Observations of the Fox

In my last post, I mentioned that I've started a tabletop gaming club at my school. I've thought about doing it at the last two schools I was posted at, and decided this time I'd just do it. There was nothing much here for those students who aren't sport inclined, so the take-up was instant. 25 kids wanting to game... all wanting to play D&D. A third of whom are girls, and probably half of whom are on the spectrum to some level (where a quarter have issues complex enough that require them being in special education classes). I've run games wth 6 to 8 players no problems, I've done 10 to 12 at a pinch, often with sub-GMs... but 25 newbies. Nope. I don't want to give them the wrong impression of what gaming can be. At first I was thinking that we should play boardgames, and run single sessions with an RPG of some type. However, a half hour lunchbreak isn't enough time to really get much of anything happening. So I'm working on a few new odeas, one ...

I don't often take selfies... ...but I'm relatively happy with the way this one turned out.

Honestly, I've just spent five years retraining at University because my previous career was filled with psychopaths, sociopaths, and pressure to succeed at the expense of the wider community. RPG and game design was always my outlet and pressure valve. I hoped it could be a long term career, but I didn't win the fame lottery and I don't have bucketloads of cash to promote a lacklustre product, so that never got anywhere. At the moment, my gaming endeavours are spread between LARP, miniatures, boardgaming, and traditional RPGs. I've tried fusing two or three of these elements together, but every time I'm working on a combo, some other more prominent designer or company does something similar and releases it to wide acclaim as an "innovation in the industry"...and I get demoralised and start something else. I guess that's where a cluster of my hopes and dreams lie. I'd like to ride the zeitgeist and actually get something out there which inspire...

Yesterday's post  got a bit of feedback, and that's great. It's also interesting to see parallel discussions emerging on various Facebook groups today. I don't know whether it's my superpower of "Tapping the Zeitgeist" at work again, or if those people starting the discussions were prompted by reading my blog. Either way, there's some good thoughts out there and I'd love to engage the area more deeply. One of the great points raised, came from Joseph Teller... " The questions in design you need to ask yourself is, does Age=Experience or does Activity=Experience? " It's an awesome question that isn't really addressed in a lot of games. I'll address it with some instances I've seen over the years. It was probably about four years ago when I joined up with the fledgling Clans of Elgardt LARP. During tbe first couple of months there were teething problems, including a "gold = XP" system akin to the early d...

...basically. Still a lot more work to do on the Can of Beans website, but it's first encounters with people other than myself have generally proven successful. Give me a few more days (maybe a week or two while my attention is currently focused on EttinCon), and I'll be ready for a beta release of the site via this blog.

I'm pretty sure I discussed this earlier, but the new LARP uses bullets as the dominant currency (along with unopened cans which could contain any foodstuff and have a random chance of being off, and rolls of toilet paper). Everyone starts with 60 bullets worth of equipment, 30 bullets worth are defined by a range of starting equipment packs, and 30 bullets worth are freely chosen. There's a massive range of NERF guns, foam/latex "LARP-safe" weaponry available, so we could specifically give prices for everything, and generate a huge list of costs that will need to be constantly updated when new ranges are released, but this feels like a sisyphean task. Instead, I'm running with something procedural. The cost of a gun comes out of a characters bullet reserve, so the better guns have a higher cost. But what factors should be considered when determining such a system. Having more bullets ready to fire (without needing to reload) is certainly an advantage. Hav...

LARP groups are tricky, moderating LARPs is trickier. Especially boffer LARPs, or those where real-world physical representation of character statistics exists. In a tabletop situation, there's an automatic degree of separation. One character might be more brawny than another, ons character might have more knowledge of certain obscure subject areas...and this can all be governed (to varying degrees of success) by rules and dice rolls. It gets murkier when statistics governing charisma or social interaction are considered, when one introverted gamer is trying to portray an outgping character with massive charisma, but even then the player can take on an authorial stance (describing what the character does), rather than an actor stance (and actually role-playing the sitiation by saying the lines and fully engaging the dialogue). It gets harder to do this in boffer-style LARP, not only because it is expected for players to embody their characters from a social standpoint, but beca...

A while ago, I was working on an idea to run a computer driven game where characters were defined by a string of alphanumeric characters. It got a bit of interest, but I never really took it anywhere.  Post 1 Post 2 Post 3 Post 4 Post 5 Actually, digging back through those posts, it's actually where I was thinking of heading. I've been having a bit of trouble maintaining the motivation to regularly upkeep the LARP in recent months, so it might make things easier to automate the whole thing. To generate characters via a basic website, to track factions based on which characters belong to them, and to map the influence of those factions across the map of the LARP world.

