Month: May 2008

Resolutions: Dealing with Canon and Context

Canon is the past in the play. It establishes facts which have gone before. It doesn’t mean it can’t be retconned afterwards but for the most part it is immutable (or at least it should have immutable facts and mutable descriptors, the latter of which may be changed due to Context.

Context is the present in the play. It represents experiences more than facts and, due to the way we lay down memories, is probably more immediately mutable than Canon though if left, it can be harder to change because it forms part of our experience memory and not just written Canon (which is essentially the basis of ‘show, don’t tell’ – if someone visualises the experience they will have deeper connection to it rather than just having the story related to them).

Accepting is where you acknowledge and agree with the contributions from others to the Context settling it as Canon. This is most easily visualised when you try to reconcile the order of events taking place in a system which does not have a strict action-point (or similar) mechanic. In systems with Action Points or Strike Ranks, everything happens according to the time. To move the story along, it can be necessary to fudge the timings, e.g.

Zakary and Carey are two of the contestants in the Garhound contest and Zakary has caught up with Carey who is descending from the Storm Apple tree with a ripe Storm Apple. Though they are perhaps 4-5 SRs apart, the GM permits Zakary to assault Carey and steal the Storm Apple. Why? Because it will make for further flavour and discussion in the game. Who loses out? An NPC who wasn’t doing well in the race anyway.

In a more narrative game, it can mean just the end of discussing a scene. Not everyone needs to be entirely happy with the outcome, but there has to be a sense of mutual consent so that the game can continue.

Returning – negates the contribution to Context but also provides options which can be considered. This is reserved for when there is disagreement within the group as to the interpretation and outcome of a scene. This is most common when there has been a GM fiat about a character and the player disagrees with it. It behooves the player in this circumstance to not only make his grievance known but also to provide a suitable alternative. This may, dependiing on the detail, be returned to the player again or returned to the group as a whole for a better resolution, e.g.

It would have been entirely appropriate for other players to dispute the conflict between Zakary and Carey because there was an immediate gain for Zakary. Though he had no chance of winning the race, Storm Apples are a potent magical item. What convinced them ultimately was that it would have little effect on their characters and in no small part would give Carey, an annoying NPC, a harder time of it. They had agreement and the option was not returned.

It’s much harder to retcon against a dice roll because the randomising element is a central tenet of roleplaying. We use them to make the decisions for us and if we stop ‘trusting’ their decisions, we may as well switch to a fully narrative process (no bad thing in of itself).

systems, systems, systems

Is it right to design another system for a game?

At the moment we’re still writing War of the Worlds, though we’ve started development on Status: Refugee and a Supers game. In all three, the working system is to be a derivative of ERIS from “The 23rd Letter”.

Part of me wants to use ORE because I like Wild Talents and Reign so much. But the licensing terms for it have been very vague.

Portraits of the Dead.

MetalFloss has a link about death:

“From Stanley Burns’ book Sleeping Beauty: Memorial Photography in America:These photographs were a common aspect of American culture, a part of the mourning and memorialization process. Surviving families were proud of these images and hung them in their homes, sent copies to friends and relatives, wore them as lockets or carried them as pocket mirrors. Nineteenth-century Americans knew how to respond to these images. Today there is no culturally normative response to postmortem photographs.”

I’ve been asked more than once to “re-create” the impossible. Adding the dead to portraits of the living.

Ransom

The idea of ransoming game material is definitely new and innovative. It’s being done rather successfully by Greg Stolze for his Reign supplements and there’s a Delta Green book ‘Targets of Opportunity’ which is being funded this way as well.

Shane Ivey wrote:

“If we collect enough “pledges” through Fundable.com to cover the various and high costs of manufacturing “Targets of Opportunity,” we’ll do it now. For each pledge, we’ll ship you a copy of the book by priority mail. (Or by airmail for fans outside the U.S., but the pledge needs to be higher to make up for the high cost of shipping.)

If this doesn’t work, we’ll hold off on it until we save up enough cash the old-fashioned way to release it. That would be … later.”

The 1000 copies of Targets of Opportunity will generate probably $35 000 of revenue. Take away fees for (6) writers and (1) artist and the cost of printing and it’s a small profit for the company.

Would I pledge? Yeah, except it’s DG material which puts it safely in the hands of kinnygraham. I’d only be tempted to read it if I got it.

Some naysayers describe it as a begging bowl. I disagree. Palladium did a begging bowl previously where they asked their fans to just send them money, old socks or whatever because you love them so much. For that you got very little. This is simply pre-pledging for a book, making a tiny profit and making sure that if 1000 copies are printed, then there are enough people out there to buy them.

