recently in particular some of his older formative articles on things like conflict resolution and dynamic situation development have been invaluable in giving me a compass for moving through the development of situations for the con sessions. So, thanks, Vincent!

Hey, stop reading TGTMB and go  look at the VAM site!

Originally published at TGTMB. Please leave any comments there.

Fate and the Poker Deck: Spheres of Influence in Vegas After Midnight

David and I have shared before about the use of a poker deck and its influence over the nature of characters and factions in Vegas After Midnight, both on the VAM site and on TGTMB, but this is the first time this topic will actually be codified into an article. Since I need to write this into the playtest packet anyway, I figured it might be fun to share it with those of you who follow the progress of VAM, and invite you to comment and give feedback if you like.

This topic will be written in two parts. The first part will cover how the concepts of nature and fate are expressed within the setting through the symbolism of suits and ranks in a deck of cards. The next part will focus more on how we plan to try to make that work mechanically.

For me, the first part is the fun part, and it’s what I’ll be sharing today. The other part will come later. So here goes…

Part 1: Setting and Situation – the Metaphysical Reality of the Madness

The premise of the VAM setting establishes that there are metaphysical forces at play in the world, and that they are in some sense sentient and active. They may or may not be personified or material in nature, but they are nevertheless real forces with real agendas that have an effect upon the world. There could be many of these forces, depending on how one might interpret the various facets of what they represent or symbolize, but at the very least, we have a force of chance and caprice, a force of order and stability, a force of chaos and dissonance, and a force of passion and zeal. And of course on top of that, there is the Madness. Whether the Madness is an altogether separate entity or rather an unstable amalgamation of the other four basic forces is anybody’s guess. But it is real, it has sentience, power and influence over the other forces, and it WANTS something.  What does it want? Who knows? It’s up to you to go out there and find out, baby.

Heh. See, that’s what the Madness does to me. I try so very hard to write this in proper grammatical English with a neutral voice, and the Madness comes into it and I go all VAM-speak.

So here’s where the cards come in – they represent the push and pull of these forces on the setting and specifically on the people and communities that inhabit it. Like cartomancy, tarot, astrology, and such things, the card suits and ranks allow for “the spirits” to communicate, via symbols, broad concepts about the nature of things. And also like those other forms of divination, the interpretation of these symbols can be very broad. (i.e. no matter what you might see on old cheesy TV shows, somebody flipping up the Death card during a tarot reading doesn’t automatically mean that somebody is going to die.)

The breadth of interpretation allows for fortune elements to come into the mix while still giving characters a lot of leeway in deciding how to approach what fate gives them. That’s key to both the color and mechanics of VAM – a balance between structure and freedom.

So, characters and factions (and anything else that could be considered to have a “nature” like the sword Excalibur or the King’s Guitar) will have aspects that are tied directly to card suits, and those suits will signify a broad metaphysical influence over the nature of the thing. There are several different schools of interpretation and belief in cartomancy, and varying assumptions about what a card suit ought to symbolize. But we’re going with a sort of amalgamated setup that matches our concept of the four basic forces I mentioned above. Here’s an outline of how it will shake out in VAM terms:

Card Suits – Spheres of Influence

• Spades (Swords) [Disruptive Power]
  • Chaos
  • Change
  • Discord
  • Dissonance
  • Anarchy
  • Instability
  • Corruption
  • Flexibility
• Clubs (Wands) [Mental Power]
  • Luck
  • Fortune
  • Imagination
  • Chance
  • Caprice
  • Panache
  • Style
•  Diamonds (Coins) [Material Power]
  • Resources
  • Connections
  • Stability
  • Order
  • Authority
  • Power
  • Law
• Hearts (Cups) [Spiritual Power]
  • Courage
  • Sacrifice
  • Zeal
  • Passion
  • Devotion
  • Healing
  • Hope

The current plan is to give all characters and factions – and certain objects and locales -  a Strong Suit.  Yes, if you’re wondering, “Strong Suit” is a Bridge term, not a Poker term, but it is otherwise too perfect to pass up, so we’re going with it.

Essentially the Strong Suit will be whichever of the four suits best represents the sphere of influence a character/faction is naturally attuned to. For example, a character with Hearts as a strong suit might have a courageous nature, or a zealous or passionate one, or possibly be an impulsive hot-head who wears her heart on her sleeve. Now I want to again point out that none of this is meant to act like a D&D-style alignment. Maybe your character IS by nature an impulsive hothead, but that does not mean you’ve got to go around acting that way. You can resist, you can try to be cool and chill. That’s all fine. I mean, we’re talking about the Fate system here, right? You want to wear your heart on your sleeve and give in to your impulses and passions? Hey, that makes for good story – you get compelled, and you get a Fate chip for it. You want to resist your impulses and passions in order to accomplish something with a level head? You resist the compel and give up a Fate chip.

