Download the file here or subscribe to the podcast.

We took Paul Czege’s Acts of Evil for a spin. This is… uh… its My Life With Master grown up, except the GM plays the minions and the players play the Masters.

But this is what we talk about:

00:00 Introduction — What the Hell is this Game?
02:10 Strategies of Play — First first: how do you win?
08:04 Terrenes and Character Generation
16:04 Mechanics
30:01 Game Play
39:41 GMing Acts of Evil

That’s right; we blather on for almost a full hour. Even Paul might not make it to the end!

Music by Doctor Steel and the Scissor Sisters.

So we playtest’d Vincent Baker’s Poison’d on Wednesday. After the game, as we were just beginning our post-play feedback-n-bitch session, we popped open the ol’ MacBook, launched GarageBand and hit record. Later, I mixed in some silly music and stuff, which was dead-easy, and what do we get? An entertaining 20 minutes for Vincent, and anybody else who cares to listen.

What we talk about:
00:00 Introductory Nattering
01:30 Long Form Game?
07:05 Character Generation
09:00 The X Economy
12:30 Fights, Escalation, and NPC Stats
18:41 Bargains
19:48 For Adults Only?
20:47 Page Design

You can download the file here.

Paul Tevis is using Full Light, Full Steam to run Spelljammer. And they look like they’re having fun.

Doyce played The Princes’ Kingdom with his 6-year-old daughter, and she produced the Cutest Character Sheet Ever.

Awwww.

Judd started an excellent thread about summer gaming over on story-games. In writing mine out, I was pretty surprised at how many games I’ve played this summer alone. I don’t know if I remembered all the shit I played this summer. Seriously, the LAGames playtest circle has been the best gaming experience I have ever had. Weekly play of something without getting bogged down in interminable campaigns that go stale. Beautiful stuff.

So I’ve played:

Repertoire, three playtests of a design that gets tightened up and developed each time, and is shaping up into a fantastic game. Our troupes of actors roving from enclave to enclave have been huge on color, strong on conflict, ceaseless in backbiting. The post-apocalyptic worlds have been beautiful, quirky things created from madcap fevered creativity. Love this game.

Joy Division, Mark’s entry for that two-page game design thing. Folks, seriously, go download it from 1km1kt or whatever it’s called cause this game is smokin awesome. Lets you play Men In Black trying to forestall the singularity of technology and social development that will destroy the human race, with a die system that will not quit. Super fucking awesome.

The Shadow of Yesterday, played in the outskirts of Near, with a pair of very different goblins and a couple of humans who, it was my impression, really didn’t know what to do with the goblins. I really didn’t ‘get’ the game in the first session, but I’m looking forward to giving it a crack next time with a little more understanding of how things are supposed to go.

Dogs, me running and Judson and Jeff playing. Playing through a town that I’d run before and watching it turn out totally different, complete with a meddling ex-Dog and an entire game where guns didn’t even come out, let alone get fired. Also played Dogs earlier at Gamex, and this game is just simply a joy to introduce new folks to the indie catalog of games. Running it again this weekend.

Heads of State: 9 short games about tyrants, which we finally finished playtesting the last couple games this summer. Being that it’s Mark’s design, it’s a big quirky machine that churns out quirky situations and characters, but despite all that it produced some pretty interesting results, especially in terms of the dictator that we ended up playing around the most. Cubism + PoliSci + RPGs… who would have thought that equation equaled Awesome?

Full Light, Full Steam playtests of many stripes, watching the final bits and pieces of the system fall into place, seeing where the text needs some smoothing over and where entire sections should just be cut out and left behind. The total glee in watching players take my baby and run off in new directions that I would have never thought of — playing naval intelligence spies! Doing an upstairs/downstairs with the officers and enlisted men! Great stuff!

Cage of Reason in a hotel room with Jason and Mark and Judson, ‘just cause’ Jason was in town. Philosophers throwing down in cage-match wrestling style. Bizzare and funny.

Nine Worlds at Gamex, wonderful, beatiful game that I desperately want to play again, but there’s so many other games piling up in the hopper. The same basic situation, played by two different groups, came out in one as a soap opera and in ours as a paranoia-filled crucible as everyone was spying on everyone else.

Roach at Gamex, a little claustrophobic with only four players, but enough of a taste that I am so there when it runs this weekend. Our Regina Sutton actually survived, relatively unmarred, much as Jesse tried to kill her.