I think it’s a good plan, though obviously with the names they have involved and the following they have with Delta Green (now the de-facto modern Cthulhu setting), it’s about a million times easier. Greg Stolze does his Reign supplements for $1000 a pop which he tends to meet quite quickly.

This idea really meets up with the ‘1000 fans‘ which I wrote a couple of months ago. 1000 fans buying $100 worth of books from you every year is a living, no? And what is $100? A main hardback book and 5 or so small booklets? As I said elsewhere – this isn’t about scamming $100 out of every fan you have but of working hard, getting good quality books out there and reaping some rewards. Obviously the RPG market is a tiny fraction of the music market but for some, it just might work (especially when you consider I’ve spent probably £200 (nearly $400) on RPG books* in the last six months.

*Maxx supplement, Saipan supplement, Sufficiently Advanced, Deathwatch 2000 Supplement, Reign, Thousand Suns, Psi World, Grimm, Dark Heresy, GURPS WW2, another GURPS WW2 booklet, Will To Power, Godlike GM screen and about $100 of PDFs just for starters…

23L Superhumans

Having some spare time yesterday evening I resurrected some of my notes for ‘superpowers’ in T23L. It wasn’t part of the plan to have 23L superhumans – though I was accused by Jeremy of writing my own ‘supers’ game when we published The 23rd Letter. We did have quasi-superhumans in the form of the Furies and the Terata but nothing was ever done with them.

Some of the thought process for the superhuman system was taken from the Amber system. I quite liked the way their stats were arranged:

  • Human – covering the full range of Human ability
  • Chaos – stronger than any human
  • Amber – stronger than both Chaos and Human
  • Ranked – allowing you to be a stronger Amber-ite, perhaps even the strongest.

For 23L/Supers, I envisaged a triple scale over and above the abilities of Humanity.

The 23rd Letter has a range of 1-7 for human endeavour. Given the media it is trying to emulate, I expanded this to 1-9 so that there could be some decent Batman/Captain America/peak of human ability in there. The rationale obviously was that someone with Strength of 1 would be weedy and weak whereas someone with Strength 9 would be sprouting muscles on their muscles!

I added a second level, Superhuman 1 (also called Basic) which covered the range from 11-19, inferring that even the weakest superhuman was still stronger than the strongest human. All individuals with Strength at Superhuman 1 would be of similar strength ability – the second digit giving you an idea of the amount they had ‘worked’ it. Someone with Strength 11 would probably be able to press a ton and could be thin and unmuscled. In comparison someone with Strength 19 would be heavily muscled or, at least, tremendously toned and should, in theory have better control over their strength.

I then added a third level, Superhuman 2 (also called Advanced) covering the range 21-29 and a fourth, Superhuman 3 (also called Master) for very high level supers.

This also extended to the Powers they would have. And even within powers there were powers that may not be available to all superhumans (essentially the first generation superhumans had access to some powers and could get very competent with them, later ‘model’ superhumans had access to better powers but didn’t have as much opportunity to become skilled with them). The Powers were in broad categories like ‘Flight’ or ‘Coordination’ or ‘Strength’. Each power would have a description of ‘Basic’, ‘Advanced’ or ‘Master’ and were meant to be built as packages, e.g.

  • Basic Flight – the character can fly up to 70 mph.
  • Advanced Flight – the character can fly at up to Mach 1. He also gains modifications to his body to better enable this, skin toughness and resistance to wind chill and friction. The player can buy Basic Coordination at half cost.
  • Master Flight – the character can fly at virtually unlimited speeds. He is resistance to the effects of this travel, gaining Basic Resistance for free. The player can buy Basic or Advanced Coordination at half cost.

Like in The 23rd Letter, the ‘powers’ were tied into the game world so that someone with Basic Strength (boosting them from Strength of 1-9 to Strength of 11-19 as well as other benefits) would be called Achilles-class. Someone with Advanced Strength would be Talos-class. A Master-Strength superhuman might be Heracles-class. A Heracles-class superhuman might have other benefits too, like being virtually impervious to harm.

This was the basis of the system of ‘More Than Human’ which was on the LateGaming site for years (since about 2001 when Jared put together the first edition of this web site) but now comes uncomfortably close to the as-yet-unreleased ‘Beyond Human’ touted by Eden (which will undoubtedly come to market around the time we release whatever this game turns out to be – if history (Zombi vs All Flesh Must be Eaten) is anything to go by.

I’ll post more on this later.

The Stars Are Right….over there….

The Internet STELLAR DATABASE is a lot of fun.

