A nicer version of By Firelight

I completed this some time ago, but only today did I get around to uploading it somewhere to be seen. Here is a PDF version of By Firelight after an editing and layout pass.

You’ll notice that the pages are quite small and this is because this PDF has been formatted to display on small screen, like on an iPad or Kindle. It isn’t ideal for reading on a monitor, but you’re like me and are sick of game PDFs being borderline unusable on handheld devices then you will understand.

I don’t consider By Firelight to be complete. At this point I am pretty happy with the rules, but I would still like to include the following:

  • A walk through of a scene or two of play.
  • 3 “adventures”. I imagine a By Firelight adventure to be a little different from what we typically call an adventure. It would consist of some ready to go characters, suggested words/phrases to put into the draw bag and several key scenes for the Guide. I would like to include one adventure set in a house, another at a campground and a third in a graveyard. I imagine that all of these places would be a good spot for a game of By Firelight.
  • More advice for the Guide.
  • A better layout and a PDF in 8.5×11 so that it views on a monitor and prints better.

Another review of In Between (Polish version)

Yet again, I was poking around over at RPG Kepos only to find that In Between has been reviewed again. It got a positively glowing review this time, no doubt thanks to the great layout and translation work done by the RPG Kepos team.

This time the review comes from Poltergeist, a Polish blog interested in all kinds of geeky things. The review scores were broken down into a number of different categories, but all of them came out as either 8 or 9 out of 10.  I don’t have a lot to say about the review this time around. The reviewer didn’t really mention anything they didn’t like about the game for me to think about. Man, I hate it when they only have nice things to say!

It seems a common theme between this review and the last are that the mechanics for the game are really good. This is great news since back when I originally submitted In Between to Game Chef the main complaint was that the mechanics were weak. The game has come a long way since then and moved away from the Universalis-style bidding to something much different. The game still uses a power economy, but that economy is built within the confines of ritualized components and twisting narrative decisions. It is a much different beast from what it was two years ago.

A review of In Between (Polish version)

I was browsing the posts over at RPG Kepos and discovered that their Polish translation of In Between has been reviewed, and positively at that.

The review was from a blog named K20 and got a score of 3 our 5 which, if I understand the comments, is a pretty good score coming from this particular reviewer. One of the issues that the reviewer had with In Between is that The Wasteland was too empty and with too little direction. I can’t say I can disagree with this, The Wasteland acts as a gateway in the game. The players meet each other there, learn about the afterlife and in some cases may become involved in a conflict with a demon. While I can’t see removing The Wasteland phase from the game as it is by far the most evocative aspect of the setting, I can certainly see putting a little more flesh on its bones.

The second issue that K20 brought up was that they felt that the demons are an unnecessary component of the game. I’m not sure I can agree with that one. The demons fill three roles in the game, the first is as a threat to the characters. The demons are there to add an element of danger and drama, something that can pose a threat in all of the phases of the game. The second role they fill is as a balancing mechanic. They exist to counter exorcists (and vice versa). Finally, they provide an alternate path for players to take in the game, they answer the question of “What happens when I do evil/selfish things in the mortal realm?” In fact, through playtesting I soon found that players wanted to be able to go down a darker road. A lot of the demon rules did not exist until version 2 of the game, prior that they had mostly acted as set dressing. So no, I don’t agree that they are unnecessary. Players want to have that darker option, even if they won’t use it. They want to know what happens if they don’t try and redeem themselves. If someone wants to play a game more centered around personal exploration, without the threat of demons (and possibly exorcists), then I think they should go right ahead and do it. It’s very easy to houserule out that portion of the game. Perhaps I should talk a little about that in an Optional Rules/Tweaks section. The Polish version of the game actually has a section like that where the translators added a few house rules that they like to use and I see no reason not to add it to the English version.

The final thing that K20 didn’t seem to enjoy was that the game is GMless. That’s far from surprising. Story games, especially GMless ones, are a very small niche of the RPG world.  In this case the reviewer likes to have someone in the role of GM to guide the game, they aren’t interested in sharing that role. That’s fine, not everyone enjoys sharing that role and I can’t hold matters of personal taste against the reviewer.

Those things out of the way, it was still a positive review of the game. The reviewer thought that the mechanics were solid, the theme was interesting and the game was entertaining. Perhaps not to their personal tastes, but entertaining nonetheless. I’ll chew on their criticisms for a while and see if I can make the updated English version even better.

