Returning to Crunchy design systems

 So i said 'hell with it' and pulled out my Mekton Zeta books and starting stating out mecha and ship designs for a theoretical game, because sometimes you just gotta crunch some numbers.

I pulled some pics from Pinterest that looked interesting and started writing some setting-fluff and then designs inspired by the artwork. [We'll ignore for now the issues of piracy and using others artwork for personal benefit; the short of it is as long as I am not making money and can give the artists credit, i feel fine about this.] This spun into more worldbuilding ideas, and then a major side-quest of creating a sub-design workflow that made things simpler. Mekton is a system that can be as simple as you want, or as complex as you want. It recognizes that most supporting and background mecha don't need as much detail as the 'hero' units, and thus can do with less crunchy detail. 

And then I realized I was going in the wrong direction; over twenty-four 'supporting' mecha designs (mostly capital ships and support craft) to two -two- 'hero' units written up so far. The focus had shifted from a setting with an emphasis on a few Hero units to huge capital ships and fleet composition. The original idea was to have lightly detailed units that support the setting, but now I worry I've gone too far down this rabbit hole. So, do I scrap what I have and start over? Take what I got so far and just change focus? The stuff I have written up so far is good within its own framework, I think. But I'm not sure its what I was originally going for. This is partially because of the variety of inspiring artwork, drawing from vastly different genres and settings. Trying to create a cohesive setting from highly disparate sources means a hodgepodge of elements. If I were planning to commercialize this setting, I'd either redo all the artwork myself, or commission some artists for new art.

This reminds me of the importance of 'setting bibles' and vision statements; writing down the vision and goal then referring to it later to check course and progress. Or, acknowledging that your initial idea needed some modification.

All this crunch, however, leads to the next step: actually playing a crunchy game systems. The point of lower-complexity designs for non-Hero units is to make the GM's life easier. Let the players have full-page sheets of details to track for their lone Hero units; the GM needs to track everyone else in the scene. That's what the side-quest was for: create a streamlined system for designing and using these supporting units; as GM I want to track an NPC unit on a 3x5 card, or half a page at most.

Incentivizing Failure, or “Making failure fun”

Classic Dungeons and Dragons games, and some modern hardcore ones, may end in ‘total party kills’ or ‘wipes.’ Sometimes this is because the characters choose to take on something they really weren’t prepared for or even capable of defeating; sometimes it’s bad planning and sometimes the best possible plan fails because of a couple bad dice rolls.Aside from the gravitas and potential hilarity of these events, not to mention elevating the perceived threat of whatever did the party in, what’s the next step? Start with a new cast of level one characters? There’s a certain appeal to starting over, trying new concepts and tactics. However, I happen to be one of those kinds of players who get rather invested in their characters; their death by arbitrary dice outcomes is an emotional cost that’s anxiety inducing. 

I wonder sometimes if this is how George R. R. Martin ended up writing his infamously character-lethal novels; he couldn’t find anyone willing to roleplay tabletop with him again after arbitrarily murdering off everyone’s characters?

It also depends on the conflict system: D&D rolls dice twice per melee attack or offensive spell casting; one could just miss outright, one could hit but then roll very low for damage; or miss a saving throw against a spell. Characters often have enough hit points to survive several attacks. This all combines to make conflicts decided over several rounds of exchanges so the averages tend to even out: you might have missed this turn, but critically hit next turn, and so on.

Other game systems are more abstract in their conflict handling; In a Powered by the Apocalypse game, for example, an entire conflict could be resolved in a single roll, and in PBtA, you either completely fail 45% of the time, succeed ‘at cost’ 27% of the time (you win but get hurt), and perfectly succeed the other 27% of the time (before you take into any modifiers). That’s potentially a lot riding on one roll.

Of course, character death is the extreme example of bad dice luck. Negotiations, investigations, crafting and other ‘systems’ that are determined by dice rolls (or card draws or whatever your resolution mechanics are) can fail at dramatic moments and derail stories and even end campaigns abruptly if not handled well.

Some games already take failure into account, mechanically speaking:

Burning Wheel games, for example, track success and failure on every stat and skill roll. When you reach a certain number of ‘tests’ against your current skill or stat rank, it goes up by one instantly and automatically and your progress of tracking tests starts over again. In Mouse Guard, you need failed tests as well as successful ones to advance.

In the Dragon Ball Z rpg, by R. Talsorian games, characters have an overall Power Level (something characters actually talk and brag about in the fiction, and is also a stat in the RPG mechanics). Comparing this stat to your opponent’s determines how much experience points you gain just for encountering them. Win or lose. This incentivizes challenging characters more powerful than yourself to grow stronger. An excellent example of game mechanics modeling story/world themes.

Aside from the mechanical aspects, most modern Game Master’s guides and ‘how to roleplay’ essays address -to a greater or lesser extent- not letting dice rolls derail a good game or story. However I feel this is often unclear, and information provided a little too late. Mechanics that enforce design goals is more direct, and sometimes a more subtle way to guide a game. 

It’s worth also pointing out that succeeding all the time gets boring; the anime One-Punch Man being a wonderful exception; but Saitama’s end solution to his problems is the punchline (pun intended) to the comedy; it’s what leads up to that point that’s the story. Let’s stick a pin in that for later, because it gives me ideas...

So. How do we structure play, mechanics and stories that make failure not only tolerable, but even desirable in some cases?

Failure can be tied to growth, like in Burning Wheel games. BW emphasizes characters challenging themselves (and the failure that comes with that) to get better at things. The point of a Burning Wheel game isn’t always character growth: growth is just the natural outcome of testing one’s abilities. In a game where character death is quite the possibility, however, striving to grow means walking a tight line of challenging your character’s abilities but not going so far as to die from it. 

Some games make character death much harder to achieve; in 7thSea 2nd Edition when your character takes their fourth Dramatic Wound they become ‘helpless’ for the rest of the scene. To kill a helpless character requires a special effort on the part of the villain, one that can be easily interrupted by another character. Also, in the genre of 7thSea, proper Villains are often too busy in their schemes to bother with the effort to kill a hero (unless that hero has time and again foiled the Villains plans and royally pissed them off). The fiction of the genre influencing how the game mechanics work, and the mechanics support the genre of the fiction. 

A clever GM can make failure lead down alternative and interesting paths when the characters fail to do something. Can’t pick the locks to the dungeon you’re trapped in? Introduce a lazy, corruptible or sympathetic guard to the scene and let the players make another different approach. Let there be an earthquake that damages the structural integrity of their prison. Unfortunately this can lead to too many Deus Ex Machina moments, and really make the characters (and players) feel disempowered. 

Now so far we’ve looked into mechanics and characters, but not considered the player in all of this. FUN is had by the players, not necessarily the characters, and defining what’s fun for the players directs us to how to make character failure interesting and entertaining. There’s a strong reliance on the social contract here, with players trusting GM’s to try and make the game entertaining and the GM trusting the players to participate fairly with each other and respect the GM’s role in the game. After all, GM’s are players too, and deserve to have fun at the table as well.

Here’s where having a clear scope of genre and play established between the GM and players is so important. Sure your players characters may have goals, but what are the players definitions and limits on having ‘fun’? What’s fun for one player may be torture for another and knowing that distinction is critical. 

