I can tell you right now that the rules as they currently exist are not long for this world. Well, that’s not true. I’ll keep them up as a painful reminder of my first awkward foray into full game design, and in case anyone finds some ideas to milk out of it. I do really like the complex interactions of the three resources and their values as static and dynamic values and that each has multiple game mechanical consequences. I think there’s some interesting “game” there. Hell, they might end up in the Roman social-oriented game I was considering when I first came up with the seed of an idea for three resources as the core of a game.

But.

I am working on a near-complete revision. Like, I’m gonna completely rewrite because the changes will be so significant. Here’s a rundown of what I plan to keep, and what I plan to change, with some cues to the directions I’m going in (as of right now! This is all still nebulous!)

• Stuff I’m keeping

1. The core concept. This will still be a mythic-heroic game inspired by Celtic and Germanic myth predominantly revolving around a clan with lots of setting creation/customization
2. Grudges. For sure. They may function differently, but you will gain mechanical bonuses against people that have shamed/defeated/otherwise besmirched you
3. Oaths. Again, they may work differently, but this is a fundamental concept.
4. Conflicting goals between your family, clan, and yourself

• Stuff I’m changing

1. The core resolution. Like, totally and completely different. Probably moving to a single die dice pool thing, very likely based on counting 4+’s as ‘hits’ and 3-’s as ‘misses’
2. Related to the above, the way characters are created, what their attributes are, et cetera
3. The three resources. Some of the elements here will remain, there may even still be 3 when I’m done, but they will be very different, and link into whatever the new resolution mechanic is
4. Clan creation is getting rolled up into character creation, and the whole process will be waaaaay briefer and more focused on interesting starting situation
5. The awful, terrible GM advice will be rewritten as actual rules and procedure for the GM

If you are interested in getting some ideas of where I’m going and what’s influencing me at the moment, check out Lady Blackbird, Burning Wheel, and Apocalypse World, in roughly descending order of importance to what I think the new conflict resolution will look like. Check out the Smallville RPG for a big influence on my current thoughts on character creation (with a healthy dose of Lady Blackbird and Burning Wheel as well).

I plan to have the conflict resolution thing in a workable, tweakable format this week, maybe by the end of this weekend, with everything else up in the air until I figure out ways to make it interact with that.

But! To keep this from being a totally content free “don’t go away!” sort of post, here’s a sneak preview of what I’m thinking about right now. I really like the three resources and their interactions. I really like grudges and their interaction with loyalty points. I really like how teamwork focused the conflict resolution is. On the other hand, I do *not* currently really like the conflict resolution rules themselves. I think they need a massive overhaul of some sort. For one thing, they were written when I was all high on In a Wicked Age and Dogs in the Vineyard, without realizing a) exactly why and how they worked the way they did, b) Vincent Baker has since said he’s not totally happy with In a Wicked Age’s mechanics, and c) that these games are no longer the “state of the art” in RPG design. So, I’m fitting these influences into a wider context, and also re-examining the rules with a better and deeper understanding of what I want them to do.

The main issue, as I see it, is one discussed by Vincent Baker in a recent interview and also on his blog (over there in the sidebar, “anyway.”). That issue is when the rules and the fiction fail to interlock properly. Now, roleplayers have a long history of compensating for imperfect reinforcement of rules by fiction and vice versa, but I’ve become convinced that a well designed game will make those elements necessarily interact, not just so that they can interact. I took some steps to do this in my first draft of the conflict resolution rules, but I think I’ll be able to do it better now. I’m not sure how, yet, so suggestions are welcome, but that’s what I’m working on in my brain and notebooks.

Not only will it give the best interests more mechanical weight, it will (hopefully) increase the tension of choosing between differing interests. Here’s my thought: you’ve got three best interests (individual, family, and clan) and three resources. So completing interests gives you points in a resource!

The run down (until testing makes me decide to do otherwise) is that fulfilling a clan best interest gives you a wealth point, fulfilling a family interest gives you a loyalty point from one of your family members, and fulfilling an individual best interest gives you a glory point. I’m afraid that the family interest may be getting the short end of the stick here, as the loyalty points with your family members will only come up if you try to get them to help you out in conflicts, but hopefully that will come up in play.

I’m also not positive on how to judge interests “fulfilled” but since all interests are player generated, I’m thinking the GM decides when they’re fulfilled. This is part of a general swing back towards more GM authority that I’m thinking will happen having considered the game  more recently, since I was all high on hippie authority sharing as a brand new concept to me when I wrote the first draft of the game.

I need to give the whole system a good once over before I get the chance to do some real live, in person playtesting sometime in the next month. I am very excite.