Speaking of the English version: yes, it is on the way. I haven’t forgotten about it, I’ve just been busy with other things. Tweet, the fellow that did the layout for the Polish version, supplied me with some layout and logo files that will make this the nicest version yet. I also have the revised set of rules that was hammered out in the back and forth during the translation. This means that the Polish version is actually more up to date than English version because they translated from my in progress new edition and not from the published second edition. Layout work is slow going, but I hope to have this finished up sometime in the summer.

There is now a Polish version of In Between.

Just like the headline says, the folks over at RPG Kepos that reviewed In Between so long ago have actually gone and translated the game into Polish. This was the last thing I ever expected to come of a game I made in 10 days for Game Chef almost two years ago.

As if translating a game from English to Polish wasn’t enough work, the Polish version of the game is quite a bit nicer than mine. They secured the rights to some artwork, got a nice layout put together, and generally prettied things up in ways I couldn’t even begin to do on my own. I got in touch with their layout designer, Tweet, and he agreed to send me that files he used to gussy-up the game so hopefully I can make the English version look almost as nice some time in the near future.

I’ve actually been emailing back and forth with RPG Kepos while they worked on this project and between clarifications on rules and additional playtesting done by their team the rules were reworked and added to. There have been enough changes to the rules that it wouldn’t be remiss to call the Polish edition version 2.5 of In Between. One of the highlights of the new additions are rules for taking a more demonic path rather than the path to redemption. While I have a copy of these updated rules in borrowing old .doc format, there isn’t a nice PDF in English available. Those updated rules will make it into the version using Tweet’s layout which will probably show up whenever I have a free weekend to work on this stuff.

You can see the Polish version by visiting RPG Kepos, which I have handily provided as a translated google link. If you’d like to just go straight to the PDF then click here.

Vote For Adventure

In my last post I talked about how I had run an RPG via a series of polls. In late December I started up another one of these games, only this time with a Monday/Wednesday/Friday update schedule. I’ve been feeding all of these posts into a Tumblr website called Vote For Adventure.

This time around the unwashed masses voted for a game that mixed together elements of weird fiction, survival horror, and an apocalypse scenario. I went with a survivor struggling through life after a large portion of the world’s population went mad.

So far this one has been significantly more difficult to write. The big problem, for me, is that there is little direction in a game set in a world that is really beyond hope. It’s about survival and it’s been a struggle for me to find a meaningful plot that makes sense. Ultimately, I think the game will end in the protagonist’s death, but I’m not going to force it. I do have a general direction I’m moving the story in, but it isn’t easy to get there while giving players the freedom to control what the protagonist does. In any subsequent games I will be forcing a setting and game setup that fits into a more standard adventure format.

In any case, if you’d like to be a part of the Vote For Adventure game then be sure to click the link and catch up with the story. Don’t forget to vote!

Alvaro C. Vargas, Space Grifter

When I’m busy slacking off from writing blog posts I tend to spend my time as a moderator for a role playing community known as r/RPG. I spent the last couple of weeks making daily updates to something I called the “Play by Poll Experiment” on this community.

The experiment I had for r/RPG was to do something similar to a Quest Thread. A Quest is essentially a text adventure done over a messageboard or forum with one person leading the narrative and the rest arguing and/or voting for the main character to make actions. In my incarnation I created a survey form using Google Docs that contained an update to the story and a number of actions that the character could take. I would then post an update in around 24 hours with a new set of questions and a continuation of the plot based on the votes. I did this for a total of 14 updates with moderate popularity. The full story, sans unsuccessful options, can be read here.

What comes next is a bit of a post-mortem on the play by poll experiment, so you may want to read through the above link before continuing.

On Setting Selection

At the very beginning of the Play by Poll Experiment (hereafter referred to as PbPE) I put up a poll where people could vote on a setting tagline and a few character options. The taglines were a little tongue in cheek with options such as “in space, where nobody can hear you scream” or “in a land of rainbows and unicorns and man-eating giants” and I got a pretty good mix of votes among them. Space came out as the winner, but I couldn’t help but notice that there was a major drop off on interest once people realized their setting choice didn’t win.  think the problem here was that I offered too many options and ended up splitting the vote. This ended up with a setting winning a majority when a minority of voters overall selected it. It would be too much work to setup a transferrable vote option to alleviate this, so I think the best option would be to provide fewer choices.