Ask yourself: when the character’s metaphorical (and maybe literal) back is against the wall due to circumstances and bad dice luck, what’s the players ideal way out of the situation? Then go with that. 

Let us introduce some example player archetypes: the role-player, the storyteller, and the tactician. There are plenty more variants and alternatives to these but for the purposes of demonstration let’s start with these three:

The “Roleplayer” is deep into playing their character and will likely get more out of pushing their characters boundaries than clever tactical decisions or min-maxing their character’s design. When a roleplayer’s character fails at their initial attempt at something, they’re probably going to be more happy to roleplay their way out of the situation than any other method. They will make decisions in character and accept the consequences because “they were acting in character”.

The “Storyteller” player is into what’s best for the drama: With character goals and motivations and natures in mind, they’ll pursue what both tells the best story and advances that narrative, rather than rely on dice or mechanisms. 

I’ll give a personal example here. At the climax of a long campaign, my character met their nemesis for a final confrontation. The fate of the kingdom and the fragile treaty holding four cultures together was in the balance.

Now, I have rather terrible dice luck; I prefer to roleplay/storytell, and i didn’t want to trust dice to decide the outcome of this crucial moment. I asked the GM for a sidebar and we talked about how we both wanted the scene to play out. What would satisfy us both. With that in agreement we went back to the table and together told of their epic final duel and how James Covington saved the day and redefined the covenant of Avalon forever after. Not one die was rolled.

Best damn conclusion to a campaign, ever. We still talk about the outcome and the ramifications of how it ended to this day.

The “Tactician” will enjoy gaming the system for the best possible outcome. Their knowledge of the game world, combined with their understanding of the game system will be their way out of the situation. They probably have a greater grasp of the mechanics of the situation than any other player; it’s their preferred playground.

Now these are all generalizations, but they’re useful starting points for conversation between everyone at the table.

This is where we bring Saitama back into the conversation. For those not familiar with the anime/manga One Punch Man, it’s a spoof of the superhero genre where the titular hero can defeat anything with one punch: Underworld demons, city-stomping kaiju, extinction-event sale asteroids, and even rainy days. Each with a single punch. What he can’t do is qualify as an actual superhero, or even hold down a regular job. If One-Punch Man were a role playing game Saitama wouldn’t even have a combat stat or skill: just a trait: “Can defeat anything with one punch.” And it’s his get-out-of-trouble card as well: When all else fails, punch the problem. Perhaps the point is to see how long a situation can go (and how absurd it can become) before Saitama resorts to punching something.

This gives us a framework: For each character define their absolute go-to problem solver. It can be a skill, talent, quirk, whatever. It doesn’t even have to be something intrinsic to the hero and certainly doesn’t have to be something under their direct control: weird and extreme luck; a face and personality that turns the head of even the vilest and most sadistic member of the opposite sex; they will fall head over heals in love or infiltration with the hero (a la Tenchi Muyo and other ‘harem’ anime). Whatever it is, it has to be something the player enjoys. The character may not understand it, or hate when it happens, but in all cases and circumstances, the player must be enthusiastically onboard with it. 

I think this process can either be done proactively (“I can always punch my way out of problems”), or on the fly as game is played, or some combination of the two. The important thing in all cases is the earnest conversation about expectations, goals and comfort levels. Don’t force a player who’s not a great in-character talker to roleplay his character fast-talking out of a situation if the player isn’t into it. Don’t expect the roleplayer to know the best combination of dice and character details necessary to game their way out of a tactical nightmare. 

In descending order of importance it should be: player FUN, fidelity of character and world next, and implementing mechanical systems last. Another way to look at it is this: Mechanics exist to support and formulate the world and character concepts; world and characters exist to support and enable player fun. Different players have different definitions and limits to fun. So not all characters, world and game mechanics will 'work' for all players. Communication of expectations and deciding what mechanics support those expectations is the framework we want to utilize.

What do you think?

No One Game Engine, part 3

As a continuation of my No One True Game, train-wreck-of-thought, consider Mephit James' gaming blog and their recent roundtable post about what game engine would you use when playing in the Civilization: Beyond Earth video game setting.

What I find particularly interesting is that this isn't just the author's take on what they'd do but has the disparate input of several fellow GM's and their take on how they'd run their own games in a common setting.

The discussion exemplifies that there's no such thing as one universal system and that the choice of game engine really depends on what you want to emphasize and embody when telling your stories. The GM's that contributed identified such game systems as Infinity, Uncharted Worlds (an Apocalypse World variant), Coriolis, Mutant Year Zero, and one of my personal favorites: Eclipse Phase. Each of these games has a different focus, different emphasis, and different 'character' and therefore color how your experience playing that setting with those rules would be.

It's rather like asking: "What would a Harry Potter-verse movie be like if directed by Ron Howard? Or Michael_Bay?
Or Uwe Boll?"
(but seriously: don't consider the latter two)

Such discussions expose lesser known game systems to a wider audience (I now need to check out Uncharted Worlds, and its many supplements, for example). This can only be a good thing in the long run, even if it introduces some short-term hits to the wallet and adds to the what-do-i-run-next windmill of thought.

In nearly all cases the GM's also talked about how they'd tweak, modify or otherwise adapt those engines to suit the setting. That's another important takeaway from this discussion: Its okay to hack your core rules to align closer to your setting goals.

Lets shout that out again for the lizard brain: It's okay to hack core rules when a tweak or two will make them even more suitable to a different setting.

The Apocalypse World Engine is a great example of this kind of fan-made alteration. I've seen offshoots focusing on MechWarrior-style mercenary campaigns to crash-landed-aliens-trying-to-adapt-to-modern-human-culture (think an anime version of Alien Nation).

Frankenstein's game

Now that I've ranted about my misadventures in finding or making One True game engine, I feel compelled to compile game sub-systems I would want in any ideal game systems. And yes, I said 'systems' because I accept there's no such thing as One True way to play.

I'll break these down into categories and detail them, as well as talk about game systems that either inspired or embody the idea.

Now I am doing this not because I'm trying to find/construct One True system again. But to maybe look at what I really like about given games and consider how to make them add-ons to existing systems. Take what works from game B, to enhance what game A lacks when game A is otherwise the ideal system for the story I'm running.

World building is dynamic and open to input

Not all games are open to worldbuilding, but many are to a greater or lesser degree. This is about those later games. Ideally, the GM sets out with a concept and scope and the players help flesh out some details. The majority of this should happen before people start generating characters and playing but there's also often a need mid-game to invent details. I consider this an extension of the "Say Yes" principle of gaming and storytelling.

• MICROSCOPE is entirely about world-building and in theory it could be used in conjunction with another game system when the players want to deep dive into a particular Scene to see what transpires. 
• FATE supports this to a degree, but not mechanically. 
• BURNING WHEEL (and TORCHBEARERS and BURNING EMPIRES) actively endorse this and support this with it's -Wise type skills, as well as it's Circle mechanics for finding allies and assets (often at a cost). I love Circles, because it's actually a hidden vehicle for drama and side-stories and quests (more about this later).

Character creation is tied to their concept and history

Character creation should allow for concept-driven choices that assemble the character at the point play begins. While interesting characters can come out of random character creation systems (I'm looking at you, Little Black Box Traveller), it's more likely to create something you're uninterested or unable to play.

