Five Reasons You Should be Playing Conclave

Yeah, so I’m writing everything in lists now, because that’s where the money is. Sue me. Also, for context it’s worth pointing out that I don’t like most computer games. As in, find them literally unplayable. So when a computer game makes a dent in that, it’s a big deal. Context.

Conclave is an asynchronous D&D-inspired fantasy RPG in the mould of the old SSI games. You can find it at http://www.playconclave.com and you and three (maybe four?) buddies can team up and play through a pretty awesome fantasy campaign on any device that can run the internet – it doesn’t even use java. If you’re yearning for some old-school RPGing in your life but are worn down by the tyrannies of time and distance, this could be your port of call. But it’s not just Tiny Adventures all over again. It’s much, much better than that. Here’s why.

1. It’s free, for real

Tiny Adventures and other social media type games are free but they don’t want to be. They want to go viral and sell numbers, so they want all your friends to play. Others want to sell you microtransactions, to get all the extra goodies. Conclave doesn’t have any of that. You can pay for it, but it’s a single (cheap) transaction to get the full version, but so far we haven’t seen a need to. What’s more, if just one person in your team pays, the whole team can unlock things. Not only does this suit my budget (and everyone’s budget) this fact filters through every aspect of the game design. It also makes it easier to sell to your friends: it’s not going to cost them anything, and it’s not going to drive all their friends on facebook mad asking them to join.

2. It’s team-based but asynchronous

The game can be played solo, but it thrives in team play – the classes are nicely complimentary (see the below for more), and the text chat supports conversation, as does the cool voting system when the story branches in different directions. This is, as mentioned, an artifact of being really free – facebook games want all your friends to play with you, which could never work for hundreds of them, so when you’re playing Marvel Heroes, you’re always alone. But in Conclave you’re very much both a team of heroes and a group of gamers, sharing an experience, which pulls it closer to the D&D feel. But unlike linking up to play Diablo or D&D online, this is asynchronous. Once everyone has had an attack (or a vote on a story choice), the game will start a new round, and if you’re a bit late getting back on line, your friends can just act before you that round (although that might not be tactically sound). Got a friend who can’t play at your rate? The game will automove you if you are offline for more than 24 hours. Going away for a while and don’t want the game to do that? Set it to vacation mode to wait for you to return. It can accommodate all paces, so you can all share the fun.

3. The system is very good

Some might say this is a no-brainer, or that it’s most kept invisible, but the system the computer is running is a really solid RPG system – so much so it would definitely be worth playing off-line. It has the D&D 4E cleverness of making every ability interesting, but without going over the top, and of focussing on status effects, but not being crippled by them. Like 3E and WFRP, it breaks down into minor and major actions, some of which have the 4E conceit of only triggering once (or twice) per encounter, or only when wounded or acquiring some other status. In the few cases where it might get as fiddly as 4E with all the effects, it doesn’t because a) the computer is doing them and b) they’re almost all elegant and simple, just a single modifier or such. Yet in this simplicity the choices are extremely meaningful, especially because you can’t win an encounter (in fact, you must restart it) if even one party member dies. This nicely balances out the advantage of having extra party members and keeps the tension high and the tactical choices extremely weighty. Sometimes, who moves precisely when will change everything, and that’s fantastically engaging.

4. The character building is strong

Characters have a familiar race/class build, but both options are strong and have options within. Niche protection is high, and the standard roles of 4E/MMOs are present, but in a way that has a new feel to it. Clerics (Buffers) are now Beacons, which means their role as a “leader” (as it was in 4E) is built into their in-setting explanation, and provides them with Warlord-esque ways of leading others to greatness. The fighter is the Vanguard who is basically the tank, but not in such a way that he can sit on the front lines without thought, especially at low levels. The rogue, runecaster and truebow are the striker-types: high damage, low squish, but in different ways from each other. Extra skills unique to each class add to make each feel distinct, as does weapon access. It is hard to make a pole-arm vanguard as a result (Beacons have that option) but you can respec if you go down a dead-end and with a simple but decently sized trait list, no two Beacons need to feel the same. Races too, are strong archetypes but with a new twist: the lumyn and the nix are mostly just high elves and gnomey-halflings, but then we have the chameleonic stealthy lizardmen, the satyr-esque wood-elf-sort-of-trollish trow and the gigantic living furnaces of the forgeborn (not like warforged; more like klingon-Azers)