It's been a couple of days since the last post. I've been discussing a few ideas with various communities, including game design groups, the LARP community I'll be running with, a few wider LARP groups, and a local NERF group. It looks like a NERF driven LARP is enough of a novelty tnat people are intrigued. That means brand new players. I also showed some of my existing players some minimalist rule sets, such as this one, and they were shocked at how such things could be called a formal set of rules. So, once again we're aiming for a sweet spot of "not too heavy, not too light". Lots of people seem interested in the idea of a formal game economy, and a decent system of development for both characters and equipment. It feels like I'm on the right track. Three is the magic number. I'm looking at three general categories that define a character (race, culture, and occupation/career), and three levels of progression before mastering something. ...

I've seen two common ideas for character progression in LARPs. The first is the point buy system, where players accumulate experience points (or whatever other name the system uses) over the course of play, then spend those points to improve their character, often finding that more potent upgrades have a higher cost. The second is the levelling system, where players gain a level in a profession for each game they attend, or maybe earn experience points toward levels in a manner similar to a D&D game. There are variants on these two options, where some levelling games allow multiclassing, and others don't... or where some point buy systems vary the costs for different things depending on the nominal "class/profession" or "race" of the character (eg. Dwarves are known for using axes, so they get 20% off their Axe skills, Elves aren't known for using axes and might have even made an ancient pact with tree spirits to avoid using them, so they pay 20% mor...

In the LARP I've been running for the past two years, I introduced an economy that I called Soul Notes. The idea behind felt pretty simple to me. Originally the game that we based our LARP on used a series of skills that automatically worked, but could only be used once per game. If you wanted to use "diplomacy", you had to have an appropriate skill card with your name on it. You flashed the card in the middle of a deal-making session, and either the opponent agreed with you or they lost a life. It all felt a bit heavy handed and trite to me; so when we broke away, I shook things up a bit. My variant developed an "economy of fate" which gave everyone 5 "soul notes". These notes reflected agency in the world, and were used with a range of skills, including Diplomacy, Picking Locks, Escape, and other things like activating magic items. A player could indicate how much they of this fate energy they want to infuse their action with, while their target ...

I think a setting lures people in when it has evocative names associated with it. These names might be places, occupations, people in the setting, specific powers. I remember that the first thing that intrigued me about Rifts (back before it had even hit the shelves), were the names of some of the classes... "Juicer", "Glitterboy", "Psi-Stalker". The orders of Space Marines in Warhammer 40k, and even the creatures they commonly fight against, all have names with an emotional intensity to them. The quirky OSR products that are all trying to outflavour one another with their outlandishness, each naming their locations in ways that highlight the esoterica, the psychadelia, or the grimness of their setting. Hell, even Apocalypse World did it with the short punchy names given to the various playbooks. So, I'm thinking about the twisted new setting for our LARP. It's a fantasy post-apocalypse setting. A savage wasteland of super-tech and magic, where a...

Today I tried a variant in my LARP running style...Basically running the LARP as a live action tabletop session. Normally I'd set up an ecosystem of play, and let the players make deals with one another, or throw twists into the session to keep everyone on their toes; but this time I basically split the group into two halves, with one group running PCs who ran through a linear quest of 8 scenes while the other half played NPCs for them... then after lunch switched everyone around. For a group of a dozen players, this worked well and I'll certainly do it again. I don't think the game should regularly shift to this format, but for one off special events, it makes a nice change of pace.

Which RPG have you played the most in your life? I've probably sent more time LARPing than anything else, and for this the most hours of preparation, telephone call back-room dealings and politics, engagement on a regular basis, all point to White Wolf's Minds Eye Theatre. Including the five years I portrayed a Russian Silver Fang Ragabash, as the Sydney Sept Alpha of thirty or forty regular werewolf players. The girl who was to become my wife played the Beta of the Sept. Close behind this was my time in the Sabbat, where global connections led me to portraying a member of the Sabbat Inquisition, a Salubri Antitribu. When it comes to tabletop gaming, I hate to say it but it's probably Rifts. Those formative years at the end of high school back in the mid 90s have a lot to answer for.