• RISK does this with it's Background choices, but you're limited to two. However, they're all fairly balanced with each other, and creating new ones is easy.
• BURNING WHEEL/EMPIRES has wonderfully fleshed out Stock/Lifepath systems, but generating new ones isn't easy. They're complex and intricate, but don't have to be 'balanced' because BW isn't that kind of game.
• STAR TREK ADVENTURES and INFINITY also have their own lifepath systems; STA is more concept- and choice- driven, while INFINITY is mostly random but gives you a fixed number of opportunities to make crucial choices (I'm not a fan of this latter example, really).

Fractal and scaleable mechanics 

By Fractal I mean the same methods of describing something (a person, a place, a thing) work the same: by a combination of Stats, Traits, Skills, Levels, etc.  Want to play an entire nation or culture? A piloted giant robot? A person? How do you qualify and quantify the items that person has? Fractal mechanics means that at all levels people, places and things fundamentally work and are detailed in the same way. Good Fractal mechanics should allow for representing something by a single value, a full spread of details, and some level in between.

By Scaleable I mean the mechanics work the same from micro to macro scale of action. When everything is Fractal, then things should easily be Scaleable as well, but the reverse doesn't necessarily have to be true.

• FATE introduced me to the concept of a fractal-style of stating things. 
• The later SHADOWRUN edition let you either describe an electronic device with a flat rating, or a full spectrum of statistics.
• FUSION (Mekton and Cyberpunk) does scaling great; giant robots and starships do battle with the same dice mechanics and options that people do with only minor differences. The MTS scaling mechanics are awesome.
• TURK had the concept of Primary, Secondary and Tertiary inputs to a dice roll: Primary sources determined the base number of dice you got to throw and keep, Secondary sources added unkept dice to the pool and Tertiary sources add a flat bonus to the result. The GM would determine what would count as Primary, Secondary and Tertiary inputs and this created a effect of diminishing returns to limit munchkinism and min-maxing.  

Story-driven / Story-driving mechanics 

This is the dividing line between simulationist-gaming and storytelling games. I won't waste more words on nitpicking about simulationist games, but I will say game mechanics should allow for elements of random effects but ultimately the decisions of how and what happens should come down to the players and GM.

This is also about crunch in gaming and by crunch I mean: overly complex, layered mechanics or rolls/test/checks that can be encapsulated in a single action. For example: "Roll to hit, roll to penetrate, roll damage, roll trauma, roll knockdown, etc..." Burning Wheel has a rule called 'Let it ride' that basically said: neither players or GM's can keep asking for additional tests when the first test answers the question of 'did they/didn't they'. If the intent of the test is "sneak into the castle" you don't demand a test to cross the moat, then another to scale the wall, then another to avoid patrols, and so on.

My favorite example simulationist games affecting 'roleplayability' are settings like BattleTech or WH40k. The rules as written are too lethal, too deterministic, to really justify investing much in any character. In BT, all it takes is a 12 on 2d6 and half the weapons in the game can decapitate your Mech and kill your pilot. Whee.

• RISK really changed my perspective on what you actually do with rolling all those funny polyhedral objects and doing maths; I love the concept of 'narrative currency' that lets players choose where and how to affect the story in discreet mechanical ways. I'll probably have to write something separately about Narrative Currency systems.
• FORGED IN THE DARK's mechanics are a framework for outlining dramatic moments while leaving the context and color of those moments entirely open to color.
• I mentioned loving BURNING WHEEL's Circles mechanics and here's why: Rather than forcing characters to buy specific 'contacts' ahead of time (and then never having the opportunity to use them in actual play), Circles allows anyone to say "I think I know a guy..." and then roll to determine how effective that statement is. Circles is one of those mechanics where failure on a Circles -test is more fun than succeeding, especially when you apply the principles of "Yes and..." or "Yes but...". Yes, you know a guy who can help, but he's currently mad as hell at you. Yes you learn that someone knows what you need to know, but they're currently imprisoned. What are you going to do to get what you need, and what are you going to owe them when all is said and done?

Mini game systems

I'm included this is a category because it's not a must-have but should be talked about. By mini-games I mean where there are subsets of game systems or mechanics for specific activities. Video games do this a lot for things like hacking, research, dialog and so on. Ideally the core mechanics should all be the same (how you roll dice, determine success/failure, etc), but build upon that framework with almost puzzle-like structures for solving conflicts or challenge.

• BURNING WHEEL is a great example of this with it's 'Duel of Wits,' 'Range and Cover' and 'Fight!' sub-systems. Burning Empires added 'Firefight' and 'Infestation' mini-games.
• Lots of game systems have mini-games for handling research, construction and other long-term activities. Too many to list here. Burning Wheel also consistently deployed a rock-paper-scissors matrix for choices characters made in conflict. Mouse Guard created the simplest version of this with only four Actions to consider: Attack, Defense, Maneuver or Feint, and let that work for arguments, combat, exploration, anything.
• FORGED IN THE DARK has 'clocks' for tracking progress on anything that can't be resolved in a single test/action/scene. Clocks tick up and down, representing progress or time running out, as needed.
• ROLL AND KEEP, original 7thSea specifically, had a structured way of learning new Fencing and Sorcery mastery abilities based on how you mastered the choice Maneuvers of that school/magic. That was a framework I wanted to keep and make part of TURK.

Character Advancement/Growth

...

• BURNING WHEEL counted tests against your stats and skills, and when you'd recorded enough marks, that skill or stat would increase automatically. It's an organic and realistic method, but also required book keeping. The Mouse Guard variant had the simplest and most streamlined way of calculating this: you needed a number of successes equal to your current rating, and a number of failures equal to one less than your rating. This encourages characters seeking to improve their abilities to strive to push their limits because you learned from failure and that's a good lesson.
• FUSION (at least in Mekton and CP2020 editions) had both marks against Skills you tested, and general IP (Improvement Points) to spend as you wish. Advancing Stats and gaining new Advantages and the like weren't addressed until FUSION came about, and then it was handled by giving more of the same points you used to create your character with to spend on what you wanted to improve.
• D20 games with Leveling systems makes for a quick and easy way to evaluate character experience and how challenging a given combat might be, but Level games always seem to break down logically when everything a character does gets better just because of a combat experience ("Wait, I killed that Orc... and now I'm better at Cooking?") Some games that have Leveling-type mechanics also separate out combat from non-combat, but really, how is that different from renaming 'classes' as 'skills'?
• FORGED IN THE DARK games track experience both for specific skills you use, and a general pool that you can spend as you wish. Skills get an XP whenever you test them under in 'desperate' tests (regardless of success or failure). General XP rewards are tied directly to character type, background and goals. Whenever a 'track' fills up, something advances.

Minimal GM overhead

Part of the reason an ideal system should be Fractal is so that the GM doesn't have to do the same level of record keeping that players do for their characters but for every other character, monster, place or thing in the game. The GM can abstract what isn't as important, and focus on what does need a high level of detail, and (hopefully) switch between the two as needed.

• CYPHER is the best example of this: The GM sets Levels for things, and players make all the rolls (roll to influence, hit, dodge, resist, etc...).
• In RISK, you can frame any Risk in terms of Consequences and Opportunities, and include things like thresholds and timing limitations. Brutes are dirt-simple, and Villains can have as little or as much detail as you like. I like how RISK lets you setup a challenge to players almost like a puzzle to solve, and it's up to them to generate the Raises and apply them to solve it.