If I were to do this again I wouldn’t allow for more than 3 setting choices or I would go in the other direction with voters selecting multiple elements which get combined into something of my choice.

On Character Creation

The biggest problem with character creation was that I put it on the same poll as the setting selection. This meant that people had to select from options that wouldn’t necessarily fit with the setting they chose. There are two ways I can avoid this happening on a future poll. A) I could have the character creation on a second page with options determined by the setting selection or B) I could do a separate poll after the first had concluded for the character creation. I think B is the better option as it means I don’t have to create a bunch of options that will never be relevant.

I also think that the character creation I offered was too limited in scope. It consisted of selecting a race, sex, and tagline for the character. Unlike with the setting selection, I think voters were happy with the results of this section, but I think it could have been more engaging. The limited scope was partially due to trying to make the options somewhat generic and I think that was a mistake. I also found that as we progressed through the adventure there was call for a random factor. I’ll discuss this more in the next section but it boils down to me needing more things defined about the character in advance.

On Chance and Mechanics

Most of the games of this nature that I have seen before (Quests, for example) didn’t have any element of chance to them. They were mostly just pieces of guided fiction. I really wanted to capture the feeling of a group of people playing an old adventure book together, like Lone Wolf or Fighting Fantasy. This meant that there needed to an element of chance. Voters needed to be able to select from different options and hope that their character would be successful. I could have decided for myself, but I feel that takes something away from the experience.

I tried 3 different randomizers during the course of the game. The first was a simple coin flip. I asked the voters to vote on the result being heads or tails and if they were right they would get a positive reaction from their action. I didn’t really like this so for the next one I tasked voters for choosing a number from 1-3 and the % breakdown of the votes would be the chance of success. This actually worked rather well, although it resulted in rather poor odds. The third try was much the same as the last, but instead of using numbers I asked voters to pick who they thought would win in a fight and provided three options. I think this was more fun, but suffered from the same issues.

If I were to run another game like this I would have the voters select skills or attributes for their protagonist which I would then grant a percentage value. I would then use that percentage on all relevant challenges that came up for the odds of success. This means I don’t have to add a question that breaks immersion of the story and it becomes something related to the character instead of some outside force.

On the Update Schedule

I updated the adventure every 24 hours, give or take a few hours on certain days. I actually didn’t mind the pace, although I felt like I was letting people down when I was busy when the 24 hour mark came along (mostly on weekends). The problem with this pace is that it ended up losing people. Not everyone visits r/RPG on a daily basis, which is easy to forget when you are as involved with the community as I am. This meant I had a steady loss of voters as the adventure progressed because people would lose interest if they missed an update. I think a slower schedule might improve this.

I do worry that reducing the update frequency might cause the story to move too slowly. I think that updating every other day is probably the slowest you could go with something like this, at least at r/RPG which tends to be faster moving than an ordinary forum. The other thing I noticed is that votes tend to drop off at around 18 hours after the update. This is very much related to the nature of the community as the topic will drop from view rather quickly, meaning people won’t see it. It will be interesting to see how having if having it around an extra day will actually affect the number of votes it gets.

On the Narrative

I had a lot of fun writing a few paragraphs for this every day. I wouldn’t exactly call it writing I am proud of, but it wasn’t so poor that I would be ashamed of it either. I think it was very representative of role playing in that without the context of the back and forth between myself (the GM) and the voters (the player) it wouldn’t be particularly entertaining. The fun really comes from trying to adapt the story to what the voters/players have selected and the fun for the voters comes from seeing how their choices affect the narrative. It doesn’t need the writing to be of high quality, it just needs to be good enough to get the idea across.

 

 

 

 

By Firelight: a campfire storytelling game.

Around two weeks ago I came across someone asking for suggestions for an RPG that they could play around a campfire. A lot of people were recommending games with few rules or dice needed to play, but to me that doesn’t seem to capture that special something that telling tales around a campfire has. At the very least it doesn’t take advantage of that magic.

This got me thinking. I already knew of one RPG designed for being played while hiking through the wilderness. It’s called Sherpa and it takes advantage of the changing surroundings as you make your way through a trail. I thought why not come up with something that takes advantage of a campfire in that same way? I typed up a reply that featured some quick brainstorming as well as a couple of suggestions. You can read it here if you are curious.