Primetime Adventures, also at Gamex. I was a little skeptical of the groupmindshare stories that I’d heard about the game, but in the end they’re all true. Our series, set in a mental institution where something is threading the patients’ delusions together, was fantastic, and in the space of four or five hours we managed to squeeze off a pitch, a pilot, and an episode in the middle of the series. I am so running this game again this weekend.

Man, now I’m all stoked for this weekend.

In those days, it was said that a hero was made of Timber, Steel, and Stone. The Stone was what stuff they might be made of — blood and bone but wits and beauty, too. The Steel was their deeds, whether it be monster-slaying, healing the sick, or tricking the unwary. The Timber was how they did it: through guile or force or grace or stupid luck. And a real hero, one that they’d be singing about for ages afterwards, had to have all three or else they’d be lost to memory.

Heroes live in a world that does not look kindly on change. The heroes’ ability and willingness to effect change is what separates them from the rest of the world. Where the common man avoids making waves, fearful of the consequences, heroes rock the boat and embrace the slings and arrows of fate, converting that fate into destiny. It is only by risking the ire of the status quo that real and lasting change can ever come to pass. Heroes know this, and their daring is the only thing that brings tyrants to their knees, slays monsters plaguing the countryside, and sets ancient wrongs right.

Without heroes, the world would never change — the tyrants would remain in power, the monsters would ravage the countryside, and ancient wrongs would fester in the forgotten corners of the world.

The world needs heroes. Will you stand up and claim that title?

Making a Hero

Heroes have two parts: abilities and relationships. Put very simply, abilities are what heroes do, and relationships are why they do them.

Assembling Abilities

Abilities come in three varieties: Timber, Stone, and Steel. Abilities come from Click-n-Locks, and each Click-n-Lock has two kinds of abilities on it. Timber and Stone click-n-locks represent your character’s personality. Stone and Steel abilities represent your character’s background, where they came from and how they were raised. Timber and Steel abilities are derived from your class, your professional training, exotic experience — or lack thereof.

Pick one of each kind of click-n-lock. Of the fifteen abilities listed on your click-n-locks, cross out any three. Rewrite any of the others that you don’t especially like or want just slightly different. Then number the remaining abilities in each category, starting with one and going up each time.

Abilities are used to roll the dice assigned to Conflicts — to do things that will help the characters get what they want. The ability’s value is the highest die that the ability can affect.

Forging Relationships

A relationship is a link from your character to another character in the story. Relationships are made up of a target and a disposition, and are rated from one to five. “My Father” might be the target; “Prove I am a Man” is the disposition.

Each character begins with two relationships. One must share a target with another character in the game. Targets can be other player characters. Split five points between the two relationships however you like.

Relationships store Fate. Relationships can safely store a number of Fate tokens equal to their value; if a Relationship has more Fate than its value, the character is overdrawn.

Note: You can jump-start a game and start at a higher power level by starting with more relationships or more points spread between relationships.

Other Characters

Heroes need villains, oppressors, monsters, and tyrants to overcome. They also need townspeople to defend, princesses (and princes) to rescue, and knights to rally. They need mysteries to unravel, ruined ancient temples to explore, and chase scenes to run through, and all of those are characters, too. All the other characters in the story are represented by two kinds of characters. The simplest characters such as victims and regular folks are “stone characters”, made up of twelve Stone abilities and a Free Conflict. They never generate Fate; they avoid change and only ever do what they’ve always done before.

More complex characters are made up of Timber, Steel, and Stone abilities just like Heroes because they are Heroes. They’re just heroes for the other side. If one set of Heroes are a trio of do-gooders protecting law and order, the heroes they oppose might promote anarchy, chaos, and corruption. Both sides will attempt to change their world, and both sides will become Fated and earn their Destiny. The question is whose changes, and whose Destiny, will win out.

Through the course of a game, everybody will play Heroes and little people on all sides of the story. Some characters may switch sides, and some may switch sides more than once. Some Heroes will ally together only to fall apart and oppose each other later. That’s fine! The clash of Heroes is what fantasy is made of!

Resources

Players use three primary resources: Fate, Destiny, and Inspirations. Fate is gained by using abilities and losing Fated Conflicts; Destiny is gained by losing Fated Conflicts; Inspirations are gained by winning Conflicts.

Fate

Using any ability generates Fate, which are counted with whatever tokens are convenient for you.

