Observations of the Fox

I love the idea of player driven storylines and player led factions within a setting. The biggest problem with the concept is the requirement for high player count. A faction needs at least three players; typically one to lead, one to act as second in command, and one to do the dirty work (but another valid option might be the one who publicly leads, the one who leads from the shadows, and the one who is overlooked but who gets the faction ahead). This means a minimum of six players for two factions, but factions really start to get interesting with five or more players in each...and cross factional politics starts getting fun with three or more factions that are capable of playing off against one another. So for my liking, this means a minimum game with three factions of five players, preferably more players in each faction, more factions, or both. Once we start wandering down this path, the "non-leaders" can develop their own niches of value. A faction might need s...

One of the concepts behind Walkabout is that it's diceless. The game derives it's random factor from drawing coloured tokens, perhaps out of a tin can, perhaps out of a bag. Three to six tokens are drawn, three are chosen for the result...further tokens may be drawn to push the degree of success or sacrifice further. You don't need to sit down at a table to do this. You could be walking through town, walking through the bush, exploring urban ruins. This really adds to the immersion of the game. I'm thinking that one of the fun ways to run the game might be to take weekly walks through the local area. Over the course of the walk, the GM and the players narrate their way through the story...in game this might reflect the wayfarers taking a journey from one town to the next. As the players walk, they discuss the events from the town they have just left. They converse about how they corrected the imbalance, how they we forced to leave before everything could be fully re...

I don't know if this will work, but here goes...

A fun afternoon. I thought I might be getting too old for this stuff, but maybe not.  Eleven participants, 10 plus the GM. 3 females, 8 males. Some of the participants have their own web series based on LARPing, just look up 'crowblade' on google...'  I'll post some more feedback on the session soon.

So, I've got this crazy idea to produce the actual play examples for Walkabout in the form of a seperate comic book...but what do I use to make it. I've got a copy of Manga studio pro, but that's a bit fiddly and complicated. It might be the end path I take, or I might just find something simpler to use. Something like instacomic . This looks like a fun tool to play with...I might just take a detour from game design for a few days.

So, if we work off the assumption that the universe works in cycles, a bit like a helix. You travel, you turn, you travel, you turn, eventually you think you end up back where you started. But things have changed while you've been gone, time has moved forward. Ebb and flow. Reality shifts between those who have self interest at heart, and who push forward at the sufferance of everyone around them...then it swings back to those who are fed up with the oppression of the psychopaths, they seek equality and hope to bring everyone up a bit at the expense of those above. Revolution, counter-revolution. Without revolution there is only stasis. With only revolution, there is no stable ground from which true progress can be made. With only the psychopaths and self-interested making changes to the world, the poor get poorer, the rich get richer and the capacity for meaningful revolution is diminished. With only the altruists and philanthropists malking changes to the world, the po...

I've been thinking of ways to teach the rules of Walkabout to new players. Actually, I've been thinking about teaching game rules on a much wider scale, but Walkabout seems a good place to start since that's the game I'm rewriting, laying out and refining at the moment. I posted one of my first thoughts about this on Google+, I raised the idea of a game written purely in the form of a comic. I think it's still a valid concept for the right game, but not for Walkabout. There are a lot of games written with dry rules, livened up with "actual play" examples. I did this with FUBAR, and it worked pretty well...but I really want Walkabout to be different. I'm already splitting Walkabout into two distinct books, one purely a setting guide (written as though it is equal parts "lonely planet guide to the new world" and survival anecdotes), the other book a set of rules with loose links to the setting (but more of a focus on how to run a game and...