Recently I have been captivated with Mass Effect II. The world is rich and vibrant, the alien races familiar but different in their own way, and the whole storyline has fantastic set-up. So how can one run a game of Mass Effect using the Dragon Age RPG rules? Here’s what I get when I put my grey matter to some work.
Tags: Game Design, mass effect
As mentioned previously, I sunk some hard-earned money into the D&D 4E PHB, PHB2 and the DMG so that at least when I reference D&D 4E, I know what I am talking about. After some weeks of crunching the D&D 4E’s combat rules and powers, I have come to a conclusion about the combat system. Effective, yet artificial.
Tags: D&D, Game Design, Reviews & Culture
Want to design a user experience? A vast game world? Considered yourself succeed when people began to spread urban legends about your game world inside the game. This blog has details on it and it’s a fascinating read.
Tags: fluff/inspiration, Game Design
So previously I take a stab at a one-roll combat for Fate 3.0 (or Spirit of the Century), and this time round I am trying to attempt one for a game with medium crunchy combat – Dragon Warriors. A quick introduction to its mechianics. Characters have Attack and Defence for hand to hand combat. To hit, you take your Attack, subtract the target’s Defence, and attempt to roll 1d20 under it.
Weapons does fixed amount of damage, but have different Armour Bypass Roll. Armour has an Armour Factor (AF) and to actually hurt the target, you would need to roll the weapon’s Armour Bypass Roll and exceed the AF. If not, your blow simply bounces off.
This is the basic mechanic used for resolving blasting spells too (Speed vs. Evasion) and indirect spells that in D20 would require a Will save (Magical Attack vs. Magcial Defence). With the basic rules out of the way, let’s see how we can have a mass mob combat consisting of hero characters and mooks.
Tags: dragon warriors, Game Design, game-mastering
We have look at setting the scope of the Meta Plot, and explore how we can fill it in. The question remains though – how do we fill in the Meta Plot? I try to offer some suggestions, along with examples. Before beginning on that, there’s one thing to keep in mind. What is the goal of this particular meta-plot you are writing?
Tags: Game Design, game-mastering
Long ago, one of my friends (I forgot who) who explicitly told me that he hates fantasy and fantasy games. Where? Magic is often used as a crutch. Magic can be used for deus ex machina, to explain strange weathers – anything! Be it gods, unspeakable horror, faerie creatures and so on, they have been used to, sometimes carelessly, just to explain everything. “A wizard did it!” “An imp ate my homework”
The line between using magic effectively or carelessly is something that I have been thinking about. On one hand, it is good to use magic to preserve the mystery of a setting and the Meta Plot, but it get tiring when it’s always evil sorcerers, unhinged druids, mentioned unspeakable horrors, infernal demons and unexplained psionic manifestations behind the scene. So for this week, the usual daily adventure hooks would have no magic as its explanation whatsoever. That also includes faerie creatures and monsters which have magical abilities.
One of the thing I have been pondering over why D&D and Dragon Warriors are different in term of magic and the supernatural is because in D&D magic is fleshed out entirely. Schools of magic, meta-magic feats, what can be done, what not and so on. It’s limiting at first, and I find all the explanations suffocating, but on thinking through it, some people do like it. Magic cannot be used carelessly. It is possible to build a challenge revolving around the schools of Magic in D&D (or just see the speculation of who actually saved V and O-chul in the latest Order of the Stick comic).
I can now understand why some people prefer magic to have rules and to be a closed system, rather than an open system where are lots of unknown. I guess it’s no a matter of “this way is better”. In Dragon Warriors, the school of Sorcery and Elementalism are not the only form of magic there is. There are faeries, not documented and not detailed, and what they can do is entirely up to the GM’s imagination. Those holes allow the GM to challenge the magic-using players.
Yet this could get annoying when the GM keeps springing up “this is a new form of ancient magic which you have never encounterd before”. I have been guility of that. So how to you retain mystery and but not carelessly? I like to think of magic, like cooking and other disciplines, have basic fundamental. Work out the fundamental of magic for your setting and let the players know, but allow for variants and differences for different cultures, different ages and so on. For example, a very good fundamental would be the classic Five Elements, or Ars Magica’s arts and forms. Using those as fundamentals, even when a magic user comes across a mysterious form of magic, he would have some clue to proceed. The clues could either grant specific formal bonuses (which you need rules for) or a bargaining chip for certain rolls (agreed between the player and the GM).