????

No One True Game Engine

No, this isn't a No True Scotsman argument. This is mostly a self-directed rant.

I have this problem where I keep trying to find/invent the 'one true' game engine to play all the games/settings I want to experience or run. Sadly, this is a bad habit that I gotta kick myself off.

I wanted to find that mythical One Game Engine with TURK (True Universal Roll-and-Keep), and I eventually gave up on the project because Roll n Keep can't do everything I wanted. I've tried again and again to cherry-pick my favorite mechanics from various systems and Frankenstein them together into something that does everything I want and nothing I don't. What I left off with at TURK was a complex and incomplete 'framework' that would need interpreting with every setting I wanted to use it in. Not only would you need a 'CORE' book, but a 'WORLD' book to tell you how to apply the Core rules to each setting. It got crunchy, which was one of the things I was trying to avoid.

Oh hubris, your aftertaste is so bitter.

The humbling truth is: Game engines/systems are tailored to produce their desired effects (whelp, at least modern games systems do. There was a time when everything had six stats, XP and levels and you rolled a d20 in combat and usually percentile dice for everything else...)

In no particular order:

RISK, as in the 7th Sea 2nd Edition, and the forthcoming 7th Sea: Khitai game, has a mechanical focus on using Raises generated by dice rolls as your narrative currency. Players and GM's then spend this currency to decide what their focus on the story details will be. I love some of the ideas in this system; it's a streamlined and evolved version of the original Roll and Keep that inspired me to write TURK in the first place.

D&D, especially 5th Edition, is great at high fantasy storytelling with an emphasis on exploration, combat and character power growth from those activities. Yes, out of the box it doesn't support character emotional and relationship growth, but there's nothing stopping a good GM from making pathos an essential driving force of a story. You don't need mechanics to do that.

Mekton and the FUSION engine are great at the grognardy-number-crunching-mecha-design and smashing stories. The Mekton Technical System is still my favorite because it focused on relative design choices, very flexible scaling and adaptability with a focus on anime physics and storytelling. The only thing holding it back is just how crunchy it gets with character design and advancement (nine primary stats and a variable number of derived stats?!?) and actual mecha combat could get really slow as well.

GURPS started as a wonderfully 'universal' system and was heavily focused on character over everything else. It suffered, i think, from trying to point-balance and option everything possible in character creation. Some of the later editions had VOLUMES published about character options. And don't get me started about GURPS Vehicles.
Okay just one gripe and then moving on: do I really, REALLY need to worry about the weight of the fuzzy dice I hang in my tricked out muscle car? Not to mention calculating the square surface area of the radio so I can determine how much damage it can take? (Fire, Fusion and Steel for Traveller TNE had the same problem.)

Burning Wheel is all about character drama in a gritty and hard way. It encourages player buy-in and adding to the game world and supports that mechanically.

FATE is fantastically abstract, generic and diverse in all the settings it's been used in, but that's also it's weakness. It depends on players and GM's having a firm and agile grip on how to use FATE.

2d20, specifically Star Trek Adventures, does a fine job of capturing the feel of principle-driven science-fiction storytelling. the Momentum mechanic makes intra-character cooperation and collaboration easy. The Infinity setting is just bonkers with the crunchy details that STA lacks.

Eclipse Phase, while a percentile system, does a fabulous job of showing how a game engine can reflect the setting; the separation of ego and morph and how they work together is a wonderful metaphoric mirror to the ideas behind a transhuman/posthumanist setting.

Cypher is fascinating for both it's innovation and return to really old-school themes involving bizarre encounters and devices. It DOES do interesting things with putting all rolls on the player's side of the table and making the GM's management of other characters easier and nominally having an open system for any kind of world-building and setting-making. See here for a separate post about other things I've taken away from my reading of the Cypher system.

Blades in the Dark and Scum and Villainy -both Forged In The Dark games- focus on storytelling with imaginative yet open-to-interpretation universes. This system sets up mechanical frameworks that quickly establish qualitative results that imaginative GMs and Players can color however they wish.

I really do need to embrace the wonderful variety of game systems out there.
Hell, I spend enough on collecting new and interesting games, I should bloody well use them!

Except percentile systems. To hell with them. They're too granular and fiddly and imply arbitrary limitations of capacity and ability. That and I just have terrible luck with them. (Ask me about my RoleMaster experience sometime and buy me a beer, and I'll spin you a yarn about the root of my antagonism towards %-dice based engines.)

I am a(n) Adjective Noun who Verbs

The Cypher system likes to summarize (or initialize?) character creation with a sentence in the structure of: "I am a(n) Adjective Noun who Verbs" and there's something sublimely cleaver about that. Cypher The choices then goes on to assign stats, powers and situational bonuses (also tied to the experience level of the character) to the character based on the choices you make when you choose your Descriptor (Adjective), Type (Noun) and Focus (Verb). The words themselves don't really indicate anything after that; they're just identifiers for the choices made. On the one hand, you know that every character with the ‘Adroit’ Adjective is capable of; On the other hand, you’re limited to the choices that have been defined with stats, skills and modifiers.

I like the idea of decoupling those defined modifiers for the most part, and return to just relying on the context of your Adjective, Noun and Verb choice. I feel this could work very well in a FATE kind of way where Aspects have mechanical benefits but are totally open to creation and interpreting in context.

We could even take this concept one layer deeper (what FATE refers to as the ‘fractal’) and consider how the same descriptive phrasing could be applied to not only player characters, but NPCs, objects and even places.

Consider:

• A Person who is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) who (Verbs)
• An Object that is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) with/that (Verbs)
• A Place that is: a(n) (Adjective) (Noun) that (Verbs)

Nouns define the quintessential function of the person, place or thing. For people, it’s their root career, story purpose, ‘class’, etc. For things it should encapsulate the general use, purpose and effectiveness of that type of thing. All Rifles fundamentally are the same; a firearm that requires two hands to hold and brace properly for use, etc. In a game with generic versions of a class of weapon or tool, all types of the same Noun start with the same base stats/values.

E.g. all pistols in 1st edition 7thSea were 4k2 weapons. All heavy melee weapons were 3k3, adding Brawn to the number of dice thrown. All longswords in D&D do d8 damage, and so on.

Adjectives are Enhancers which are boons when they are relevant to the situation, and added complications when the are inappropriate to the context of use.  (In RISK games, I’d adjudicate this as a free Raise when appropriate, and at least one Raise of Complication if inappropriate.) Against an opponent with the same or opposing Adjective, the bonuses cancel out.

A sniper who is forced into close-combat with a melee attacker tries to shoot their opponent with their longarm. The GM adjudicates the ‘sniper’ Adjective of their weapon means they have to overcome a 2-Raise Complication to not damage or loose grip on their weapon during the melee.

Verbs are Enablers and augment base abilities with additional or unusual functionality. For ‘magic’ items, this is where the special and magical ability is defined (e.g a longsword that drains life force). For modular and modified technology items, this is the added features/functions of the modifications (e.g. an Assault Rifle with an underslung grenade launcher; the grenade launcher is the added functionality.)

A soldier armed with an Assault Rifle with Grenade Launcher, is attacking a Brute Squad. The GM adjudicates that the Verb on the weapon lets them take out their Weapons skill rank in Brutes for a single Raise. BOOM.

