From the fantastic SucceedBlog.

Which makes me ponder: what if you design a game with two ratings for each stat: the number that determines your effectiveness as we’re used to, and the rating that determines some sort of incentive-reward when you use it (similar to octaNe). The idea being, you are displaying both what you’re good at and what you want to see in play, avoiding the two-contradictory-messages thing.

So say, for instance, we rate stat effectiveness with a number 1-6 and stat incentive with die size: d4s for stuff you actively don’t want to deal with, d6s for neutral stuff, d8s for “that’s sort of cool,” and d10s for “this is what I want my corner of the game to be about.” So I have Willpower 5d4, which is a clear indicator that I would really like to avoid things like mind control, and Kill People With Swords 4d10, which shows that I’m all about killing people with swords. I also have Eloquent 2d8 — flagging that I want to see social interaction and maybe even politics despite the fact that I’m shit at it.

Say you roll a couple different stats for any check, and evens are successes and odds are failures. After everybody has rolled, you not only count up successes, but the GM can also count up big dice to see how he’s doing. To put teeth into this, for every d10 rolled, the GM gets an Adversity Point to add to his budget; for every d4 rolled, he loses Adversity. (And every two d8s give him one point, or something — details are sketchy; this is just an illustration!) Play should very quickly move towards highlighting what the players want to jam on. The system also still preserves the ability to resolve the occasional conflict in an arena that a player finds disinteresting.

To be mundane, in the episode where the veteran witch-hunter protagonists will be fighting a cabal of sorcerers, the show starts with one of the protagonists, back before they were a witch hunter, crossing paths with a sorcerer. What happens in the flashback tells us how the present-day witch hunter will feel (and sometimes how we’re supposed to feel) about sorcerers when they crop up next.

Now, when you’re writing something and you set this sort of thing up, you know exactly what sort of first encounter you need in order to get the conflicts you want later. You want undying enmity from your witch hunter, you have that first sorcerer murder his parents and rape his sister and write the nascent witch hunter shaking his fist at the sky in front of his burning childhood home. You know where you’re going, so you start off by pointing in that direction.

But what happens if you don’t know where you’re going? I don’t recommend such a stance for writing, but for roleplaying, it can be the order of the day. If you’re running a game off of the bandolier-o-bangs method, where you’re throwing challenges in front of the PCs to see what happens, what prevents you from doing this in flashbacks, as well? About here, you might be saying, “Sure, Josh, I guess you can do that…” but think this through. If you throw out bangs in flashbacks, you’re giving the PCs an opportunity to retroactively edit their character. That antagonist that you have statted up ready to come in both fists swinging… he may turn out to be an old friend rather than an old enemy. Maybe the witch hunter got his start helping the sorcerers kill his entire family. All of which puts a very different spin on the ‘current’ action in the present-day portions of the game.

I’m intrigued by the idea right now, and will probably give it a whirl in our upcoming HotBlooded game. I’m not sure if this will turn out to be a nifty technique or playing russian roulette with the game…

Friday night we checked in and all that and then I settled down to play Montsegur 1244, a structured freeform game which is getting a lot of play and buzz. I went into it expecting it to be not-my-thing, and I came out of it knowing that it was not-my-thing. Lack of strong character goals and a blindness to the parts of historical context that I really dig into were the big problems for me; I was also sort of an odd man out in our (randomly-generated) situation: everybody else was playing the sex-and-family bits of the situation, whereas I was the only one playing the religion part of the set. Which all sounds more negative than it really is — everybody else was having a blast, and it’s a nice little package of game-situation.

Saturday morning started off with In a Wicked Age, which Will calls, “The game I don’t like that I have fun with every time.” Which is pretty spot-on accurate. We played in God-Kings of War (best for cons) and ended with a giant naval battle determining the fate of an empire. Schweet.

Saturday afternoon I took the baby which Meghann had so kindly been entertaining while I was wicked-aging. She went off to play a Star Wars game; I played A New World: a Carcassonne game with Prudence strapped to my chest. The game is very neat and challengingly different than basic Carcassonne. After that was done, we all (myself, Meg, Paul, Ryan, Jesse, Will, James, Morgan… who am I forgetting?) sat down to a luxurious two-hour-long dinner slot, which allowed us to have a lot of casual social time. I really hope Strategicon retains the new schedule; I don’t mind getting to the morning game an hour earlier if it means dinner isn’t a big harried rush.

Saturday night I played in the Houses of the Blooded LARP, which I went in expecting it to be not-my-thing and was totally blown away by the awesome. John has devised a very, very slick conflict resolution system that is near-perfectly tuned to the LARP environment. It incorporates mechanics directly into the roleplay in a nearly seamless fashion. Yes, even combat — at the conclusion of the first (and only) duel of the night, John declared combat over and all the Vampire LARPers cheered because it was over so quickly and cleanly. The “private scenes” which are played out in public give the whole experience a great sense of pacing and introduce tons of information into the game constantly. Nobody walks around wondering where the action is — everybody walks around scheming on how to turn the action to their ends.

Sunday morning I had the baby again — I can’t recall what Meghann was playing — and so played Thurn and Taxis again with baby in the sleepy wrap. I love that thing; I don’t know how people raise babies without it.

Sunday afternoon saw me running the Agora playtest/preview, which succeeded on both fronts admirably — I got some good playtest feedback and also introduced the game in an engaging and entertaining manner. Thanks to Jesse, I even have an Actual Play recording of most of the game. Playtest feedback mostly centered around “selling” player actions, and will result in a couple new (small) procedures and some chunky Mastery player advice.

Sunday evening, my parents trekked out to the convention just to take the baby off our hands for a timeslot. While Meghann played Mouse Guard, I was able to just kick back with Ryan Macklin, who I don’t get to see often enough, chatting about game design but also just things-and-stuff. When they were done, Meghann returned spouting superlatives about Mouse Guard, so presumably there will be mice with capes and swords in our gaming future.

Monday morning I was literally the only RPG on the schedule, and so our game of Primetime Adventures had six players. We did a “Yes, and…” sort of series-building and came up with something truly spectacular. Running in perpetual syndicated reruns on TVLand, our show was “Trouble in PERL-dice,” a 60s-era sitcom-spoof (think F-Troop) about the Board of Directors of the international criminal organization PERL (pronounced ‘peril’). As the show was ostensibly in reruns, we played one episode out of a “marathon,” so started with the very end of one episode, including the “Next Time On…” segment. This allowed us to have a Next Time On list for the episode we played, and this worked marvelously. Our climax featured two flying aces in a dogfight using invisible planes — in other words, two guys in sitting position arcing and spinning around in the air. Fantastic stuff.

And then it was time for post-con Mongolian BBQ with almost the whole gang (Paul and Ryan understandably buggered off before then), completing a fantastic convention.

Click the following to download Part One and Part Two.

I always have a lot of fun on Ryan’s show, and in this one I really enjoyed the opportunity to relax a bit, call myself on my own bullshit, and talk nuts and bolts rather than big, high-minded abstracts. In other words, I got to talk about game design fueled by my enthusiasm for game design and not some misdirected attempt to spread my brand or drive sales. Very refreshing, and very fun. I should also note that a lot of the podcast is also about Ryan’s upcoming game-in-development, Mythender, which was lots of fun to talk about and sort of counter-interview Ryan about.

THEME
The theme is immersion.

INGREDIENTS
Write a immersive game incorporating three of the following ingredients:
* Burn.
* Horse.
* Midnight.
* Sea.

Submissions need to be uploaded to Graham’s server in one week, midnight (Britain-time) on the 29th.