5. The writing is fantastic throughout

I’ve played Mass Effect and Dragon Age and Guild Wars and more, and this is the best writing I’ve ever seen in a CRPG. The world design is elegant and clever: for hundreds of years, empires have fallen, one after the other, until only Bastion was left, the last free city, which just so happens to be where your characters come from. Why they’ve fallen and who caused it is still becoming clear; the game does not make the mistake of doing infodumps about the world but reveals it in elegant inches, as you explore and gain allies and respect, but at the same time never makes you feel small. One lovely twist is that whatever force of darkness is out there has taken away the ability to dream – except in rare, magically important situations: a perfect macguffin to draw your PCs into the story, and to trigger lovely subplots (like the cult that develops around another Dreamer who believes his nightmares have made him a messiah).  It’s not just the structure and world that are well written though: the characters and language are vivid and direct, and each quest or scene introduced with short, clear vignettes that deliver powerful emotion and clear goals in the minimum of words, then vanish – just like a good GM should do.

And that’s the real glory of Conclave: it is the best D&D game I’ve ever been in, including all the ones I’ve played on the tabletop, because it feels like a tabletop game, and what’s more, one being run by an excellent GM. Here is a CRPG that hasn’t tried to reinvent the wheel but rather taken all the best lessons on good GMing from the table, and implemented them as elegantly as possible on computer, and then stepped aside to let you fill in the blanks. It’s not, of course, an RPG. You don’t get to act in character or make any choices you want. On the other hand, if you do that in the textbox, it is as much an RPG as anything Gygax ever wrote, and certainly as much as anything from SSI was, or even Planescape: Torment was. So-called narrative control and on-screen dialogue does not necessarily the RPG experience make, and if you’ve found things like Dragon Age to be glorified adventure games that don’t feel anything at all like gathering around a table to match wits with hideous enemies in dungeons foul, then all is not lost. Conclave is here, and it is OFF THE GODDAMN HOOK. If it was any more D&D, it would make cheetoes shoot out of your screen, plus you can play it on your goddamn phone, even if your buddies are at the North Pole.

What more can you ask?

Men v Misogyny – the Crowdsourcing Begins

Well, we’re going to give the MESSAGE idea a go and see what happens. I got a wonderful person to help out, I’ve lined up a designer to make the logo, now we just need some cash to pay the designer and set up the initial website. So off to crowdsourcing we go. I use IndieGoGo because they are much more flexible and cheaper than Kickstarter. You can find the campaign here:

http://www.indiegogo.com/projects/150672?c=home&a=154593

It went up on the weekend and we’re already more than halfway to out goal, which is awesome! Clearly some people care enough about this to put their money where their mouths are! But its not just about the money, its about getting the word out – if this is going to work, it will need a lot of people to buy in to the idea, in the figurative sense, so even if they don’t fund it, they need to hear about it and talk about it. So please make sure to spread the link everywhere you can! Your favourite RPG and computer game forums! Your fellow guild members! Your twitter followers! Your mom! Your dentist!

Maybe not your dentist. (I hear he’s a jerk.)

The Upside

Something happened in roleplaying this weekend, what with the misogyny and the internets. I’m not going to go over it again here. Edited highlights can be read on this lovely blog post of Patrick O’Duffy. This contretemp, like most things on the internet, was full of ugliness and stupidity that just made everyone feel awful. So allow me to offer a ray of hope:

Some of the triggers of this event were a few books published about ten years ago. They were pretty stupid and awful books then. They are equally stupid and awful books now. Gamer sexism was godawful then and remains godawful now. We had the internet then, and although we’ve gained a bit more social media and protest sites, not much has changed there either. But there wasn’t a row then, and there was a big row now. So what has changed?

My guess is what changed is gamer women.

There are more of them, and they are better organised and more than anything else, they are sick to the back teeth with it. They are mad as hell and not going to take it any more. They’re sick and tired of the rape threats and the rape culture, of the whore tables and pimp cardgames, of the chainmail bikinis and the porn tracing, of being the ball-and-chain, the victim, or the whore, of the endless equivocating and poor comparisons, of being ignored or diminished by the entire industry, and mocked and denigrated by the entire hobby, and of being told to shut up and get back in the kitchen when they say a single word of complaint about any of this. They are sick to death of it all, and they’ve got a voice, and they intend to use it, and nothing and nobody is going to stop them any more. They are going to call everyone on their bullshit, and demand that it gets better.