Not everything needs Adjectives and Verbs in their descriptions, but everything must have a Noun. +Adjectives should be common, while +Verbs represent rare, unique and especially important or powerful people/places/things.

Another thought: could this system work with skills or other character traits? Let the (Adjective) be the relative level of experience/ability, the (Noun) be the broad skill, and let any (Verb) represent specializations or extra effects the character has associated with that Skill.

I’m an Expert Hacker.
I’m a Novice Archaeologist who Finds Lost Things.
They’re an Experienced Marksman who Dual Wields.

Thoughts?

Deconstructing design systems

I have a secret confession: I love crunchy design systems. I mean games that have design systems within them for designing and creating things to use in the game. Starships, giant robots, equipment and computers/programs, etc. Mostly this applies to sci-fi games, but also for a bare handful of fantasy settings. They're a game in and of themselves.

I enjoy the intellectual pursuit for systemic elegance and purity. There's a kind of glory in learning and using a design system to achieve what your design goals, which is why games like Mekton Zeta are still on my shelf even though I'll likely never actually play it. Actually playing these kind of games can become a pain, however. (See my previous post on Deconstructing conflict systems for why)

I've already mentioned Mekton Zeta Plus' Technical System. Other examples include GURPS' Vehicles, DGW/FFE's Fire Fusion and Steel, which vary in level of detail from 'lots' to 'absurd.'

I look at the laundry list of things to finish developing and implementing in my TURK Eclipse Phase game and despair over the workload as well as what impact it may have when playing it. Details of weapons, armor, tools, drugs, nano, medicine, mesh and hacking, etc... Eclipse Phase is a setting that cries out for details, crunch and variety: social, morphological and infological freedom being core tenants of the setting. It begs for a way to design things on the fly and implement them in the game. Not just gear but also NPCs and organizations and so on.

The trick then is: How to make playable yet customizable design systems? How do you prevent runaway detail escalation, or loopholes that munchkins can abuse?

I'm toying with the idea of a 'fractal' of game details. Most 'things' get a single stat, representing their overall quality/usefulness/effectiveness; if need be, that rating can be broken down into sub-stats for specific examples. The latest edition of ShadowRun seems to have latched onto this. We shall see where and how it goes.

Deconstructing conflict systems

Conflict is an essential part of any story, let alone role playing, tabletop or board games. Conflict drives change. Stories are about change. Ergo stories are about conflict.

Personally I've experienced a bell-curve of expectations from conflict systems, from simple to complex to simple again. It's been an evolutionary path that mirrors the kind of stories I've liked and like to create: starting with simplistic goals ("wack the bad guy, loot the treasure chest.") have changed to complex explorations on _how_ goals are met, and finally an epiphany that _how_ isn't as important and _why_ and _whats the outcome_ of perusing goals and change.

In my youth, I sought out detailed, complicated and 'crunchy' game systems because I sought understanding how the things worked, even in make believe worlds. The kind of games where a six-second combat round could take half an hour of real time doing math and looking up rules and charts. But in my experience it's only fun when it's warranted. As a GM it's a nightmare to track tons of details and characters and plot.


In other words, I'm becoming and old phart and don't want to consult a ton of charts and use my slide-rule in pursuit of a good story anymore.

To give a board-game example, take Ad Astra Game's Attack Vector Tactical; a richly detailed simulation of hard-science spacecraft combat. It's got charts, math and a strict order-of-operations to playing the game. Players spend their time both planning strategy but also calculating and plotting and measuring all the details of the ships on their side. While I appreciate the detail the developers have crafted into the system, AV:T is exactly the kind of game that's best played on a computer. Let a machine handle all the math and show me the options, limits and choices available to me.

Personally, I'd rather focus on the tactics and strategy and not get overwhelmed by the math. This was no more apparent to me when I heard that AV:T had been licensed as the board game engine for an Honor Harrington game of starship combat. The novels focus on the leadership and tactics of the ship captains, not so much the navigators' working sliderules and working graphing calculators.

Then there's the other end of the spectrum; games like Full Thrust and Battlefleet Gothic, which are almost too simple in their rulesets, but let players concentrate more on tactics and fleet composition than number crunching.

To delve deeper into the separation of player-vs.-character abilities: If my character is a brilliant engineer/programmer/scientist, then I the player shouldn't be limited by my relative lack of ability. The player states their intention, rolls the dice, and the GM and player cooperate to narrate the outcome. Mechanics should determine degree of success or failure, but leave the rest to narration.

Players should focus on choices. Mechanics should support choice.

Roll and Keep: L5R and 7thSea

7th Sea and Legend of the Five Rings got be back into roleplaying at the turn of the millennium, and the core of those rules -Roll and Keep- has been my favorite and go-to-engine since. Role and Keep is elegant, dramatic and flexible and I love it.

There are two released games that use Roll and Keep; 7thSea and Legend of the Five Ring. L5R is a pseudo-Japanese mythology setting with samurai and shugenga (wizards) and concepts like high honor and clan station. There is also a very popular L5R CCG, but I don't play it. 7thSea is a swashbuckling alternative world where the countries of Europa all reaching their Renaissance at the same time; where bloodline sorcery vie for power with the growing fields of mad science and technology.

The core dice mechanic, by which the system gets its name, is a dice-pool system with a twist. You create a pool of d10's from Traits and Skills but when you roll them you may only keep a certain number of them, adding the results of kept dice together to determine your total roll. By default the Trait score is the number of dice you get to keep and the dice from your skills are 'unkept'; this means your Traits are universally more important but are harder to raise to high levels. Skills are easier to improve and grant additional boons that unskilled characters don't get.

7thSea has Brutes and Henchmen, which are lesser NPC's, used to challenge or assist the Heroes and Villains in your games. Brutes are very simple, stats-wise, which makes the GM's job all the easier; you don't roll or track damage against Brutes, if you successfully hit one, he's out. Unfortunately Brutes travel in packs (Brute Squads). Henchmen have the same Traits and Skills that Player Characters have, are tougher than Brutes but aren't as hardy as PC's. 7thSea favors player characters as heroes. The worst that can happen from a fight is to get Knocked Out, and the GM is encouraged not to kill PC's, but instead have them wake up afterwards in captivity or in the midst of the Villain's devious-yet-subtly-flawed-death-trap.

Legend of the Five Rings, inspired by the book "Book of the Five Rings" by Miyamoto Musashi and Japanese mythology, has a different feel than 7thSea, but is no less dramatic. L5R characters are first defined by their clan, family and school of training. L5R characters start fairly similar to each other, but can quickly grow into distinct characters. L5R has two social traits for your character's Glory and Status, representing reputation and authority, which fluctuate quickly during play.L5R is a gritter setting and system than 7thSea, but glorious for all the same. If you're a fan of Kurosawa films and Japanese mythology, L5R is great. In addition, the canonical setting of L5R's Rokugan is continually evolving in response to events in the official CCG tournaments, which is an interesting idea even if it leads to occasional oddities.

I've enjoy the Roll and Keep engine so much, I am working on my own variant which is generic enough to handle just about any setting. More on this to come...

Burning Wheel games

(This post is about the core Burning Wheel mechanics. I'll make specific posts about Burning Empires and Mouse Guard later.)

