Mysterious Mysteries

Unfortunate delay

Friday, May 18th, 2007

Well, unfortunately the Anime Card Fight project will be delayed while Tony joins the army. To be honest, we actually haven’t been doing anything with it in the past month or so because as his project, it would be rather difficult for him to coordinate it from boot camp.

And of course, while I’m talking about projects that are delayed, I would like to again mention The Company. I mentioned a while ago that I didn’t like the way the writing came off. Well, I certainly haven’t given up on the game, but I can’t honestly say I feel any urgency to get it out either. Of course, with the end of the college semester, I’ve been wanting to get back to it after I got done with some very involved goofing off.

So the plan for The Company is this: rather than trying to spice up the manual with annoying fiction, I’ve decided that a good avenue to try would be to make the whole thing an in-fiction instruction manual. Actually, with the thinking I’ve been doing, it will probably make it easier for me to get across the atmosphere originally meant for the game.

So huzzah.

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No playtest, but a lesson learned

Wednesday, December 20th, 2006

We did try to give The Company another playthrough, but we learned that while I was very well aware of what The Company was all about once the ball got rolling, as a player I find it very hard to get to that point. All the other RPGs I’ve played (even Tony’s unreleased ones) have very strong cues on how to start. Maybe it’s just because I’m indecisive somewhat, but The Company’s lack of a strong cue made it too hard for an already nervous me to get started.

This re-affirms the value of short one-page fiction pieces being written and placed into the book. The stories would be short enough to not be obnoxious, but transmit a picture of play “as intended” and allow players to work from some known point of comfort.

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A good gamemaster indeed

Wednesday, December 13th, 2006

I guess one of the reasons I have so much trouble playtesting The Company is because I’m not a very good gamemaster. (Speaking of playtesting The Company, I have, sadly, given up hope that I will hear from any online playtesters, and will have to carry on as best I can myself.) Tony, however, is something else. He can spin an excellent roleplaying session from the barest of plans, and I hope some of you will eventually have the pleasure of playing a game with him as the gamemaster at a GenCon one of these years.

On Tuesday we were playing one of his games in development by the name of Demoner. Taking the premise of a town under control of a magic-using cult, with the town church and library decided as two important locations, Tony managed to spin a very entertaining investigation, and then seamlessly allowed it to shift into a shooting spree when I got tired of using subtlety to achieve my ends. With very few bumps I was able to learn what was going on, who was involved, and where their centers of power were. When night fell… Well, away went the joking investigator and out came the shotgun.

This is the versatility as a gamemaster I wish I had. Sitting on my bedroom floor, we can play pretty much any game I want with a premise as general or as specific as I request. Next week we’ll probably play some The Company, since what has been said about the game after I released the playtest copy was positive, and I would really like to get it out there to a wider audience.

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Why I like diceless systems

Monday, November 27th, 2006

First of all, I must confess: I’m not exactly a prolific roleplayer. There are so many systems out there that I would love to play but could never get a group together for. Likewise, pretty much all of my gaming experience has been with dice, so everybody will have to forgive me for delving into theory.

That said, I just prefer thinking seriously about games without dice, since they just strike me as more fun. Rather than asking the player to decide how beneficial something is to him versus how likely he is to succeed, the player can simply decide what he would like to do. It’s basically taking chance out of the equation, like a collectible card game with everybody’s entire deck starting in their hand right from the beginning (a concept which will sound familiar to you if you have ever been to Tony’s ProductionKey.com).

Of course, diceless does not strike me as being ideal for classic combat-based systems, which is just fine because I’m not all that interested in writing those to begin with (though I do have one I’m still toying with). For the most part, Tony (who is, by the way, the other half of Eroth Productions, which is the company that we use to both sell anime merchandise and hope to release our roleplaying games under) is content to write combat-driven systems, while I come out with the more story-driven systems.

Even diceless combat-based systems can work out nicely, because they eliminate annoying randomness (”Come on, anything but a one, and I’ll win! Oh… a one.”) and replace it with a somewhat lesser evil of building your character around sustainable cycles (”Activate shield, take four damage. Kill one enemy, take three damage, shield breaks. Activate shield, take three damage. Kill one enemy…”). It’s a tradeoff, and I can’t come out and say that I think that diceless games are absolutely superior to dice-based games.

And after talking in a bit of a circle, I come back to why I like diceless systems: they are just more well-suited, in my eyes, to systems where the players take the ball and run with it wherever they please. When you get away from combat, dice just become unnecessary. He’s your character, shouldn’t you be the one to decide whether he accepts redemption or continues down his path of self-destruction?

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A good gamemaster indeed

Why I like diceless systems

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