Whenever you use a Steel ability, the Fate goes to a relationship. The player may choose which relationship it goes to. The choice need not reflect anything in the fiction whatsoever.
Whenever you use a Stone ability, it absorbs the Fate (put it next to the ability name). That ability cannot be used for the rest of the scene. At the end of the scene, the Fate is discarded.
Whenever you use a Timber ability, it may absorb Fate (as a Stone ability) or the Fate may be put towards a relationship (as a Steel ability).

When the number of Fate tokens is greater than the value of the relationship the Fate is on, the relationship is overdrawn. At the beginning of each page where a character has overdrawn relationships, they must roll the highest die that they are allied with and accept any lower result. The character must do this for every relationship that is overdrawn.

Fated Conflicts

You can stake Fate onto Conflicts, making them Fated Conflicts. The Conflict in question must relate to the target or the disposition of the relationship the Fate comes from. Staking Fate on Conflicts allows you to Split or Schism as in Capes. If you lose the Conflict, you get your Fate back doubled. If you win the Conflict, your Fate tokens turn into Destiny tokens which you hand out to the players on the losing side.

Destiny

Destiny can be spent to:

• create an extra Conflict at the beginning of a Page
• claim an extra Conflict at the beginning of a Page
• play one more Character at the beginning of a Page
• take another Action at the end of a Page

Inspirations

The winner of a Conflict gains Inspirations by matching dice just like Capes.

Character Development

Resolving Relationships

Whenever the action in the fiction has a character achieving a disposition in regards to its associated target, that relationship can be resolved. The player may do one of four things:

• up the ante - change the disposition of the relationship and increase its value by one.
• redouble - change the target of the relationship and increase its value by one.
• move on - create an entirely new relationship at the same value and remove the old relationship from the sheet.
• complicate - keep the original relationship exactly as-is and create another new relationship at a value of one.

In addition to whichever option he selects, the player can rewrite a number of Abilities equal to the prior level of the Relationship. Abilities cannot switch categories (Stone abilities cannot become Steel abilities), but if two or more abilities in a category are being rewritten, they may swap their values.

Hot damn why did I not get around to attending gaming conventions until now? All the years of unexploited opportunities! It makes me weep.

I’m back from Gamex, and despite coming down with a little Con Crud the day after, and despite quite possibly the worst My Life with Master player ever, I am coming away from the weekend all smiles and exultation. Sadly, I have to wait until August to do it all over again. I am so saving my pennies for GenCon Indy next year — I’m sure it’s completely different, but that just makes it more intriguing.

Here’s what I played:

Dogs in the Vineyard — I ran with six players, none of whom had played before, and we managed to pull off a good game. Not a great game, but at least a good, solid game. Solid enough that three of the players asked where to get the game when it was done, and as far as success metrics go, that’s a pretty good one.

Prophecy — I didn’t wake up early enough for Paul’s first Nine Worlds game, so I ended up playing this board game, instead. It was pretty neat — sort of like Talisman, except designed well. “But have you played Runebound?” everyone keeps asking me, and no, and I’ll fix that soon, but Prophecy was pretty hot shit, too.

Shab al-Hiri Roach — It was me and Jesse and his wife Meghan and some total stranger Doug playing; I had not had the pleasure before. It was lots of fun. I grabbed the Roach early on, when I got the card that turned all of my dice to d12s, and stocked up a high stack of reputation. I ditched the Roach in the next event, and was sailing towards winning… only to pull the Roach in the last Event. Sadness. But Regina Sutton died, so I suppose not everything is lost.

Primetime Adventures — The Ward — Judson and his SO Stacey came down to Gamex and paid admission to play only one game, and it was this one. And I have no idea why they paid admission. But! This was awesome. I’ve never had the pleasure here, either, and that has been revealed to me to be a travesty of untapped opportunity, much akin to not having gone to gaming conventions. I admit, I was skeptical and somewhat put off by the “groupthink” that everyone always raves about in PTA — skeptical that it would happen and put off by the very suggestion that such a thing might be enjoyable — but wow when it happened it was awesome. We put together our series and played two episodes in five hours. The Ward is a serial set in a mental hospital where the patients’ hallucinatory world is shared for reasons unknown. There was all sorts of lingering doom and unspoken possibilities of what might be happening, but all we did in our two episodes was gleefully pile up the mysteries without a care in the world as to what everything might turn out to be in the end. I would love to play a long-term PTA game to see what it’s like to play an entire season.