Burning Wheel really turns roleplaying on its head in many ways, and since I picked it up, it's really changed my views on both storytelling and game mechanics. I love it and hate it for the same reason; like watching something both fascinating and disturbing, Burning Wheel sticks in your head and forever alters your perceptions. Picking up and experiencing Burning Wheel has forever infected my view of gaming and I regret nothing.

On the face of things, Burning Wheel uses a straight-forward dice pool mechanic, but it's Burning Wheel's conflict engine where things really shine. BW is both really open about story-mechanics, yet ruthlessly competitive when it comes to conflict mechanics and the consequences of choices. Also, and perhaps more importantly, Burning Wheel makes failure interesting (Mouse Guard especially pushes this concept).

Burning Wheels conflict engine uses a core concept of secretly scripting actions in advance, then revealing them one at a time and resolving them rock-paper-scissors style. Attack versus Defend? Whomever rolls higher succeeds. Attack vs. Attack? Both sides could succeed or fail, independently of the the other's success or failure, and so on.

Burning Wheel fantasy has three types of conflicts: Fight!, Range-and-Cover and the Duel of Wits. While Fight and Range-and-Cover clearly deal with martial battle, the Duel of Wits covers social conflicts. Both sides in a DOW start with a pool of 'Disposition' points, representing their initial position and strength of argument. Exchanges of Points, Rebuttals and Obfuscations whittle away at your opponent's Disposition. The side that looses it's last Disposition point looses the argument! The winner, however, may have to make concessions based on how close to zero their Disposition was brought to zero! The essential conflict mechanic scales well, and allows for narrative control over the context and feel of the story.

Burning Empires, the sci-fi BW setting, adds several more conflict types: the Firefight (Range and Cover writ large and with a more strategic point-of-view) and the Infection-level campaign conflict which handles events of planetary importance.

Mouse Guard introduced a streamlined version of this core conflict engine concept, which allows for settling just about any form of contest or conflict, with only four 'move' options (Attack, Defend, Maneuver and Feint). Which skills are tested for each Action depends on the nature of the conflict. Adding new conflicts is easy: simple define which skills are tested for each Action.

Unlike most other RPGs -which traditionally require a ton of creative world-building ahead of time on the part of the Game Master/Storyteller- Burning Wheel thrives on starting with simple world concepts and filling out the details and world facts through character creation and in actual play. Instead of asking "What do I know about (X)?" players instead say "My character knows (X) to be true," and then rolls to see how right/wrong they are. I love this idea, because it enables player and character investment in the game and the world, which makes for richer stories and deeper attachment to character and world.

Character creation is a process of choosing Lifepaths that affect the character's age, skills learned and traits acquired. Want a skilled, experienced character? Then accept that they will either be older, or heavily affected by the tough life experiences they've gone through to get that good. You character will pick up traits and habits that may seem negative or inhibiting, but these play into Burning Wheels drama economy (called Artha), you want complicated and challenged characters because their flaws and failures actually fuel the Artha economy. The Stocks (races) and Lifepaths available to a campaign also feed the world narrative and help to define setting.

Circles, which is a social attribute, is how well socially connected your character is. Instead of taking fixed contacts or allies before play begins, you can test your Circles to see if you can find someone with the skils/knowledge you're looking for. Failing that test doesn't mean you don't find them; instead they may hate you, or some other side-quest your character needs to meet. Circles is a brilliant idea and I've considered adding to other game engines.

Character Advancement is based on testing your character's abilities. There are no Experience Points, no Levels; killing one hundred orcs doesn't automatically make your character better at cooking. Want to improve an aspect of your character? You have to test it and push it beyond what's safe or routine. At higher skill ranks, you have to try things that are patently impossible to succeed. This is where the Artha economy really helps; you need the help of Artha to improve abilities beyond a certain rank. Tracking the number of tests for every skill and ability is a little taxing, but you only count the ones that actually count towards advancing that skill.

On the downsides, Burning Wheel is very different, ruthless and character-lethal system. It's not difficult to get your character maimed or killed in the fantasy and sci-fi settings that have thus far been published. Mouse Guard is different, but character death is still possible. The essentials of Burning Wheel's conflict system(s) are challenging to grasp at first, especially to old-school gamers who are traditional in their experience with gaming.

Savage Worlds

Savage Worlds is similar to Cortex, in that you assign polyhedrals as the values of your stats and skills. The SW is a general set of gaming rules which have been used in a great many settings: Space 1889, Pirate of the Spanish Main, Slipstream, The Savage World of Solomon Kane, Deadlands, and so on. Savage World settings embrace the term 'savage': They are challenging and interesting places to play in, but nobody would actually want to live in a Savage World setting. Life, in a SW game, is nasty, brutish, short and occasionally awesome.

I bought the Savage Worlds Deluxe book and Action deck that go with it, so this is a review of the generic form of the rules and not of any particular setting, although the core book references several of the already produced setting books and provides a couple of 'one page' adventures to get you started.

Character creation is quick: with four core Attributes, a couple of derived Stats and Skills. Skills are linked to specific Stats, and learning a skill up to the linked Attribute rank is easy; going beyond that is more difficult/expensive. You also get Edges which break the standard rules in one way or another, and Hindrances which limit or complicate your characters' life, but earn you back Edges or Attribute/Skill steps.

Character's earn 1 to 3 XP per game session, and you 'Advance' every 5xp earned. Each Advancement lets you do one of the following: Raise an attribute one step; gain a new Edge; learn a new Skill at d4; or increase one Skill one step (or two skills one step each if they are below their linked Attribute value). Every 5 levels earns you a 'rank' increase, from Novice, to experienced, elite and legendary status. Your rank determines what kinds of Edges you have access to. Creating experienced characters is pretty easy: start with a novice, then spend as many Advancements the GM lets you.

Unlike Cortex, you roll either your Stat or Skill dice. Heroes and major villains also get a 'wild' d6 to throw as well and can choose that result instead. The target number to beat is 4, or a derived stat of your target; each 4 points you roll over the TN is a Raise for additional effects. Dice can also 'ace' or explode on a max result and allow rolling additional dice. Fast and simple.

SW doesn't just use dice but also a deck of playing cards. These are used for initiative, in-between "interlude" scenes or just playing poker when the game slows down.

Savage Worlds also has a dramatic economy measured in Bennies. Spending a Benny allows you to re-roll a trait roll, or activate other effects.

SW focuses mostly on combat conflicts and strongly implies using miniatures and maps. However, I was surprised and delighted to discover a simple and effective social conflict mechanic hidden in the book. There's also the "Dramatic Task" system, as well as travel and mass battle systems.

I like the simple, streamlines aspect of Savage Worlds, plus that it's entirely open-ended for introducing your own Edges/Complications and Skills. I don't like that it's essentially a tabletop combat game with some roleplaying elements strewn in. Savage Worlds is clearly a game that tries to straddle the fence between combat-simulationism and storytelling.

Cortex rules (Serenity and the BSG RPGs)

Cortex is the name for the core rules used in the Serenity and BattleStar Galactica RPGs, both products of Margaret Weiss productions (although sadly they no longer supported/licensed). I feel fortunate that I got copies of all three games while they were published. The core rule book is still available, however, both in print and digital form.