And this is excellent goddamn news. For rpgs, for video games, for gaming in general. Not just because the hobby needs it the way the Augean stables needed a hose, but because we need more voices, and we need different voices, being heard and being loud and making things different. Because that’s the only way a medium can progress and evolve and stay interesting.

So. That’s the upside. Maybe it’ll let a little sunshine in if you’ve been facepalming through too many trainwrecks of late.

The MESSAGE: Something Like A Plan

Okay, I think I’m going to take this forward, since people seem generally supportive of the idea. The next step is to hammer out something like a plan and a mission statement about what we are trying to achieve, what we’re not trying to achieve, and how to get there. So here are some general principles of those, to get started:

1. Stay focussed. There are many problems in gaming and computer gaming, sexism is just one of them. Racism is just one of them. There are a myriad of ways to tackle these issues. Trying to find all the ways to tackle all the problems is not going to help anything. A tight focus means we do our thing well and hopefully we connect it to other things that make a larger difference.
2. Have a defined goal which we can articulate. Still working on that, but the idea is to build a system to encourage men, through a branded tribalist approach of badges and logos and merchandise, to make a concerted effort to not be dicks in gaming environments and to advertise that fact to others (making them want to join that tribe). Here, being dicks means using racist and sexist slurs, and hitting on people, and making sexual attacks, and being horrifically unpleasant and general. The idea being that those who make such identifications can be relied on not to do that, and eventually be selected by people to play with more often, thus encouraging more people to make the same pledge, and generally creating communities of people dedicated to a minimum level of behaviour. Here’s Wil Wheaton talking about what we want to encourage. 
3. Don’t Be Dicks About It. We are not the moral police. Nor are we White Knights. We’re not here to save anyone, or accuse anyone. While we want people to encourage others to act the same way, this isn’t about giving anyone the moral high ground or turn them into forum vigilantes. That way leads to madness. And this isn’t about anyone’s sensitive ears, either. This isn’t even about women. It’s about being better simply because it’s what we want and think is appropriate. Also, we’re relaxed enough to occasionally say the word dicks, and that’s going to be okay. At least, that’s where we are now. Happy to here weighing in on lines to be drawn. 
4. Invite Others. We’re all doing our bit to make things suck less. We work with other groups, not against them. Nobody owns a movement or an idea.
5. Start Small, Start Slow. I am one man with an enormous amount of personal issues, challenges, and dependents. I also have no money whatsoever. Doing it right without killing myself means moving at a snail’s pace, and results will move equally slowly. Before I can even start a website I will need graphics for it, and before I can get graphics for it, I will need money (because artists don’t work for free). Some kind of stepped plan will be important. There will likely be crowd-sourcing for the cash. Recent evidence, like Feminist Frequency making a hundred and sixty thousand dollars(!!!), proves people want to talk about this stuff, and fund people doing things about it.
6. Do It Well. As mentioned above, we want to do it right, which means making it look right, which is why I’m going to need money, because no GOOD artist works for free (nor should they). Unless they really like this idea, he said hinting.

And yeah, we’re going with (Getting The) M.E.S.S.A.G.E. – Men Ending Slurs and Sexual Attacks in the Gaming Environment.

Comments useful as always.

Men vs Misogyny

So there’s been a lot of talk lately about misogyny, sexism and sexual harassment in geekdom, such as comics, movies and particularly gaming. Comic commentary I’ll leave to better minds like Kate Beaton but I know gaming, and gaming is also a Big Deal. And sexism in gaming is such a big deal even the BBC  is doing stories on it. And there are lots of people trying to raise the issue of sexism in game design, in the online community and particularly in game environments but it is endemic enough to become a meme and is thankfully well-parodied.

But so far, most of what I’ve seen crying against it has come from the ladies themselves. And a lot of what I’ve seen coming from men is mansplaining, turning a blind eye, or a shrug of the shoulders. Even when women are recognised as having a fair complaint, the sentiment seems to be that “gamers/gaming is like that” and it’s pretty hard to change.