I really liked the quick little set of rules that had formed out of that comment and I’d be lying if I said the positive feedback didn’t encourage me to expand those initial ideas. That’s exactly what I did. I took that initial set of ideas and I compiled them into a proper set of rules, changing things as needed.

The most important aspect of the game is that it incorporates the campfire right into the mechanics. It really would have been a shame to not use the fire since it was going to be there in front of the players anyway. I decided to use it in a kind of ritualized manner. Players are given pieces of paper with character traits on them and they are also given a paper cutout that represents their character. Traits are consumable and burned once used. Any harm that comes to their character results in pieces being torn from their cutout and being tossed into the flames. It’s simple, but I think really helps provide an atmosphere for the game.

Another thing I needed to consider and overcome for this game was that playing a game at night are not ideal for most traditional ways of playing RPGs. There probably won’t be a lot of flat and dry surfaces, light will be low, and outdoors there could be rain or wind causing all kinds of problems for things like character sheets. As someone that grew up in the Pacific Northwest I am intimately familiar with these conditions, so I wanted to make things easy on the players. The first step was to remove character sheets. The character cut out doesn’t have anything written on it. There’s nothing to read so light is no problem. It’s still paper and will be susceptible to wind and rain, but it won’t be used unless it needs burning so it can easily be shoved in a pocket or held down by a stone. The same thing goes for the Traits, although they would all have a single thing written down on them. A randomizer was also a problem. Dice were going to be a pain to use because the numbers could be difficult to read in the dark and without a large flat surface they would bounce all over the place. Cards had a similar problem, only they would also be susceptible to the elements. I thought about how this game would likely be played in the dark by the light of the fire and how burning things as a game mechanic was very ritualistic. I got thinking about playing on ritual and I recalled all of the films I’ve seen and stories I had read where people voted with black and white stones or had to draw stones to determine their fate. This was something I thought I could use in my game. It reinforced a certain mood and was something that wouldn’t have problems with light, wind, or rain. To top it all off, there are plenty of stones available outside at a campground or park. It would be a simple matter to gather up some dark and light stones for a game if nobody thought ahead to bring something to use. I decided to go with drawing stones as a mechanic and used a simple system where black equaled a negative result and white a positive one. Easy to teach and understand, which was perfect for the kind of impromptu setting this game would be for.

I now had all of these ritualistic and borderline spooky game mechanics. I decided to go for broke and make it a  horror game. I suppose it could be played in any genre, but ghost stories have a long tradition of being told around a campfire so it really all fit together rather nicely. I wrote the rules with that in mind and added advice for playing the game that kept the art of the campfire ghost story in mind. The only thing left that I really needed was a title that fit the game I had created. I decided to go with By Firelight. I think that the reason I went with that title is pretty self explanatory.

I wanted to capture that feeling of telling creepy stories and turn it into a game and I think I’ve managed to do that. I’ve posted the draft of By Firelight on Google Docs where anyone can read it. Take a look and let me know what you think.

One Lost Update

I’ve been busy working on a super secret project and seem to have missed an update here or there. I’ll post about the aforementioned covert project as soon as I’m able, in the meantime I suppose I should let let you know that One Lost Pipe placed 4th in System/Rules and 4th in Layout/Appearance for RPG Geek’s 48 hour RPG contest.

While I can’t say that I’m not disappointed that I didn’t place higher, I am pleased that I did so well with a quirky game like One Lost Pipe. The winners in all of the categories are darn fun looking games. My personal favourite of the competition was The Conspiracy of Unkind Constables. I thought it was a very well written and designed game. You can check out the rest of the entries here.

I’ve got to say that I’m a little burned out on design competitions right now, but I’ll be keeping my eye out for any more that might be on the horizon.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Introducing One Lost Pipe

A wonder website that goes by the name of RPG Geek recently held a 48 hour RPG contest. What this means is that the contestants have to design, write, and submit a complete RPG in 48 hours without any help. I decided to try my luck and see what happened.

The contest, this time, had each contestant randomly generate 3 words which were to become elements that had to be included in the game. The three words I generated were rat, pipe, and tavern. I came up with a number of different ideas, each one becoming increasingly more bizarre. I thought of a game were the characters were trapped in a hallucination brought on by a hallucinegenic plant that is smoked and a rat is their spirit guide. I thought of a game where an evil rat was driving people insane in the public washroom of a bar. I have a strange mind.