So a gamer friend asked of me: "What kind of gaming would I use Cortex for? I play D&D when I want high fantasy, I play Burning Wheel/Empires when I want heavy character pathos and worldbuilding/destroying. Do I use Cortex for combat-heavy games, or social-heavy games?"
And after thinking about it, I answered: Both, but mostly the former (combat and action).

Cortex is a polyhedral system: your character's abilities, skills and Traits are rated in a type of polyhedral die. When performing an action or testing a characters abilities, you roll the relevant dice from your Attribute and one from you Skill. You compare your roll versus another character's roll, or versus a TN set by the GM. Some rolls combine multiple attribute ratings, or you add the attribute values together to determine other thresholds. Cortex also has extended actions (for projects lasting more than a single roll), and a simple chase mechanic. If only it had a social conflict framework. There IS a sort of social meta-game in the generic version of the rules, but it's focuses on legal court battles, which isn't nearly as universal as one could want in a social conflict structure.

Cortex Skills have two tiers: general skills, and specializations within general skills. You can learn general Skills up to a d6 in rating, and beyond that you buy specializations (D8 or better).

Cortex characters also have Traits which are also rated as polyhedrals. Cortex shines in that these advantages can be added to your attribute + skill rolls when relevant, or add flat values to your derived stats. While the core rules have a wide variety of examples, Cortex easily allows for additional Traits to be added for your campaign. Traits can be Assets (which benefit you some way) or Complications (which have a negative cost, but complicate your character's life). The examples in the generic version of the rules have basic examples, but the Traits in the BSG and Serenity books are flavored like the settings they come from.

Cortex has a drama economy, measured in Plot Points. Plot Points can be spent to add dice to a roll, prevent damage, or affect the plot of the story. Plot Points are gained via strong roleplaying.

Combat has one twist that I find interesting. You have track 'stun' and 'lethal' damage separately, on reciprocal tracks against the same value. If you have, say 14 hit points, you're out of combat if you take 14 stun, or 14 lethal, or any combination of stun and lethal that exceeds your 14 total. This is less complicated than, say, the Storyteller damage tracking system, but you can get KO'd real fast in Cortex.

I like how Cortex treats vehicles just like characters: with attributes and skills/specializations and traits. They even have the dual 'stun' versus 'lethal' damage tracking system. 'Stun' to a vehicle meaning non-permanent but disruptive damage.

FATE games

FATE is a flexible,tailor-ableRPG engine, with official licenses for Harry Dresden, Diaspora and Starblazer Adventures and Spirit of the Century.

FATE makes a number of interesting design choices; some of which I like and others I don't agree with.

First off: the dice. FATE uses 'FATE dice' (a.k.a. FUDGE dice) which are D6 with two '+' sides, two '-' sides and two blank sides. You typically roll four at a time, thus getting a range of -4 to +4 with an average of 0. Onecoulduse regular D6 and just note that 5&6 are a +, 3&4 and neutral and 1&2 are -.[The only other version of rolling a positive/negative range I have seen is rolling two D6 or two D10 and subtract one from the other: resulting in a range of +-5 or +-9.]My experience with FATE dice, however, is that I hardly ever roll a positive result. Sometimes I have terribledice luck.

FATE sorta balances this with Aspects, which can come from characters, locations and situations. Tapping an Aspect gives a flat bonus to the roll and is a narrative opportunity for the player to explain how the Aspect is a boon to their action. Players can even add new Aspects to themselves, opponents and locations by attempting a Maneuver action; success means they get to place a new Aspect. You can alsocompelother people's Aspects to force a penalty to their rolls, or straight dictate their actions.

Characters in FATE don't have fixed sets of Attributes, stats or ability scores. They are a collection of Skills, rated from Terrible (at -2) up to Legendary (+8). If you character doesn't have it written down, you're considered to have a "Mediocre" (+0) rating in that Skill. The difficulty numbers for attempting actions are rated on the same "Ladder". A "Great" Difficulty task requires +4 or better total. This, coupled with the dice mechanic, provides both a rational and a quantitative way of measuring ability, challenge and the effort a character makes.

Characters also have Stunts. These are rule-modifying or outright rule-breaking 'feats' the character possess. These are highly setting specific: In Harry Dresden the can represent magical powers; in Diaspora they could mean your character is trained on military-grade gear; In StarBlazer Adventures they represent alien abilities and other pulp sci-fi abilities, and so on.

Conflicts in FATE are fairly open structured. Maps are drawn as needed but scale and accuracy aren't necessary; they are for purely relative values/locations. One can even map out social conflicts, which I like. Characters (and other combatants) have Stress tracks to mark 'damage.' Once your stress track is full, you're out of the conflict. Players can opt to take Complications at varying levels to reduce incoming damage. Complications are essentially negative Aspects that opponents can tap in future tests and conflicts. 'Damage' is simply the difference between an attack roll and a defense roll.

FATE also has a dramatic economy measured in Fate points. These tokens of story flow allow players to boost their rolls (or reroll them), as well as tap aspects, complications and create new ones. Compelling someone else's action because of their Aspects costs you a Fate point, which you give to the compelled player if they accept. Fate points are also introduced by the GM for good and dramatic roleplaying.

Character advancement is a bit of an odd duck, but it makes sense in that FATE is a story-focused game, and not a exercise in counting experience points and gold pieces. It also differs from game to game (Diaspora having the lest detailed character advancement system), but in essence: the GM determines when the characters have reached milestones in their story arcs, and at these milestones players may make incremental changes to their characters' Skills. Aspects are the most easily changed; they can be tweaked before a game session even begins as they are highly subjective. Stunts can be swapped out as can your Skill ratings for minor milestones. For major milestones you can add new Stunts or Skills.

Overall, I like FATE in concept. I'm not thrilled with my experience with the dice mechanics, but the conflict system seems robust, flexible andscale-able. Complications and Aspects add a wonderful freeform and subjective element when most games get too detailed and deterministic. I like how character growth is also tied to story, and dissuades players from trolling for every XP point they can get. FATE is another one of those games that I have yet to actually play, but I am looking for an opportunity to give it a go.

Flashbacks in gaming

I have this idea for a game: The characters are all veteran soldiers and the war that has gone on for generations has just ended. Given detached duty, the PC's must make their way home. On the way, they must deal with the demons of their past and the aftermath of a conflict that seemed would never end. There may be ongoing battles, refugees, rogue units and the emerging post-war politics It'sWing Commander IV meets the Macross anime with some bits of the TV showsLost and Firefly thrown in. Why Macross? I'm a fan of transforming fighter-planes after all :-)

Part of the idea is that the characters are all very experienced, veteran heroes from the conflict. They've been at war for years and carry with them a wealth of experiences both good and bad. As the story goes forward, it also casts back into the past of the player characters. We learn about their past as they also strive to creating a new future. This may manifests in two ways that I see

1) at moments of crisis in the 'modern' timeline, when PC's need a dice boost or other boon, they can invoke a quick flashback in narrative form; they then must eventually pay back that karmic debt by more roleplaying after the immediate conflict.

2) given that the characters are veterans of the conflict, there's not a theater of that conflict they haven't been to, so everywhere they go there should be backgrounds, contacts and unresolved issues located there. These hooks should mostly be up to the individual players to bring into the game, but also available to the GM.