Without trying to be all white-man’s-burden, I’d like to say that I’m sick and tired of the problem, and I’m sick and tired of doing nothing about it. I’m sick and tired of gaming not being a safe space for women. I’m sick to my stomach that my female friends can’t go to gaming stores. I’m tired of reading article after article about the shit that goes down online, of the way that gamers revert instantly to sexual language and sexual attacks, and then excuse it as smack talk.

So all of this leads me to say: maybe it’s time some men started doing something about the problem. Because guys, this is our problem. Members of our gender have made gaming, over and over again, a toxic, hostile and dangerous place for women. And that’s not just bad for women, or bad for us, it’s bad for gaming. And it is sad and disgusting that it took a lot of very loud women pointing this out to us before we noticed or gave a damn. And it is depressing as hell that we either don’t want to do anything about it, or cannot do anything about it.

Right now, I don’t believe the latter. I think we can do something about it, specifically as men. Because for the moment we dominate the gaming industry and the gaming market and because we should. Because it’s about fucking time. (And yes, all of the above applies to homophobia and racism in gaming too. I’m just picking one thing at a time though.) The question then is, what to do.

Just as a start, I’m throwing an idea out there. It might be a stupid idea. Consider this a call for input on it. The idea takes inspiration from the various men’s groups around the world that take a stand against sexism and crimes against women. Those groups are designed to encourage men to recognize that the problems begin in their numbers, in their social groups, in what they will and won’t accept from their mates and their wide circles. I think it could be a good concept to apply specifically to gaming.

I’d like to see a society of men who have taken a pledge to make gaming safe for women – video games, online games, board games, rpgs, all games, for all women. And who will try to do so by not tolerating any sexism, harassment or sexual assault (verbal or otherwise) from the men they game with. Who will kick out, ban, or refuse to group with guys who won’t stop with the misogyny. Who will be able to join an online group and get a little avatar badge that says to women “hey, you can game with me and I won’t be a sexist jackass to you”. Maybe even a t-shirt they could wear at cons. Just to say “I’m a man, and I have GOT THE DAMN MESSAGE.” The message that enough is enough. That this has to stop.

I like the sound of that, actually. It could be Men calling for an End to Sexism and Sexual Assault in the Gaming Environment. Shirts that say: I’ve Gotten The MESSAGE. And those who haven’t got it yet, well, haven’t got the MESSAGE.

Obviously such a system could be abused. Obviously such a system could end up doing nothing to help and just be handing out badges to people for feeling like sanctimonious crusaders. Obviously this could just be an excuse for me to bignote myself and act all quixotic, or just get in the way of other good ideas. Obviously, I don’t want any of that.  Hence, I’m doing my research before I started tilting at windmills. That’s where you come in. Tell me if you think this will make any goddamn difference at all. Tell me, men, if you’d want to support something like this. Tell me, ladies, if you think it would help in any way. Or tell me to go back and try again.

But tell me something because enough IS really enough. Some of us have got the message, but it isn’t getting through, and it’s just not good enough.

NOTE: This post was edited on the 27th of September, 2012, to remove a personal anecdote. Nothing of significance was changed.

D&DNext: The Cursory Examination

Since like a hundred people cared what I thought about Gatsby, here’s a much more contentious topic that everyone is weighing in on – the D&D Next playtest rules. I had a quick look because I still don’t care, and my thoughts here are based on the quickness of that look. Your mileage may vary, product subject to change without notice (this is a playtest, after all)

- It’s still D&D. D’accord.

- They have somehow done a good job of bringing together a lot of ideas from all the different editions, which must have been tricky as hell. Most pleasingly, I see the simplicity of redbook here, with the one line stat line. They’re kobolds, they have 2 hit points, they have an AC of 14, they do X damage. Done and dusted. If you’ve ever felt that D&D lost its way around the time it became AD&D, there’s something for you here – but it doesn’t have THAC0s, so you come out ahead – AC goes upwards, thankfully. There’s also Weapon Proficiences back from 2nd ed, but also a proper skill list from 3rd, but simplified right down to what you’re trained in, like 4th. There’s still Saving Throws but now they’re just Ability Checks (welcome to 1977, D&D!).

