Fair Play
Posted by Jason on April 27th, 2009 — in Uncategorized
Dang, that’s a lot of roleplaying games! Bully for me, eh?
Ten thousand! Wow! Wait for it…
OK, it was ten thousand copies of the Creative Commons licensed Dungeon Squad, translated into Spanish and printed in a newspaper in Mexicali, Baja California. How cool is that? My friend and Story Games regular Torquemada hooked it up. He wrote and asked if he could translate Dungeon Squad and include it in the paper, and I was like “Uh yes, you aren’t even required to ask, and also you are my hero.”
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Posted by Jason on April 21st, 2009 — in Uncategorized
Man, Steve tore through the manuscript and really punched it up, based on a year of play. And I got pages of great notes from people who have played and found the book confusing in spots, or hard to parse, or had questions unanswered by the text. So I’m weeding it and adding stuff based on Steve’s really hard edit and it is looking great. I cannot wait to hand it over to Patrick, who is going to lay it out again in a more sensible way. It’s going to be easier to read and play.
One super interesting trend – 80-90% of the procedural confusion stems from things that are directly addressed in sidebars. This means that people don’t read them. Which means they are going away.
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Posted by Jason on April 11th, 2009 — in Carolina Death Crawl, Playtest
Me, Clinton, Shane, and Remi playtested Carolina Death Crawl today and it went … OK. I learned a lot about how the game works and what it’s weaknesses are currently, which is great. Of course these guys always bring it, so we had a wonderful, picaresque story of four guys struggling to get home – an erratic and cowardly Lieutenant; a Sergeant with a rotting, infected leg; a blowhard Corporal with a quick temper, and an ultra-religious Private whose love for his wife knew no limits. He survived, by betraying the Sergeant and every oath he’d ever taken. Along the way an old lady got hung from a cypress tree, a bunch of contrabands were mercilessly gunned down, a southern belle learned where not to hide valuables on her person, and many things were burned down.
The game needs a more brisk prologue that kick-starts play, many of the character and action elements need to be tightened, and card handling needs to be given some attention. And there needs to be more reference material and a shorter pre-game monologue. It played in an hour and a half and I can see the good in it. Exciting!
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Posted by Jason on April 10th, 2009 — in Carolina Death Crawl
“The pocosin is inhabited almost exclusively by run away negroes, bears, wild cats, & wild cattle. Great numbers of cypress trees, tall straight and lofty, in many of the swamps and low grounds; besides multitudes of singular excrescences, named cypress knees, growing out of the most miry places. I was amazed at the large number of serpents. The prodigious multitude of green frogs, reptiles, and large insects … you cannot perceive the animals from whence the sounds in the trees proceed, they being most effectually hidden among the leaves and branches. So that at first this absolutely seems to be a country of enchantments.” – J.F.D. Smith, A Tour in the United States of America
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Posted by Jason on April 9th, 2009 — in Carolina Death Crawl
I’m working on the assumption that cards will be printed 18-up, so I have 54 to work with. There are 39 action cards and 10 character cards, which leaves me with five. The plan is to have these include directions for each segment of play on one side, and color quotes for each town that gets raided on the other. The mockup is set in 8 point type, but the quotes are so excellent it’s hard to cut them down. I probably will, though.
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