In addition to the Strong Suit there will be another suit-related aspect called a Tilt. This is what I was calling a Vulnerability in an earlier essay on TGTMB – but the term “Tilt” fits my idea even better and it’s also a poker term, so that’s a win-win.

In poker parlance, Tilt is “a term for a state of mental confusion or frustration in which a player knowingly adopts a sub-optimal strategy, usually resulting in the player becoming over-aggressive. Placing an opponent on tilt or dealing with being on tilt oneself is one of the most important aspects of poker. It is a relatively frequent occurrence, due to frustration, animosity against other players, or simple bad luck.” [definition taken from Wikipedia’s entry on the term]

So in VAM, the Tilt Suit is meant to indicate the type of behavior that a character or faction tends to drift toward when under overt pressure or frustration or, more importantly, when under the influence of Madness. In some sense it does represent a weakness or vulnerability, because by nature it is a “sub-optimal” attitude – but I think it’s also important to point out that even though the strong suit represents the most optimal side of one’s nature, and the tilt represents the most likely place where your Achilles heel is, it is also the tilt suit that represents what type of so-called mystic abilities one might have when under the sway of the Madness.

At this stage, my plan is to have every faction assigned a Tilt Suit – but I am NOT intending to have the Tilt Suit be a required aspect for characters. A character CAN choose to take a Tilt Suit as part of the character creation process, but in that case, it will come in through one of the phases, and it will be chosen by the player to suit the character’s concept, rather than assigned by drawing from the deck, as the Strong Suit is by default. The choice of a Tilt Suit will be important for characters who plan to take a mystical ability as a Stunt– because that’s the suit that will determine the sphere of the ability. But for other characters, it will be entirely optional.

And one more thing in case any of you are wondering – There is no expectation that a character’s suit(s) of influence will have to match up in any way with the suits of influence of her faction of origin or her current loyalty. The odd possible combinations, in my mind, are all part of the potential for making interesting situations. So go ahead and play that Spades character in a Diamonds faction! It is, after all, the Madness, baby.

Originally published at TGTMB. Please leave any comments there.

Whenever I get flustered or frustrated while trying to write/edit/compile VAM playtest text these days (which is more often than I’d like to admit) I often try to turn to an alternate activity that still accomplishes something that brings VAM along. So lately, I’ve been dinking around with creating insignia for each of the factions. I’ve only got three done so far – 10 more to go in my baker’s dozen – but I figured I might as well share them here along with putting them up on the VAM site.

I should also point out that the VAM site itself is another ancillary project that I’ve been puttering with when my patience with rules writing gets to me. So it’s in a state of transition right now, design-wise. Forgive the potentially odd colors and layout you might encounter if you visit. I do, however have a cool new title/logo design for Vegas After Midnight that is featured on the site and in the faction insignia images.

As for the rest of the VAM site, I plan to have it shiny by GenCon. But as usual, I’m juggling more than I can keep in the air, with kids, clients, and a re-vamp of the main Harping Monkey site that I’m doing to show off to a potential new client. By the way, the juggling thing also accounts for my recent lack of participation in various discussion communities, and the absence of new recorded episodes of TGTMB – you’ll have to settle for occasional written posts like this one for the time being.

Back to VAM – I want to publicly give a big shout-out to Mark Kinney. He provided a much-appreciated spark of VAM coolness by proposing an alteration to my revised faction plan to allow the VAM story arc that the Rolemonkeys played to remain a part of the history of the setting, in spite of the fact that the faction they were joining – the Rangers – no longer exists. The notion of WHY the faction no longer exists has become a nice springboard for enriching the premise of the game, and plants several potentially useful situation elements into the mix that play groups can fiddle with if they so choose. So, thanks Mark – and also thanks to Clay Karwan, whom I suspect probably added some input into the idea that Mark proposed.

Wow, this turned into a longer post than I intended – I was just going to show you some pictures. So maybe I ought to actually cut to the chase, eh?

Here are the three I have done as of today. I’ll add more in future posts as I complete them. Click on the little 400-pixel version and you’ll get a 1000-pixel version. I’m leaving these un-watermarked and thus out in the open – please don’t misuse them.

It all started with a dream.

No, really. I mean it. It has not ever happened to me, before or since, but the whole idea came from a really weird dream I had one night back in 1997 or so.

I dreamed of a bunch of guys in Elvis outfits, some of them on motorbikes, having a firefight with a bunch of carnival freaks right in the middle of the Vegas Strip.

The next day I remembered it, wrote it down, and right then decided, “This is going to be my new campaign world.”

Vegas After Midnight was born.

It took me a few weeks to pull it together. I did it old-school, of course. If there was any such thing as RPG Theory or progressive game mechanics or story-games back then, I sure didn’t know about it. I did what everyone around me did when creating a homebrew campain world. I picked my then-favorite game system – GURPS – and built a world, a bunch of glitzy and powerful NPCs, and a pretty rigid storyline, then invited my friends to make some characters and come wander around in my creation.

