Support My Friend's Patreon Page Cause He's Awesome

Hey guys, if you like supporting independent artists / musicians and creative types then please check out my friend Mike TV of the band Get Set Go's Patreon page. Give his video a watch and if you are so inclined then throw a few quatloos in his direction. He's a good guy, super creative, and a fellow D&D player to boot!

Find the page here:www.patreon.com/getsetgo

Thanks
Nick

RPG Musings: Setting and Mechanics

There is an interesting aspect of rpg design which I've only recently begun to contemplate: the connection between setting and mechanics.  You'll notice that many games keep the mechanics and the setting separate.  These games sell themselves on their generic qualities.  GURPS is the most extreme version of these sorts of games.  Sure, in these types of games if it is a fantasy game there might be rules for magic or whatever, but the magic rules are often rather vanilla giving no particular flavor or uniqueness to the setting.  It could be any standard fantasy world.  There are advantages to this approach as many players and GMs do NOT want the setting that the game has supplied to them.  They'd prefer to make up their own setting.  I must confess this has almost always been my feeling about games.  I was much more interested in what I had in my head than what the game's author was trying to get across to me.

This feeling so predominates in the rpg field that it is a real consideration whether to include a default setting in your game or not.  Many of my favorite games do not include a baked in setting.  There are exceptions: Pendragon, Empire of the Petal Throne, Talislanta, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay all contain very definite settings that I'd be more than reluctant to lose.  Removing the setting from these games would lead me to ask the question: what is the point now?  The setting in those games, for me anyway, IS the whole point.  This isn't to say you shouldn't imaginatively own the setting and make it yours--that is, in my opinion, absolutely essential for satisfying play to happen.  My Arthurian Britain is not going not look like yours.  My Tekumel is not going to be Prof. Barker's Tekumel.  That's as it should be with a good rpg setting.  The designer has, hopefully, left plenty of white space for you to fill in.  When companies tried to more tightly control their campaign worlds, we saw the late eighties and nineties explosion of books with the setting "metaplot."  To get the "real" setting required that you also purchase the latest product.  Both the indie gaming scene and the OSR have eschewed this approach, as they rightly saw that these sorts of practices were both an unsustainable business model and actually toxic to the health of the RPG hobby itself.

I think many different approaches can work when you're dealing with setting.  The question is really: what is your ultimate design goal here?  The setting might be deep and exceedingly detailed or it might have just a light touch--where the game approaches being generic, but it doesn't really go all the way.

Do you like when games provide setting, or do you like to make it up yourself?  Or are you somewhere between?  Or does it depend on the game you're playing?

Fantasy RPG Design Draft Update

A Grim world of Perilous Game Design:

Okay, so I've got around twelve pages of a design draft for this thing I've been tinkering with.  Right now, it is a bit of a Frankengame (see here), but I keep drifting things so that (hopefully) I end up with something that isn't totally derivative.  That said, I'm also not trying to reinvent the wheel with this game--it is both mechanically and content wise a homage to those games of the past that I have loved.  It just brews them into a slightly different package.  I've no illusions that the world wants or needs ANOTHER fantasy roleplaying game, but I've always wanted to do this for my own satisfaction.  So far it has been fun.  The pain will come later I suspect.  So, what's next?

Once, I do another pass or two on the design draft my next goal would be to play the game to see how it runs.  I'll post about that after it happens, but it may be a while as my group is finishing up this fifteen month Amber campaign that we've been playing.  After I play the game, I have to do some serious thinking about where I'd like to go next.  Do I try to develop this into a coherent game text?  Doing so would mean some serious writing as I could see the design draft expanding to eighty or a hundred pages once everything is explained so that other people could play and run the game.

One of the other things I do want to include is some kind of beastiary, but I haven't even turned my mind to that yet.

There will be a setting in the game, but it is my intention that as with Chaosium's Runequest the game could easily be adapted to your own dark fantasy campaign world.  The world right now is a mix of old school Warhammer, Ravenloft, A Song of Ice and Fire, and real world gritty medieval.  However, the imagined playstyle the game supports is a semi-sandbox that the players can wander around in, and there will be concrete advice on how to set up this up.  When I say semi-sandbox I mean that the map space the characters wander around in will have opportunities for the characters to use their skills, attain a bit of gold, and even achieve personal goals--it isn't exactly the pure sandbox of old school D&D, but it is a close relative.  I'm not interested in a "missions" or railroads as that's not usually a playstyle I particularly enjoy (Uther-period Pendragon being a notable exception).

Franco v Colbert Tolkien Smackdown II

Steven Colbert is awesome.

Awesome Comic Books Artists Drawing Stuff on a French TV Show from the 70s

 Here are some of the best comic book artists ever on a French TV show where they collaborate on a drawing.  

In this one Druillet amazes me as always with what pours out of his pen.  Hogarth is wonderful, and who can resist John Buscema drawing Norrin Radd??



 I've always loved Moebius and Neil Adams, but it was Joe Kubert who blew me away here.

In the Weeds of Game Design

I've been working on my previously mentioned and untitled Fantasy Roleplaying Game.  I'm well into the weed in a few areas, but I also have some really daunting work ahead of me.  Game design is a bizarre and sometimes painful process.  As was indicated in my last post, the game is definitely heading in an old school simulationist direction right now.  It feels to me like an unholy combination of Runequest, Top Secret/SI, AD&D 1e, Rolemaster, Stormbringer, and Palladium Fantasy.  I've also stolen a few "new school" ideas from games like Burning Wheel (which I feel like a spiritual successor to some of the games above).

Right now there are sixteen professions and working through those is taking longer than I thought.

And the magic system is a bit of a mess right now.

And so it goes.

Simulations & Dragons (or How I Learned to Stop Worrying and do my own Fantasy Heartbreaker)

There is an ancient tradition of people trying to do the their own Fantasy Roleplaying Games.  For much of the early years of our hobby this consisted of people trying to do D&D "right" or more even "realistically."  Examples of this particular design path include games like: Runequest, Chivalry & Sorcery, Harnmaster, Palladium Fantasy (1st Edition), Rolemaster, Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay, and many others.  Even my beloved AD&D 1st Edition can be seen as an outgrowth of this impulse in response to the original 1974 D&D Boxed set.  I've always been attracted to these more complex games, and the idea of simulating in great detail my own fantasy characters and the kingdom they live in has always been a powerful draw for me.

To that end, I've started tinkering with my own game system that definitely draws inspiration from these types of games.  Right now it consistes of a mass of notes in a notebook, but it's edging up on eight or nine pages of rough notes right now.  I've no intention of publishing this for sale, but maybe I'll make it available as a free pdf eventually, and I don't really know where this is going though.  Conceivable, I could wake up tomorrow and decide this is a terrible idea.

Right now I'm excited about though.  I'll post more about it if I continue to make progress. 

Old school simulationists unite!