It's been more than a day, but here's part 2 of this series of map tutorials. We left with the part where the ripples were drawn around the coastlines. Since my process basically follows geographic elements, the brings me in two ways to waterways and rivers. (1. Following the coastline water theme and leading inland... 2. Using the placement of mountain ranges on the map to determine where streams and rivers flow from, and leading them toward bays and bayou areas on the coastline). Zooming in on a sample set of rivers along the eastern coastline, you can see where I have a few streams starting in each mountain range, using jagged lines to show how they twist and turn through hills that are too small or not strategic enough to appear on the map. Pairs of creeks join up, then these larger streams join up into rivers as they approach the coast. Where a river might reach a depth where sea-going vessels are capable of travelling, I split the river from a single line, to a p...

The LARP we've been running for over a year has gradually grown from a half dozen players to regularly getting 15-20 players. In that time we've seen 30-40 characters, some of whom have come from strange and exotic lands into the game. The more players we get, the more we need to structure the world beyond the immediate environment. Otherwise we end up with anything and everything. So that means time to start naming things and mapping them. When developing a a like this, I tend to start loosely. Then I draw on the ideas of other people, incorporate them into the core ideas, and elaborate upon them. The general idea is to centre the map on the region where the LARP takes place. Next, we have a mysterious Empire to the east, a wilderness to the west, mountains blocking off a wasteland to the north, and a local kingdom to the south. I've worked with one of the other players to develop some details about the western lands and the major cities of the area. I've pr...

I haven't been posting much lately, because I've been making costuming and props for my regular LARP game. The most recent thing I wanted to produce was something along the lines of these. The first couple of times I used my LARP bow, I ended up with welts and bruises up the inside of my arm when the bowstring hit it repeatedly. So I decided that I needed to make something that added a bit of protection to that area. In ongoing use, I found that the bowstring hit my inner arm far less, so I probably don't need the protection any more, but in the heat of battle, with bowstrings drawn quickly and arrows shot off instinctively, the bracers will still prevent the occasional arm hit from the string. For the material used in this project, I had bought a few leather jackets from local second-hand stores, some black, some dark brown, some light brown, a range of leather thicknesses. On average about $6 each ($4-10) for an assortment of leather ready to go. The first thin...

The reason for building the scale armoured sleeve was today's LARP. It seemed odd to run a LARP in the lead-up to Christmas, a time when families are gathering for BBQs, workplaces are holding their end of year Christmas parties (and closing down for the holiday period), but the majority of players assured me that they'd be in attendance, and a few even told me they'd be bringing new players along. So, with a dozen regular players, a few irregulars promising they'd show up, and a number claiming that they'd be bringing some new faces, I had no idea how many people would actually be in attendance. It could have been as many as 20, it could have been as few as 10 (based on promises)... I had to be prepared for the most, because if there's one thing I can't stand, it's leaving players bored. I've been to too many LARPs where the story is based on the activities of a select group of players while everyone else just lingers on the edge of the sto...

With the scales cut and painted, and the sleeves of the hoodie marked out, it's now time to sew the scales on, and make the final piece... ...or so I thought. I had hoped I could attach the sclaes to the sleeve with a pair of holes at the top of each scale, and if I had used a more sturdy material for them this might have worked. But as it is, the scales are too flimsy, and bend too easily with only a pair of holes. I also found that the spacing lines marked on the sleeve were probably a bit too far apart, so that means making some further adjustments to the pattern before sewing can properly commence. Each scale is roughly 65mm long, and 35mm wide, and I had made the spacing lines roughly 50mm apart, this was to ensure some overlap...but there just wasn't enough overlap for my liking once the scales actually started being put solidly into place. So for every 2 spacing lines, I've ended up sewing three rows of scales (basically creating rows of scales that ...

At the end of part 1, we were cutting up 150-odd scales out of a dozen soft drink bottles. Not sure whether this would be enough (but seriously suspecting it wouldn't be). The next stage is to get these scales to stop looking like cut out pieces of plastics, and instead make them look like polished pieces of metal, or insect chitin, or some other material from which our armour is made (in the context of the game) at the moment, this project is proof of concept, so I'm taking a deliberately simple course of action. I've considered that later repetitions of this armour might see every scale painted with a dark green vein, then lighter green to represent a series of leaves, but for the moment, a simple silver will suffice. Painting Step The silver needs to be protected from the hits of the swords, so I'm going to use one of the properties of the material to it's advantage...that being its transparency. I'm going to paint the underside of the scales. Thus givi...