As a game mechanic, how does one handle flashback as a system? Few games deal with this directly. The only one that comes to mind is: Fireborn, where you simultaneously play ancient dragons in the age before and their human re-incarnation in the modern age. I don't own this game, but it's available cheap on DriveThruRPG, so maybe I should go ahead and get it.

So I open this post to discussion: How do/would you handle flashbacks in a game?

Microscope

And now for something completely different... Microscope.

Microscope is less a roleplaying game than a collective worldbuilding game. A round-table non-linear game of free-style history building. In Microscope, players don't have player-characters, character sheets or even dice. You have a stack of 3x5 notecards and pencils and that's it.

Let me backup and explain that again.

As a group you begin by discussing in broad strokes what your setting and history is going to be about. You define the tropes that are and aren't included in that universe. You define the beginning and end points of your history (the 'bookends'). Then you take turns going around the table, adding details both large and small to your collaborative history. The player who's turn it is has complete narrative control over what goes on, generally, so long as they don't contradict the established tropes and go beyond the scope of your history bookends. It's a completely non-linear process: On one turn a player creates a fantastic city. On the next turn someone else destroys it. For the rest of the game all players can continue to add events involving that city between it's creation and destruction. All Periods, Events and Scenes have relative order, but not explicit order (you don't assign dates to your events except as color to the narrative). If one player's input seems to derail the 'story,' there's no limit to how to bring it back on track.

The three levels of playable details are: Periods or broad history (think "The Bronze Age", or "Man's first explorations of space"), followed by Events ("The Tribes migrate to the Rivers," "The Federation and The Empire war over the Delta Sector."). Events consist of Scenes ("The Emperor confronts the Senate over Solarian slavery," "The Hero Galoka befriends the Huluzian tripartate"). You cannot play a Scene before it's encompassing Event and you can't play an Event without a Period to place it in. There's no limit to the number of Periods in your history, or the number of Events in a Period, or Scenes in an Event. Game ends either when the allotted play time has passed, or players are satisfied with what they have accomplished.

Microscope is amazingly simple, yet fundamentally deep and awesome in it's potential. It's rulebook (as such) is small and easily portable and is also available in PDF form which reads well on tablets (I have a Nook color).

While one can play Microscope entirely by its self, I think one of it's greatest potential uses is for worldbuilding for other games. Worldbuilding is best done collectively, which gives all involved players investment and involvement in the setting they are going to play in. The only change to Microscope is that when you get down to the Event and Scene level, that's when you break out your other game books, roll up characters, and play the resolution to that Event or Scene.

Microscope is just the thing for creating organic, collaborative settings and histories that have player investment and the potential for depth and inspiration to play more or other games in that setting. It's a numberless, diceless variant on the concept of the The Great Game that was used to create 2300AD's back-story and can be used much the same way.

I've only recently gotten my hands on a copy of Microscope and haven't gotten a group together yet to try it, but I am looking forward to it. Once I've gotten some actual play underway, I'll revisit it here and post some more.

2300AD

(I will be reviewing both the original GDW 2300AD game, as well as the Mongoose Publishing port of their Traveller rules for 2300AD here) 

In it's first edition (1986), 2300AD was titled "Traveller: 2300AD" but this was later dropped to remove confusion with GDW's Traveller game line. "2300AD: Mankind's battle for the stars" was released in 1988. In 2007, QuickLink Interactive released a "2320AD" source book as part of their D20 Traveller rules (I admit, I do not own this. I was not fond of the "D20 all the things!" rush of the last decade).
Then just this year (2012), Mongoose Publishing released their 2300AD setting book, which uses their Traveller ruleset to play in the 2300AD setting.

2300AD's setting grew out of GDW's original Twilight:2000 game (no, it has nothing to do with sparkly faeries- i mean 'vampires'), in a process call The Great Game. A hodgepodge ruleset for running countries and nations as a whole. It was played by the writers at GDW to cover the three centuries of time from the nuclear apocalypse of Twilight:2000 to the futuristic setting they were looking for in their new game. This means that 2300AD has a more organic back-story than most roleplaying games; being the product of several players input as well as random circumstances, rather than a unilateral vision from the outset.

Of course, some of the elements of that backstory are hilariously outdated nowadays. The third world war that started the "twilight" period supposedly happened in the 1990's. Germany was still divided into two states until the 2200s until they went to war with the French Empire (yes, you read that right. French. Empire.). Russia is still a communist power. Texas has seceded from the US and is now an independent nation. One has to think of it as alternate history for it to make sense.

On the other hand, the Twilight-to-2300 period allowed for a kind of 'international renaissance' to take place. The culture'verse of 2300AD is very international in feel. France and China have the most colonies with America coming in barely third. Many nations have off-world colonies. This makes for much more colorful character backgrounds and international intrigue.

The newer books have expanded greatly on concepts barely hinted at in the original materials. The difference between life on the "Core" worlds and "Colonial" life is more exaggerated in more detail. My only problem with the Mongoose 2300AD book is a lack of information about the various aliens of the 2300'verse, but I'll get back to this later.

2300AD is gloriously "hard" sci-fi. The designers allowed for one science bending alteration to known physics (i.e. the Stutterwarp drive to allow FTL), while everything else remains limited to extrapolations from current science. For example: there are fusion reactors, but they are huge and require lots of maintenance and attention. Real-world science has given more nuanced details to rather flat ideas (gene therapy for colonists to survive their new homeworlds is more pronounced, for example). The international flavors also influence the technology of the setting: the French love their elegant railguns, the Americans make great warships; the Australians make the best plasma weapons and the Germans still make the best tanks (hover tanks, but tanks none the lest).

The FTL of choice for 2300AD deserves special note. The Stutterwarp Drive, in my humble opinion, is one of the most interesting and well-conceived theories of FTL travel in nearly all sci-fi I have read. It is one of my favorite concepts, and I keep coming back to it when considering new sci-fi settings. I won't go into details here (maybe in another post about FTL in general), but the short of it is: Stutterwarp allows for fun as well as rational faster-than-light travel, without the loopholes and problems of so many other FTL concepts (relativistic rocks, for example).

Then there are the aliens. 2300ad breaks from a lot of 'pop' sci-fi by making their aliens truly alien. The aliens of 2300AD are enigmas; mysteries to be unraveled or avoided. They are NOT appropriate as player characters, which makes them all the more interesting than "like humans just with funny foreheads and Nietzsche'ian philosophies". From the existential threat posed by the Kafers, to the biotechnology masters of the Pentapods (which are the least human and yet the closest thing we have to an ally), 2300AD makes aliens interesting again.

So why don't I play it?

Hard sci-fi is a difficult sell to a lot of gamers who are used to high fantasy and superheroes. "Does that mean I have to know physics and math and computers and stuff? No thanks," is the common refrain. 2300AD is a great setting, and would be fun to write fiction in, but as a gaming setting? That's a harder sell. 2300AD also suffers, like early Traveller editions, from the simulationist/gamer mentalities of most of GDW's games of that era. It's personal combat has some interesting ideas, but feels more like a table top game than a roleplaying game.

So what do we learn from 2300AD?

• organic settings have a lot more depth than those with direct design. 
• A good FTL concept makes the game better. 
• Settings drawn from real (or alternate) near-history are easier to invest in, compared to completely (ahem) alien histories/cultures.
• Really alien aliens are cool!