Fair Play
Posted by Jason on February 25th, 2010 — in Conventions, Cowboys With Big Hearts, Medical Hospital
Dreamation 2010 was frickin’ awesome.
Cowboys With Big Hearts needs some GM advice and structure. I’m thinking: To “unlock” your Keepsake, at any time you have a flashback tying you to the orphans. Until then you can’t use it. Or maybe you have to tie the keepsake to the orphans in the flashback. That might be fun. Then it is color scene/big conflict/color/big/color/showdown. So maybe: Phoenix / Apaches / Train robber friends / rockslide / weirdo preacher / Death Brothers (that was the Dreamation game), with stuff slotted in as a GM prefers, with many options. I don’t think the rules can be well presented on cards.
Medical Hospital – procedure timing was wrong, wrong, wrong. Trauma doesn’t work right. You need to be able to earn Pull in roleplaying scenes (by hitting the A-Plot maybe?) but I want to avoid state tracking so badly! If the RP game can stand alone like the arts-and-crafts game can, that is a good thing. Big thanks to Eric, Witt and Laura who “got it” and really chewed the scenery. The game is cluttered with stuff, which I need to think about. Lots of bits swirling around. Viz the RP half of the play space:
My interest in structured freeform is rekindled. I want to write a larp now. I want to play in a larp now, perhaps before writing one. A conversation with John S. and Frank M. really got me thinking about how to port what is good about what I already do to a different medium.
Seven sessions of Fiasco were run – three by me – and it wasn’t enough. I’m so grateful for the warm reception the game has gotten. I’m also happy that I can run it endlessly and not get tired of it. I couldn’t run three games of Grey Ranks that way, or The Roach.
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Posted by Jason on November 25th, 2009 — in Cowboys With Big Hearts, Design
Just playing around with format. The grey line indicates the actual card dimensions.
Well, actual as in 3.5″ wide and 2.5″ tall, anyway.
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Posted by Jason on November 19th, 2009 — in Check this out dude, Cowboys With Big Hearts, Design
More or less to see if they would fit, I condensed the rules for Cowboys With Big Hearts onto a single double-sided letter page, just right for folding up in a tuck box. They fit and I didn’t lose much color, although it pains me. Can you read this or is it an exercise in tiny type futility? That’s 8-point Garamond, which seems cruel.
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Posted by Jason on November 16th, 2009 — in Conventions, Cowboys With Big Hearts, Playtest
I got a chance to playtest Cowboys With Big Hearts again on Saturday at Ice Station Nerdly. It went surprisingly well! Here are the 54 cards:
I printed out the card content onto Avery 5263 labels and stuck them on color-coded index cards. The finished version will be 2.5″ by 3.5″ playing cards. Here’s us playing:
One player had never played a roleplaying game before that day. She was fantastic, as you might expect. The game is a weird mix of extremely heavy, old school GM authority and completely player-driven action. I think it may end up being tricky to get right, but I may be mistaken. The new RPGer said “This is really fun. I want to run this at PAX east next spring” to which I said “OK!”.
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Posted by Jason on June 9th, 2009 — in Cowboys With Big Hearts
I think the solution to the game’s handling time and weird flatness issues is, as with most things, Otherkind dice. Injecting an additional degree of player choice into the mix makes the math a little flighty, so more playtesting is in order. It will definitely be more fun to shuffle the dice around, and decide whether to slam down more patent medicine or leave it alone. Here’s a mockup of the character sheet, just for fun.
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