Big Bad Con
Big Bad Con in Oakland looks like so much fun! We won’t be there, but bon vivant and friend Lenny Balsera will be, and he’s running Fiasco. In fact, he’s running unpublished playsets of great mystery! I wish I could be there.
Fair Play
Dragon Con
I’ll be at Dragon Con soon! I’m a gaming guest of honor. If you are going to be there please say hey.
I’m on four panels. I didn’t pick the titles! Game Design Mastery has a ton of great people on board, including nuclear geniuses like Richard Garfield.
Title: Indie RPGs!
Description: Beyond the d20! Our panel on the revolution going on in the role-playing industry. Vive la difference!
Time: Fri 05:30 pm and again Sun 01:00 pm Location: Grand Salon B – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
Title: Game Design Mastery
Description: A roundtable with the masters of game design itself. What makes a good game – card, paper, computer, or otherwise? How did they create their masterpieces?
Time: Sun 11:30 am Location: Crystal Ballroom – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
Title: The Mechanics of Designing Your Own RPG
Description: Designing your own RPG? Ever wanted to give it a shot? What are the mechanics that give you hang ups? Award-winning designers reveal how they do it.
Time: Sun 07:00 pm Location: Grand Salon B – Hilton (Length: 1 Hour)
Durance: My Game Chef Game
For some reason, Game Chef this year was really productive. My game is solid and I’ve already playtested it twice. I think it has legs. I’m always interested in instructional design, and try to separate procedures from commentary whenever I can. To that end I’m playing with a sort of script-y style for the rules bits of Durance. It looks like this.
So you’ve got a bare bones list of exactly what to do on the left, and comments on these procedures on the right. What do you think? Do you know of other games that have taken a similar approach?
Game Chef!
I got swept up in Game Chef. The timing was pretty good; we just wrapped the Fiasco Companion and other projects are simmering. My game, Durance, does exactly two interesting things:
1. There’s a resolution/guidance mechanic that forces you to look at the setting you’ve collaboratively built each time you use it. Not in a consulting mode, but in a “the dice are on top of the setting document” mode, which I hope will reinforce those details in a non-intrusive but fruitful way. This works in Fiasco, where you browse 144 items to choose a handful, and in so doing get a feel for the playset’s flavor and tone.
2. That same resolution/guidance mechanic also paces the introduction of new situation in a way I think is pretty elegant. There are three numbers tied to themes (desperation, servility and terror), higher numbers trump lower numbers, so you have a neat triangle where at least one will always trump another, sometimes two. On a tie you can elect to add a new fictional element from a list, based on the numbers currently on the mat. And on a somewhat rare triple tie, that element is some variation on the biggest event in colonial life – “A transport arrives”. I feel very clever.
Nine Roosevelts Update
We playtested Nine Roosevelts Against the Impossible last night and it went well. The bones are strong but it isn’t ready for prime time yet. I can see the fun in it and playing helped me understand what needs to happen with the game. Tazio Bettin’s art is so, so good. Our Roosevelts were fighting Prussians, mole men, werewolves, Prussian mole men, and the traitorous William Howard Taft, whose ravenous hunger had acquired universe-destroying potential. Several Roosevelts were lost but in the end we put a stake through Taft’s greasy heart.