First off, it taught me a lot about Google Wave, and while I think it’s far superior to a standard forum for RPGs, it still has some shortcomings compared to ‘the real thing’ of sitting at a table with your friends and talking it out in person. That being said, I’m currently participating in 3 Google Wave RPGs, so I would still recommend it if you’re hungry for gaming and the internet is your only outlet.

In the case of Bo3s though, it created some issues with the clan creation section (the only part we did). Turn taking is awkward in an ansynchronous environment where ‘order’ is arbitrary. Also, different people updating at different speeds created a disparity of expectations in how quickly to post. But I’d say the big thing that hurt the clan creation process is that a lot of the back and forth collaborative stuff that would be happening in person was constrained in the online format, making each person’s contribution more self-contained and final, rather than being malleable to fit in with the overall creative vision, which is what the clan creation process was supposed to foster.

On that note, the clan creation rules are too lengthy. I got so caught up in worrying that there would be enough material for a compelling situation off the bat that I forgot my whole inspiration of “In a Wicked Age” and my desire for the setting to come out in play. I think what I will do is make a *much* shorter clan creation process as the standard, and then offer an optional detailed clan creation process for people who really want to flesh out the world before they step into it or to refer to when things come up in play (for example: “I dunno guys, what is the neighboring clan like? You tell me, or roll on this table here”).

Another point about the creation rules that my friend Adam pointed out is that certain aspects of it (like one player naming a type of community and another player fleshing it out) made the whole collaborative process be *too* collaborative. Individual players didn’t feel like they had ‘ownership’ of anything, and maybe other players took what would have been an idea that got them fired up and went in a totally different direction. My goal was to force the players to accommodate each other’s points of interest and to create a world that everyone had buy in with, but I think that I shared out the ownership too much.

One solution to that problem can be gleaned from Archipelago II by Matthjis Holter. This is a great game that I’d love to give playing a try, but reading through it really opened my eyes to some different ways to approach RPG design. And you can get it for free at that link! Seriously worth checking out. At any rate, in it there is the concept of ‘ownership’ since there is not a traditional GM. One player is given authority over an aspect of the game world (like ‘geography’ or ‘religion’ – typically things the group decides will be important to the game) and anybody can suggest things about the world, but the player with ownership can veto ideas relating to his domain.

So, let’s say you have authority over ‘geography’ and I’m like “Man, there are these giant floating mountains, with like plants and stuff growing between them”. You could go “Floating mountains? I don’t think so, all of the terrain has been really harsh and mundane, so let’s not do that. How about some normal jungle mountains that go up really high?”

I think a few areas of ownership, or at least the concept that certain things are ‘owned’ by certain players might go a long way towards supporting buy-in to the collaborative creative process. So, maybe each player gets final say over details about their family members (even if the GM gets to control their actions in play) and one guy gets to detail the religion of teh clan, and another guy gets to have authority over the crafts (or whatever). I’m gonna poke around with these ideas and streamline the clan creation process in a lot of other ways. I’ll probably look at character creation again, since I realized taht most of the ‘initial situation’ generation happens from the Character creation already, so I may fine tune that and make the clan creation a subtle background.

He was kind enough to mention Ragonarok in his ‘ludography’, but I’d be pointing you towards it anyway, because it’s really exciting to me and does some really clever design stuff. Check it out.

In case you’re not familiar, Vincent Baker is the author of a few of the games I reviewed on here (In a Wicked Age, Dogs in the Vineyard) and is a pretty big deal in the indie RPG scene, because his games are flipping awesome. There’s already a lot of buzz about this game, and with good reason: it’s really, really good.

In addition to being a great ready to go game, it’s also supremely hackable. A number of really interesting hacks are already being developed (and have been before the final rules even released!). You can follow them at the Apocalypse World forums.

I’ve currently got a bee in my bonnet to work on a Dark Heresy (Warhammer 40k roleplaying) hack for it, as I love a lot of the expanded setting material in Dark Heresy and Rogue trader, but I have no desire to ever play the system that comes in the game.

But don’t worry, my Necro redo and the Book of Threes are continuing to get some lovin, I expect to have a post about some feedback from the alpha test of the Book of Threes in the next couple of days.

So, the way I see it, in a skirmish wargame, shooting has two main intentions: to control movement and to remove enemy fighters. The second is fairly obvious, but there are some implications to it I want to discuss, so I’ll start with “controlling movement”.

In traditional Necromunda, you have something called “pinning” when a figure is hit, but not wounded. A pinned fighter misses a turn unless he has buddies around to egg him on and he passes a test. In the previously mentioned WWII game, we modified this a bit to make it a little easier to test to get up, mostly because we made pinning a much larger part of the game by forcing characters shot at to test to avoid pinning on a miss. Pinning, then, achieves the aim of controlling movement, and our system had a pretty cool emergent effect of creating “fire and maneuver” set ups very in keeping with the WWII flavor.