Look at the entry for Barnard’s Star especially the submits at the bottom where you can search for stars within a certain radius. How I wish this had been about when I was working on 2300AD scenarios (My favourite being ‘Bayern’ which exceeded the 7.8 light year limit on inter-stellar travel)

Looking at the entry for Sol we find:

“The “8” in the Detected Planets entry is not an error. Pluto is not a “planet,” but a huge, close-orbiting, low-eccentricity Kuiper Belt object. With a big moon. Of course, some die-hards out there still insist that it really is a planet, more for sentimental reasons than anything else. They’re welcome to live in their little fantasy world. Neener neener.”

Status: Refugee – Timeline

Here’s a snippet of some of the stuff I’m writing for Status: Refugee. It hasn’t been okay’ed by Aidan yet so details may change. But it should give you an idea of what we’re working on. I want to bring several themes on board: themes of salvation, themes of alienation, of being a stranger in a strange land, of being an immigrant in a new world of opportunity.

  1. 1998-07-17
    Astronomers take note of unusual stellar seismic reports from Barnard’s Star, a dim red dwarf in the Constellation Ophiuchus, the Serpent Holder — west of Cebalrai or Kelb al Rai (Beta Ophiuchi). Though ancient, Barnard’s Star had always experienced flare events, though this flare was twice as hot as the normal temperature of the star. This was not fully analysed until 2002 and the results not public until 2006.
  2. 2004-11-02
    Astronomers describe an object travelling at 12% of the speed of light entering the solar system. As it passes within the orbit of Saturn, it disappears. Due to lack of evidence, it was not reported to higher authorities.
  3. 2008-05-04
    First Contact. Humanoid simulacra of alien origin approach more than half of the world’s governments. They bring data, projections and propose a solution. Within a decade, they claim, the Earth will become a barren wasteland. All mammalian life on the planet will be extinguished. The seas will boil. The plants will burn. Life will continue on Earth, but it will not be human.
  4. 2008-05-06
    Leaked documents from the First Contact cause widespread panic across the world. Major cities experience riots, demonstrations and looting of businesses and personal homes. People start to hoard food and water, sunscreen sells out everywhere.
  5. 2010-09-15
    The North American Repatriation Act is passed into United States federal law.
  6. 2011-04-02
    Barnard’s Star explodes into a supernova. It will be six years before the effects are felt on Earth.
  7. 2015-07-04
    Official End of the United States of America as a nation.
  8. 2018-02-14
    Estimated date for first effects of the Barnard’s Star detonation to affect Earth’s biosphere.
    Gamma Rays induce a chemical reaction in the upper atmosphere, converting atmospheric nitrogen and depleting the ozone layer leaving the surface open to harmful solar and cosmic radiation.

So that’s it. In a decade we lose the greatest treasure we own: The Earth.

Mutants and Masterminds.

Every now and then, someone asks on the RPG.net forums…

What’s the best supers game?

and every time the Mutants and Masterminds people come out of the woodwork to tell us that M&M is not a d20 game. It doesn’t have levels, hit points or attacks of opportunity. Now…this last one is a D&D specific thing but Levels and Hit points are a staple of D&D games.

Mutants and Masterminds has ‘Power Level’ which affects the following:

  • Attack Bonus
  • Defense Bonus
  • Save Difficulty
  • Toughness Save
  • Fortitude, Reflex and Will Saves
  • Skill Rank
  • Ability Scores

It also tells you how many points you can spend on powers.

Also, on page 25…

As the heroes earn additional power points through adventuring, the GM
may wish to increase the campaign’s power level, allowing players to spend
some of their earned power points to improve traits already at the cam-
paign’s limit. Not raising the power level forces player characters to diversify,
improving their less powerful or effective traits, and acquiring new ones,
but it can make the players feel constrained and the heroes to start looking
the same if it isn’t raised occasionally. Increasing power level by one for
every 15 earned power points is a good rule of thumb, depending on how
quickly the GM wants the player characters to improve in overall power.

Hm, so it has levels, but they’re not used in the traditional way. You start out at a certain level and ideally fight foes of a similar level. It’s a bit like starting out making D&D characters at a certain level so you can play a particular scenario and then never really bothering about the XP thing. I dislike XP systems a lot.

As for Hit Points. It seems it’s true. There’s no Hit Points. There are ‘saves’ against damage ad things called ‘Damage Conditions’ but without buying the book, I’m unlikely to find out what they really mean.

I’m still not struck on the Feats but it has improved since M&M1e. For my money, however, I’m going to stick to trying to use Wild Talents.