- Probably the worst idea is what they did to DC checks. In 3rd, it was 10, 15, 20, 25, 30. Now it can be anything from 1 to 30. More flexible to the needs of the situation, but good luck remembering that the DC for resist poisons is 17, not 19.

- Backgrounds are a nice idea although again, it’s a stone-age one by gaming standards. They give your character a sense of identity beyond class. We have two priests in the set: one who was a knight and one who was a priest. You get different trappings, skills and world impact. It’s like Warhammer (they even made the Halfling a commoner). Welcome to 1985, D&D. Big hi to Rob Schwalb, Warhammer maestro now working on 5e, perhaps showing his hand.

- Themes could be a nice idea, because they provide an extra vector for a class. My class as a fighter means I get weapons and hit points, but then I can be a killy fighter (striker) or a defendy fighter. This allows for an extra place to put many of the fun powerups from 4E (others are in class abilities – maybe? It’s hard to see where the level powers come from). Problem is, the only themes we get to see in the same class for the two clerics: one is defender, one is healy. The fighter is a slayer, the rogue is a lurker, the wizard is a magic user. It’s only going to be really interesting if you can swap themes (and backgrounds) across all classes, if mages can be lurkers and clerics slayers and rogues healers. That’s hard to balance but otherwise we’ve just got kits back again. Which is okay, but it loses the fun of 4e where you could fill the same party role with a completely different ethos. The most boring thing about D&D is that clerics are healers and fighters are fighters, and clerics really need to heal here again, because healing surges etc are gone. If it turns out we can have lurker clerics, this will be more interesting. Right now, we don’t know.

- No sign of so-called modularity in mechanics.

- I have no idea if it has balance issues ala 3E. By making it a lot simpler, they may however just dodge that issue a little bit because it’s harder to care.

- Everything else is pretty much the same. It’s D&D. You go down a tunnel and hit gelatinous cubes with axes until they die. You search for secret doors. Elves are immune to charm and sleep. Yadayadayada.

Overall, if you like D&D but found 3E too fiddly and 4E too fiddly and too high-powered (or too mechanical), you’ll find this one up your alley – it’s like 0D&D cleaned up ala 3e with lots of the toys from 4e. But if you have no problem with 2E or 3e, there’s no great benefit to changing over that I can see. But familiarity may be what the market really wants – it would explain why they keep making clones of the game, after all.

Diablo 3 and WoW: a financial perspective

A friend I cannot name works for a major Australian bank as an actuary and share-wrangler. One of his jobs is to collect financial info from international sources to track stock market trends. His most recent North Korea report made mention of the dent Diablo was creating in other companies. NCSoft (makers of City of Heroes, Guildwars and Aion MMOs, and Mount and Blade) had sales drop 8% when D3 went live, and added in their report:

 

In its second day of releases yesterday, Korea PCcafe rankings revealed that Diablo 3 market share surged to previously unseen levels of 26%, up from 16% on the first day. Based on our visits to PCcafes yesterday, we think the Diablo 3 phenomenon will continue in the next few weeks placing further negative sentiment on NCsoft, which is expected to release Blade & Soul on June 27. 

Meanwhile, Activision dropped 3%, partly due to resolution of a lawsuit, but also because of Diablo 3 errors. And in a sign of possible desperation, Blizzard was offering a free copy of Diablo 3 to anyone who prepaid for World of Warcraft for a year. WoW is beginning the big decline.

Do the money people know the score? You decide.

Marvel Atomic Hero Robo Roleplay

I caved and got the Marvel RPG pdf after some nice person sent me some cash last week (thank you Peter). I didn’t get the $400 for rent, but I got a nice few days with a shiny new RPG without the stress of having to review it, which is much appreciated. Still too early to form a total opinion, but I like it. There’s a lot of talk about how D&D 5e will be modular, but because of the way Cortex works, it already IS modular. There are about twenty things you can do with every dice roll if you want to get really tactical, but you can also just roll to hit if you want, and the system works fine each way.

It’s main flaw is it is NOT very friendly for chargen, because there isn’t a complete list of all the power options. If you don’t know that The Thing has a cool power effect where he breaks the scenery a lot, you can’t find it anywhere else in the book.  Likewise GMs could use more guidance on building NPCs. There are lots of really really fun dice tricks, making for a tactical and tactile experience full of kapwing and kapow in the best sense, but not always a clear idea of what all those tricks mean on a deeper level.