Nine Worlds — Paul ran the same scenario/situation twice, and based that situation off of a previous game of Nine Worlds at ForgeCon (you all know that’s what the thing is called, so give up calling it “Forge Midwest Gathering”). Basic idea: six people with diverging agenda are on a ship heading from Point A to Point B. Apparently the first game the day before, which I did not wake up in time for, played out as a soap opera with the principals all flinging love and desperation and whatnot at each other, and ended with people settling down to raise children. Our game, by contrast, played like Paranoia, with everybody spying on everybody else, and follow-up conflicts that were all about finding out that they knew that we knew that he knew that they did something else. We ended with me jettisoning two of the other players out into space. Marvellous.

My Life with Master — I’m going to chalk this one up alongside Sorcerer in the category of “games that were interesting and developed a lot of things in the design-o-sphere but by the time I played them there wasn’t anything new for me there.” Also, the paucity of available options (Villiany or Violence and only character action) drove me up the wall. And it didn’t help that we had a player who had responded to the initial pitch of “you’re a minion of an evil mastermind” without understanding the implied addendum and it sucks. Said player and the friend he brought with him had lots of fun wreaking havoc with their character-pawns, but the fact that they were racking up a stat called Self-Loathing was apparently lost on them. All that said, it was still an entertaining game and I’m happy to add that notch to my belt — although I’m not sure I’d want to play the game again.

Then I was supposed to run Capes next, but I only had two folks sign up — the troublesome player and his friend from My Life with Master. Now, while I had been sitting in MLwM and wishing that I had something like Capes to moderate this guy’s, say, casual “accidental” violence to women, I had no wish to play Capes with just he and his friend. I wouldn’t have the player resources to fight them both off, just to begin with. And Capes with three kinda sucks. So I cancelled the game and went to play (wait for it)…

Vampire LARP — All throughout the con I was complaining that I didn’t get to play any mainstream games, since I wanted to play all the indie games that were on offer and that left me no time to “ground” myself in the default gaming experience that so many gamers assume to be the entire world of gaming. Also, I have never LARPed before. So with Capes shelved, I accepted an invitation to play in a Vampire LARP. Good fucking god. I spent, no joke, twenty minutes trying to get out of a room. While they were calling out initiative order for Round Three of the combat that somebody had conveniently placed right in front of the door, I thought to myself, “Why can’t they just deal everybody a couple cards and decide who wins right now? It worked in Nine Worlds this morning…” I am completely unfamiliar with the new Vampire, and have passing knowledge of the old Vampire, which gives me the level of knowledge of exactly dangerous, and easily confused by statements like “The Brujah are a bloodline of the Gangrel.” So it was very profoundly reiterated to me how much White Wolf games are all about mastery of setting minutiae: lots of stuff was happening, and there were boons and favors being exchanged, but to me all of it happened without any significance, so it was an oddly flat experience — like a four-year-old watching movies. Things explode, but who knows why.

All in all, a very successful, entertaining, and educational weekend. Anybody in southern california that aren’t going to Strategicon events are missing out — they’re not big high-production affairs, but they are a few hundred players gathering in one place and cool games being played. Hard to pass that sort of thing up!

Nathan Paoletta is starting an interesting experiment, a Game A Day Project where he’ll post a snippet of gameness every day. He describes the project at his main blog.

Go, Nathan, Go!

Go read What is Fictional on Victor’s Gaming Philosopher. Good stuff.

For just $120, your 672-page copy of Monte Cook’s Ptolus can be yours. Order soon, and you can get a nice 32-page Player’s Handbook — five copies of it in fact — so your players will not be killed by this monstrosity of a book.

What the fuck? Who in their right mind would shell out over one hundred bucks for six hundred pages of a setting? Oh, but it’s cross-referenced! It’s got color illustrations! Yes, and it can kill babies.

But wait, there’s more. This book? This tome? This monstrosity of an abomination of game design? It includes no rules. This works with D&D 3.5, folks. It requires the GM and Player’s Guides (which are what, $35 a piece or something?). So yes, this complete game can be yours for the low-low price of two hundred dollars. And then you have to read nearly a thousand pages of material in order to play it.

Here’s what boggles my mind: if the entire thing can be condensed into a 32-page Player’s Handbook, why isn’t that the product?