I eventually settled on an a game inspired by the tale of The Pied Piper. In my game the piper is long gone, but he had left his pipe behind as a kind of folkloric artifact. It became nothing more than a myth capitalized on by a pub owner, that is, until it was stolen. That’s when a plague of rats fell upon the city and the pub owner hired you (the player) to get it back. I decided to call this game One Lost Pipe. That’s kind of interesting right?

Mechanically I decided that I wanted to use playing cards. I’m not sure why exactly, maybe I was just sick of dice when I wrote it. Cards also fit nicely with the pub theme, so there is that. I had initially been trying to turn this into a kind of basic tarot system, but after outlining all the cards and looking at it I realized it just didn’t mesh with the private investigator vibe I was getting from the game. I switched directions and went for a mechanic inspired by blackjack/21. It was simple, fast, and matched the theme much better than tarot.

With this game i wanted to experiment with different ideas. That’s one reason for using the cards, but another thing I wanted to play around with was seeing if I could make an RPG that could be played by just one person. I built the game around that, but then I decided that I wanted the ability to scale the game up to more players. I decided to accomplish this by adding a pseudo-GM position called Fate. Fate is essentially the blackjack dealer and when he is included the resolution gets a little bit more crunchy. This was great, but I decided it would be fun if the two players would switch roles back and forth, so I made that the default. Any players that are happy with their roles can just choose to ignore that rule. I also added two additional roles to the game so that it can be played with anywhere from 1-4 people. The additional roles were that of the Rat King and the Reporter. Each has their own goals in the game. The Rat King wants the rat swarm to overrun the city and The Reporter wants to get the scoop from the person that stole the pipe. Adding either of these roles adds some interesting twists to the way the game is played.

Speaking of the Rat Swarm, that’s another mechanic I added to the game to play around with. It’s kind of a built in timer. The game ends if it gets high enough so this game is definitely a single session kind of thing. The rat swarm also doubles as a currency for both Fate and the Rat King as a way to mess with the detective or reporter.

The only other interesting thing to say about the game is that I included a random pub name generator table at the end. I’m not sure why exactly. I just thought it would be fun.

I’ll be adding my game, One Lost Pipe, to this website in the near future. For now, you can get it at its RPG Geek Page. If you like the game then consider voting for it, but please read at least a few of the other entries before you do so. I’m currently in the process of writing a mini-review for each of the game submissions for the contest. I’m posting them on RPG Geek as I go, but I’ll do a round up here when I’m finished.

The Gentlefae of Cremona (Game Chef 2011 Review)

This is the last one of these and then I’m done posting my thoughts. It was one of the harder ones to review because of the density of the rules.

I enjoy seeing the few games that borrow the fairy elements from Shakespeare’s work. It’s a nice change from all of the tragedies and romantic comedies.

I didn’t get stuck anywhere reading through the rules, but I did have to read through twice before I really wrapped my head around everything that is going on. This is a game that would really benefit with a page dedicated to showing the player how it should play out.

The overall mechanics seem like they should work and I like how you’ve spread responsibility out among several different players for everything that happens. I also can’t help but feel that the game would be more fun if only the Major Arcana cards were used. Of course, that would require reworking your entire game so please don’t consider that a criticism; it’s more an observation that drawing named cards is more fun for me.

The glossary was a nice touch. It’s not something you see often in any RPGs. I do think it’s a bit odd you would include a glossary and not a table of contents though.

My only criticism is that I think the game might be a little bit too finicky. This game seems to be intended for one-off play, but it requires a tarot deck, beads, created characters (although not difficult to create) and index cards/scrap paper. That’s a lot of things. To top all that off the rules take a few passes to sink in. I don’t think that’s very conductive for a one-shot style game where players may not have even planned to play the game and have fallen back on it because someone couldn’t make it or as a break from whatever their regular game is. My earlier suggestion of including an example of play could help alleviate that, as could including some of the necessary components in the document to be cut out. My group usually plays indies as a break or as fall back, which is where this is coming from, and I fear that we would likely pass over this game in favour of something lazier.

This is a solid entry with an interesting system and an engaging theme. I think it is a little rough around the edges, but that’s the nature of Game Chef titles.