Though said, I am intrigue now by how D&D handles magic. The game is not my cup of tea, but having a ’science of magic’ defined would help to remove the accusation that GMs and fantasy authors use magic as a crutch as an explanation for everything.
Tags: Game Design, game-mastering
It’s one thing to say “This Meta Plot…has issues”, it is another to sit down and write your own. I have done nothing really right for the past few years (heh heh) but I did spend some time on custom home-brew settings, so here are my thoughts of crafting your own meta-plot. Feel free to discuss with me as I am not a great author of any renown.
So to go on from where I have stopped on the meta-plot series, I am going to write down my thoughts on writing a meta-plot. Whether the result is good depends on the writer 
Whenever I read through the rules for most role-playing games, I find it interesting when some mention “combat is just a kind of opposed roll, but it usually takes a number of rolls to determine the outcome”. The reason is simple – combat is usually the main conflict of most games, the point in time when your builds, equipment, strategy and cunning all come into play. (Strangely, though, it’s hard to find formal rules for skill checks which could doom a character if he fails just one roll, like falling down into a bottomless pit). Yet I have GMed games which combat take an hour to go through, and I have known D&D combats which went for 2 to 3 hours. Is there a faster way to resolve combat while keeping it fun, and allow players to employ tactics?
Tags: fate, Game Design, rules mod, Spirit of the Century
Why does the Meta Plot exists? It is a question asked by all sort of games – computer and pen and paper role-playing games. The strange thing though, from my understanding, board games always have a Meta Plot. So let’s start by looking at that.
Tags: Game Design, game-mastering, opinion
For a long time, I take it for granted that rolling dice is part of the RPG experience. They tell you whether you succeed at a task, gives the degree of success and add unpredictability and suspense to the game. In theory, during my games, I find that sometimes rolling dice becomes a grinding task.
Now most core rulebooks would suggest that to roll dice only when necessary. However, this is not in the formal rules – it is like more of a rule of thumb. In Spirit of the Century,t hough the game is lighter than most, dice-rolling takes up most game-play time. True, the Fudge dice roll will ensure that over a long period of time, you will get +0 most of the time but because a game usually involves less than a hundred rolls, you get unexpected results.
Then I played Nobilis. As a GM, I feel strangely…empowered…and at a loss. Last time, whenever the player tries to do something, I set a target number, or apply a penalty (depending whether it is roll and add, or roll-under) then you see the dice roll and decide whether it succeed. In Nobilis, you use miracles. But what happened when a player does not use any miracle at all and try to use social skills to resolve a situation? I was very tempted to make them roll dice – except that this being Nobilis, I didn’t bring any dice.
When it comes to a diceless games, things tend to be black and white – either your miracle (or points bidded) is enough to overcome the challenge, or not. But during the game, where the players are trying to use social means to resolve a problem, I feel it is unfair that I do not give them success, or even partial success, because they do not use any special powers. Plus, they put up a compelling argument. The spirit of the game of Nobilis, after all, is to avoid direct use of force and supernatural powers to get what you want. So I ruled in the party’s favour and have to drop a cinematic “powers unleashed” confrontation (though they did well, I grant them that).
With the dice, I could easily delegated that to random numbers. Part of the responsibility goes to the dice. Sure, GMing guidelines say the GM could ‘fudge’ dice rolls now and then, but that’s not the point. The dice also justifies. “You rolled too low dude, sorry, no game”. It helps the GM to make decisions. That I appreciate.
However, as mentioned upfront, dice-rolling can become a chore. So I would like games that have dice-rolling as an optional part of the game, used only in dramatic situation. Sure, Unknown Armies state that there is no need to roll most of the time, but somehow that doesn’t apply to conflict resolution (character vs. character), which makes up bulk of a game anyway.
So when thinking about Qitai, the characters being Wuxia characters and all that, it would also feel strange to make them roll dices for every actions. I am toying with something like Nobilis and still retain the Fate Points aspect of SoTC. Here is what I have in mind so far.
Hopefully, this would reduce the number of dice rolls needed for the game (the spending of Fate Points to get a flat bonus is pretty much like Nobilis) and at the same time, when the GM needs guidance from the dice, he got it too.
Tags: fate, Game Design