We played, it rocked, we had fun. I was railroading them a lot more than I should have, but back then, that was how we played, and so we thought it was a blast. Then after a good long time, we moved on to other games, and the group spilt up when various folks started moving away, and VAM got set aside for several years.

Then, I dunno, a couple years ago, I started playing with Mark, Chris, Max and Clay, and I got the idea that this was a group that might enjoy playing VAM. By then I had the Harping Monkey and a couple podcasts going, so I shared the premise with the patrons, told them I was going to play it with my group, and well, a few misfits on the HHM boards just grabbed ahold of the stuff I’d written and demanded more. Then, in a fit of creative euphoria, I started churning out all kinds of plans and schemes and ideas, including doing a VAM play-by-post on HHM and trying to get a game book published using the CHUPA (now called CORE) system being developed over at Dragon’s Landing. I asked Chuck and Lonnie to help me make it all happen.

I was in way over my head. I was doing podcasts, gaming, and trying to re-write VAM, and that was just the hobby stuff. On top of that was the freelancing graphics/Web design business and the parenting and husbandy stuff.

I took on too much, made too many promises, got frustrated with how I could not wrap my head around the CHUPA system,  lost touch with Chuck and Lonnie as we all got burned out and overextended in the months after GenCon, and I crashed.

The Long Winter came. VAM, along with many other creative endeavors I was involved with, got set aside.

Of course, in the midst of all that, when most of my other hobby pursuits went off and slept in a cave for several months, roleplaying continued. Our group decided to record our play sessions. The Rolemonkeys were born. And soon after that, we played Spirit of the Century.

It is kinda sappy and ridiculous for me to say this, but Spirit of the Century put the fire back in my head. It not only brought back my creativity, it helped put my whole demeanor back on track. Running that game started the pilot light again, not just creatively, but in terms of understanding the potential and power that progressive games have for a guy with my play style. And that kind of hopeful, creative energy helped get my head back in the game for being a better father, husband, and friend.

So, yeah, sorry to come off like a giddy fanboy, but I owe a lot to Rob, Fred and the gang at Evil Hat for creating Fate and Sotc and helping to light my way back to the path I want to be traveling.

So, here we are. Now I have a solid rockin’ game system, a decent Website, and a very helpful design partner in my friend David Moore – someone who gets my basic premise for VAM and loves SotC as much as I do, not to mention the great advice and support we’re getting from guys like Daniel Perez and JJ Lanza and some of the HHM patrons. And we are committed to getting a playtestable version together in time to run it for our groups in July, then bring a second-draft playtest to GenCon to test the game out on as many people as we can reasonably get to play and give us feedback.

So, keep tabs on this blog over the next few months. David and I will be posting when we can.

… I just don’t know yet if it’s bad, crampy gas or fuel and inspiration gas!

Sure, I’m trying to turn the concept of Vegas After Midnight into a viable game design, and all I have to go on is my own limited experience, and the inspiration and advice of others who’ve trod the path.

Fear the Boot, one of the biggest and most popular RPG-related podcasts, has been doing some serious work lately on a game design series, where they are not only chronicling the creation of their own RPG, Skies of Glass, but also using it as a springboard to give advice to game designers and worldbuilders in general.

I love Fear the Boot. I have high regard for the hosts and I hope soon to meet them and roleplay with them. However, the advice they’re giving is unfortunately too constrained to be helpful to me. That’s not to say they’re not being helpful to others, but essentially, everything they’re saying is focused around their own experiences, and they have by their own admission very little exposure to recent game design ideas and also very little exposure to recent marketing possibilities in the hobby. And they actually want it that way. They don’t want to be tainted by outside ideas, or influenced by those who’ve trod the path before them.

I can respect that. But I don’t have the confidence or the guts to do it that way myself. I’m eating up every bit of worldbuilding/setting creation/game design fodder I can find. Not because I want VAM to follow some formulaic … formula, but because I love ideas, and I love tweaking ideas to suit my needs, melding several ideas into a hybrid idea that works for me, and, well, just not doing things in a vacuum.

Anyhow, I have several avenues of fodder coming in these days, but the newest and perhaps tastiest one is this treasure trove of design theory: Troy Costisick’s Socratic Design blog

Yes, it’s FORGE-influenced design theory. But I’m okay with that. Sue me.
Another great avenue of tasty info is Paul Stark’s Shakespeare and Dragons podcast. His stuff is all nuts and bolts storybuilding, but he presents it in a way that makes me think of stuff I thought I was already thinking about  – and think about it from a new angle.

The problem is, i think I’ve taken these and other tidbits and allowed them to become a means of procrastination. I keep telling myself – “Wait, don’t write that section yet, until you’ve read up on this or until you’ve listened to that.”

Yeah, I know. You don’t have to point it out. At some point, i need to write my frakin’ vision of VAM and stop falling back on all the gumbo.

So, help me out. Inspire me. Give me some motivation, dear friends and fellow misfits.

Because I feel like I can’t go on without some more gas.