However, the emphasis on smooth, stylistic chargen is lots of fun, particularly designing Milestones and Distinctions.  Here’s my first go at Atomic Robo, which might give you a feel for the system.

Atomic Robo!
Affiliations: Solo d8 Buddy d6 Team d10

Distinctions:
I Used My Violence On Them!
Action Scientist
88 Years Old

Power Set: Atomic Robot
Godlike Durability d12
Superhuman Strength d10
Cybernetic Senses d6
SFX: Collateral Damage (as per Thing), Immunity (gas, toxins, disease, pressure), Invulnerable (except electrical attacks)

Tools of Science
Lightning Gun d10
Grenades d8
SFX: Area Attack, Dangerous
Limit: Gear

Specialities:

Combat Expert d8
Science Master d10
Tech Expert d8
Vehicle Expert d8

Milestones: 

Destroying the Scenery
1 XP when something heavy falls on you
3 XP when you are Stressed Out by physical stress
10 XP when you cause an enormously valuable or large thing to be destroyed (eg Tokyo, the Empire State Building, a pyramid)

Horsefeathers!
1 XP when a seemingly normal person or situation you encounter is revealed to be strange or crazy
3 XP when monsters or villains show up unexpectedly
10 XP when something threatens to destroy the world or the universe

 

In Which I Break Focus After One Day, and talk about Ashen Stars

So yesterday I was talking about how easy it is to go off on a tangent and lose your focus, and then last night I was talking to someone about my Gumshoe whining and he said “you gotta read Ashen Stars” and I’m like “dude, I know it” and he’s like “here it is” and bam, I’m off focus, reading away on something I can easily read in five years from now.

To be fair, I was right based on my first impressions – it is hella awesome. It’s not just one of the coolest sci-fi settings ever published, containing five of the most well-crafted alien species you’ll ever see and a fantastically strong premise (“what if the Federation lost a huge war and so had to hire Han Solo and Mal Reynolds to police deep space in the aftermath”) it also has some great depth of detail and infrastructure to that, all the things that aren’t really setting but aren’t really system (or core system) but make a game unique and strong, like a fantastically detailed exploration of the intricacies of the justice system and a simple but detailed guide to making planets and some awesome cyberware and a huge list of ship stats and what might be (haven’t plummed it in detail yet) the best ship-to-ship combat system ever written…

…and on top of all that, it has Laws’ usual sense for the dramatic and narratively-styled. Like Leverage and Smallville (and to a lesser extent, Buffy), it puts genre tropes front and centre (although I wish it hadn’t called itself space opera, it sounds cheesy and you can play this plenty dark and grounded).  Planets are designed for the story around them, first and foremost. Adventures are built around premises and twists, because twists are what makes the half-hour ad-break interesting. But it keeps the core basis of simulational mechanics, which helps keep players grounded in the fictional world. It’s a nice balance, and the kind of thing that neither the old school hard-core sim games nor most bleeding edge indie games ever really got.

And speaking OF, it has what is at once the oldest rule of GMing (depending on your style) and also one of the most revolutionary rules ever written down. In the section on setting difficulty levels, it doesn’t have a useless table explaining that 2 is “Trivial” and 4 is “average” and 8 is “impossible”. It doesn’t go to great lengths to determine how hard your average lock is to pick in the setting. No, it explains the core of pretty much all mechanics I’ve ever used:

If succeeding would be boring or kill the story, make the target number impossible or nearly so.

If failing would be boring or kill the story, make the target number very low or just let it happen.

If both success and failure would be interesting, set it at 4 (average).

At first glance, that might seem obvious to you, but to any hard-core world-simulationist, it is insane. To the hard-core anti-”railroading” anti-die-fudging types on RPGNet, it is mind-breaking heresy. To Ron Edwards and co, it is the GM setting an agenda of “his” story and taking agency away from the players, and violating a sacred trust of everyone having input . It’s the kind of rule that is like the exploding of Alderaan – I could hear the screams echoing across the internet the moment I read it. Like the initiative rules in Fvlminata.

