Fair Play
Posted by Jason on November 29th, 2008 — in Uncategorized
I’m still chugging away at Fiasco, and it is getting sleeker and sleeker. Here’s an example of a play set - I like this form factor. Two double-sided pages; you use two for engineering the fiasco initially then flip them to get a handy “what do we do when?” reference and the two other bits you need mid-way through the game. I like this particular play set a lot - I think it front-loads some fun potential conflicts without being too focused.
I’m open to suggestions about how to present this information, although I think giving each 36-item list half a letter-sized page offers a nice amount of breathing room.
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Posted by Jason on October 15th, 2008 — in Uncategorized
Graham “The Devil” Walmsley challenged me to write a game about a song. I accepted and he told me my song was some Kurt Weill nonsense that demonstrated his deeply flawed taste, so I wrote a little game based on John Gay’s 1728 Beggar’s Opera, which is pretty funny and cool. Does it work? I do not know. I should put in a rule requiring the narrator to mock Robert Walpole. Note how easy it would be to turn this into a contemporary Baltimore gangster drama.
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Posted by Jason on August 28th, 2008 — in Uncategorized
I was thinking this morning of the tactical infant combat game I designed in elementary school, Baby Wars. It’s basically a Melee rip-off, but what struck me looking back on it is the fact that my central premise is babies fighting to the death. It’s a little transgressive, and also speaks to both my early enthusiasms and blind spots. It’s a game, it’s about babies - what else could they possibly do?
I wonder if anything has changed…
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Posted by Jason on August 22nd, 2008 — in Uncategorized
I’m having a pretty involved conversation over at TheRPGSite, which has been very interesting. It started as a thread about the Indie RPG Awards, and I registered and waded in when they started talking about Grey Ranks. I offered to answer questions and correct any misapprehensions and a number of thoughtful people took me up on it. They are asking some challenging questions and it’s been very good for me to formulate cogent answers. It’s making me realize how insular my gaming/Internet world is - why haven’t I been asked these questions before now? We need better critical faculties and mechanisms as a community.
We’re also talking a bit about the Indie RPG Awards and how to make them better, which is strictly awesome.
Of course, this truly productive conversation is occasionally interrupted by some lunatic screaming “SHITCOCK!” in my ear, which baffles me, but that’s the noise in a lot of good signal.
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