The point for this post being I like the game-play implications of pinning, and I think I like pinning even on missed shots to be a possibility, so I’ll probably keep that. Any other thoughts on how shooting can control opponent movements would be welcome in the comments.

Now, the more direct aim of shooting: killing and maiming enemies. In pretty much every GW game, you roll to hit, then roll to wound, and then Armor may or may not come in to negate the wound. Since each step is a simple D6  roll, and you do them all the time, they get to be pretty quick and natural. I’m pretty sure the reason for the separate hit, wound, and armor rolls is to allow for a high level of distinction between different match ups: you can be more or less accurate, shooting with a more or less powerful weapon against a more or less tough foe, and his armor can be better or worse. That allows for a wide variety of characters on each end of the role, and even more possible match ups.

That being said, the intent of shooting is to remove a threat, and so there’s no inherent reason that roll should be split up into three steps. So, in the interest of trying to figure out if there’s something better, I’ve been considering some other options. One that has caught my fancy is something to do with multiple dice, possibly of different colors (thanks to a discussion over at Praxis).

Here’s the rough idea I have: a shooting character looks at his shooting skill (“Ballistic Skill” in the Games Workshop parlance) and at the stats of the weapon he’s firing. Both give a number of dice to roll, which he adds together. Perhaps different colored dice can be specified which “hit” at different probabilities (e.g. something like whites hit on a 6, blues on a 5 or 6, and reds on a 4, 5, 6).  He rolls these and totals the number of hits/successes he’s rolled.

Now, the target looks at his toughness and his armor, which also grant dice (again, possibly of different colors). He rolls that number of dice, and any hits/successes he scores negate hits scored by the attacker. If any hits are left, the attacker then assigns them to the target. I’m thinking that the target has a number of boxes that can be checked off in order, going something like “pinned, -1 die on rolls, -2 dice on rolls, out of action” or something like that, with effects being cumulative, and you can’t skip a step.

Cover would probably be represented as a number of hits scored in the defender’s favor, but possibly as fewer dice to roll for the attacker or more armor dice for the defender.

The notion here is that a character’s accuracy stat would probably always be or start out as white dice, with more meaning more accurate (which might translate into hitting a more vital area, if those dice get you enough hits to wound seriously). The kind of weapon and how powerful it is would also be represented by number and color of dice: automatic weapons would have more white dice, powerful weapons would have more red dice.

Of course, another option would be to have a fixed target number (say, a 6) and then different die types (d6s, d8s, d10s, et cetera). This might allow more variability in weapon power.

So, how does this sound? Would it be too many dice per shooting action? Are the opposed rolls too funky?

So, a few months back, I went through the Necromunda, Mordheim, and Inquisitor rules and looked for ideas to modify, incorporating ideas from a WWII skirmish game my friend Lance and I developed a few years back (initially based on Games Workshop’s Lord of the Rings game, but since modified beyond recognition). I got the basic battle rules worked out, but never got into the nitty gritty of the point-buy character and warband creation.

Along the way, I think I succumbed to feature bloat and ended up with a bunch of cruft that the game doesn’t benefit from. So now, I’m starting “from the ground up” trying to come up with rules from base principles of what I want to happen in the game, consciously working to avoid falling back on old GW based habits.

Once I finish this, I figure I’ll compare the two rulesets and take the best of both worlds. That’s the theory at least. So, some high level design goals:

• Ideally suited for forces of 6-15 guys per side, but hopefully allowing for simplified rules to run larger battles
• Quick, smooth play that doesn’t bog things down in endless rolling or rules look ups or the like
• At the same time, enough detail to make each individual fighter interesting and individual
• Again, aimed at doing games set in the 40k setting, but hopefully applicable to any modern/sci-fi setting

The main pitfalls I’m worried about are falling into extreme and over detailing of options. I have a tendency to do this, as has recently been pointed out with the clan creation rules in The Book of Threes and from my prior experience with modifying wargames rules. One of the solutions to this I plan on is intense modularity: give a simple, basic set of rules with a number of layers of optional add ons that provide more and more detail, and can be used or discarded by individual groups of players as they like. This is also how I intend to tackle different “levels” of game play, such as campaigns and individual battles, play with a game master or without, and so forth.

Going forward, I’d appreciate any insight into these or other pitfalls I may be blindly stumbling into.

So here it is.

Let me know what you think (this is as yet unplaytested, but considering it comes from two games that work fine and are playtested, I assume it’ll be fine. I may make changes once I get the chance to play it some).