And I thought that was interesting. It was nice to see it written down so simply. For those of us who GM to present stories as much as react to them, it’s an instinctive tool, but as I said, I don’t think it’s ever been written down quite so explicitly and clearly and simply. It is effectively permitting dice fudging, as a written rule. Which is super sexy awesome.

So, Ashen Stars: worth checking out even if you don’t like Gumshoe. Hell, it would be almost trivial to turn the system into a roll-under one (actually, Blue Planet’s Synergy would be a good fit) and still use 95% of the book. Unless of course, you think this is railroading insanity. Then you should go play Smallville, which, alas, is much, much harder to fudge because you have much less control over probabilities.

And now…I must stop reading about the awesome armadillo people and put it aside….do it…DROP THE BOOK STEVE! THIS IS THE WRITING POLICE!

*shots are fired. Fade to black. To be continued…*

Fragments from AusCon…

“Oh my god my life is a mess”
- freelance Voodoo priestess and ship’s cook, Eloise Laplace, on being in love with her mother’s ex-lovers’ brother, in Smallville (of course)

In reverse order:

Ran Smallville again. We barely had time to get one roll for everyone in because we were doing chargen for SEVEN! people. Madness. But gorgeous madness that everyone enjoyed heartily, I think. The hat-pulls were “Napoleonic Wars” and “1950′s B-Movie SF”, which led to an awesome alt-history where the Wars had gone into detente while Dutch, French and English scientist united to explore a common enemy – a deadly alien force from beneath the sea. More on that later. First pull was “Unruly Teens” and “Venice” which I loved – imagine mixing The Outsiders with The Libertine! – but people didn’t get a strong enough hook from Venice, and fair enough. Full Hat List below.

Ran Three Hours to Midnight, with four amazing minds and passionate hearts and created something new and wonderful currently called Hunter’s Dawn. The final version after three hours is complete and playable, if sketchy, not to mention clever and unique. It also hints at a much more developed and ten times more awesome second edition, which we intend to have prepped to demo at next year’s AusCon! Woot! We also, I think, all learnt a lot about design, as you always do in these things. Thanks to Natan, Bonnie, Gareth and Sam – I’ll be in touch soon, and my blog readers (all two of you) will know more soon too.

I entered “GM of Legend” and got handed three random words and about an hour to prepare (plus eat lunch) for a game of a bunch of people. The words were sphinx, caravan and adultery. As usual, speed forced me to fall back on my strengths and I wrote a little freeform/LARP/thing (ie pregen characters where everyone has secrets and conflicting goals). The characters were all royal sphinxes of the Great Sphinx Empire, and King Felix had heard rumours his wife was disloyal, so had sent all the eligible royal males away on a trade mission. The caravan had just returned from Greece – and shenanigans were about to break out. More on that later. I came second (DOH!) to the awesome John Reid but was told by one player he gave me full marks in every category, so that was nice. Keen to hear more about the other games, as John ran Dread, and other GMs ran Pathfinder and something else, and I’d love to hear what kind of D&D or Dread game emerged from those words!

And first off I did some seminars about being a GM and learning from TV. The former was well attended, and one person came back to hear it when we repeated it again later, so I think people are really keen to know about GMing stuff. The latter only reached two guys but I learnt a lot from expanding on my ideas. Please, if you heard a seminar from me, send me feedback because I love doing them and want to tailor them to what you want to hear. The final seminar was with my regular colleagues Timothy and Nathan, who are always intelligent, illuminating and excellent. We talked about how to finish and how to publish, and Nathan gave some excellent info on POD and Lulu (apparently, Lulu is the SHIZNIT). Timothy also made an excellent point about how e-readers may totally revolutionise the way RPGs are written because they can do maths for you as you read…

I also played a bunch of board games to find out how they worked, although very few reached completion. A Touch of Evil seems awesome, Hey That’s My Fish is cute but has too much set up, Torres BROKE MY MIND and may be too clever for its own good but boy is it clever, Ad Astra is like Settlers only it blows, and Small World is just as neat as advertised. Future sales will be based on these samples, perchance…

Wish there’d been more time for play and more people to play with, but we got chucked out right on five and numbers were a little low in general – but it’s a good sign that there was too much cool stuff to fit in (didn’t even get to fight zombies or walk them or whatever one does with them)…I think AusCons may run the distance and bring more awesome in the future!