Observations of the Fox

One of the things about post-apocalyptic stories is that you don't know what will be valuable, or what might drive the narrative. However, there are a few key things to consider when deciding what types of items might become more valuable. I've already mentioned the idea that useful items will probably play a significant role in the story, but quite often in post-apocalyptic stories the key items that have sentimental value. In Walkabout, one of the key ideas I had from the beginning was that trade only tends to occur on a local scale. Most settlements are generally self-sufficient, scavenging what they need from if they can't make it. However this limits available options. If a car needs tyres, and there's no more tyres of the right size, someone will need to modify the car to fit the tyres that are available. If someone wants a cup of coffee, and there's no more coffee around, there aren't many coffee plantations in Australia, and imports are no longer common....

  In Walkabout, I'm suggesting that a really nice stick might count as a piece of equipment, but so might a nomadic convoy rig filled with everything you need to survive weeks away from civilization. There is no way that these two pieces of equipment could be considered equivalent in power. What are the advantages of the stick...? You can poke someone with it. You can reach further with it. You can attach it to some string or line to make a trap or fishing line. You can use it to mix ingredients. What are the advantages of the nomadic convoy rig? You can shelter within it during inhospitable weather. You can get places more quickly. You can gather with several allies in relative safety. You are protected from gunfire while in it. You can grow crops in a hydroponics bay You have storage areas for other pieces of equipment  If might have a built in med-bay, or workshop. It may have it's own story and reputation. Those last few  in bold  are probably the important ones....

The core concept of Walkabout is "Mad Max meets Tank Girl, via the Aboriginal Dreaming". However different people will be getting different ideas from the notions of "Mad Max", "Tank Girl" and "Aboriginal Dreaming". The three concepts get us into a ball park, and the general ball park is where any of the two circles overlap, while the specifics is where all three overlap... Mad Max + Tank Girl A world where the technology of the past is decaying but still dangerous in the right hands. A world where a few people still hold most of the power by using a combination of charisma, fear-mongering, and lackeys who don't know better. Vast deserts, ecological disaster. Vehicles play an important and defining role in characters lives.  Tank Girl + Aboriginal Dreaming Talking animals (although in Tank Girl it's mostly the rippers). Things are rarely what they seem at the surface at first glance. There's a funny side to the events, and it's of...

 Two nights ago, we had another "Medieval Tavern Night" at The Press Basement Bar .  It's been an erratic night. The first event was meant to be held in February but got pushed back to March, we had about 18 players, with 3 sessions at 6 per session, and another dozen or so Magic players (I think), who were participating in a card tournament. I ran an open exploration game focused on a ruined city that covered an island. It was once the capital of a corrupt and ancient kingdom. The each had goals on the island, it worked fairly well.   The second event was in April but coincided with ANZAC day, and a lot of people figured it would be called off, or simply had other plans. We had two games running, and I think there were some Magic players again. I ran 8 that night, where a bunch of the players had been in my session on the first night. For this session I ran a heist. All the characters were half-animal races, so I pitched it as Oceans 11 meets Zootopia. It was basica...

One of the things that I've been incorporating in many of my games is the idea of a narrative pool of tokens. I really focused this idea in FUBAR , but it also appeared in The Law , and a few other games I've developed. I've also incorporated it into sessions of a range of other games. Technically, this kind of works like the clock which was the first of the modular components that I mentioned in this series, but it works on a larger scale and sets the flow of the whole session rather than establishing the context of a specific threat or scene.  I usually use this system with a pile of poker chips, but you could use glass beads, seashells, bottle caps, or something appropriate to the genre of the game being played.  It basically starts a session off with a pile of tokens, as players perform actions the tokens move from an available pool to an exhausted pool, or might be removed from play altogether. The amount of tokens still in the pool shows how many things the character...

I think it was " The Shadow of Yesterday " where I first saw this. The basic idea is that everyone has the chance to gain experience points as a group, but everyone also has the chance to gain experience individually. This basically means that players can have their own agendas rather than working together as a team and succeeding of failing based on the actions of the people around them.  Actually, thinking back a bit further, I'm reminded of the experience point table in Rifts, where players gain a tiny amount of experience merely for attempting tasks...but still, in that game everyone has the opportunity to gain experience based on the same range of criteria.  In TSoY, players have "keys" which indicate things that are important to their learning journey. One player might be getting experience from investigating the world, another might be getting experience for killing things, and a third might be getting experience for building stuff. Players can either ear...

 So I was hit by COVID again over the last week... not pleasant at all. Last night was meant to have been the third night of our local "Medieval Tavern Nights", and I've been throwing together something a bit different to the first couple of games I ran. The first couple of games I ran have been character driven affairs, with lots of exploration of environment forming feedback loops with exploration of who the characters are and how they relate to one another. It's been fun, it's been deep, it's shown players that there can be a lot more to RPGs than just a combat session with strategic use of equipment and spells to face off against monsters and other adversaries. This time I'm actually planing to run a 3-4 hour combat session, and tell the story through that. Both ideas use the concept of flashbacks. The idea here is one that can be applied into virtually any game, but it probably works best with one-shots or short campaigns of no more than a half dozen ...

 I've got my lunch-time high school gaming clubs playing Vampire the masquerade at the moment. They've all been playing mortals, and the offer for the embrace is going to hit soon.  One of the things that a few of the players have really connected with is the idea of "Nature" and "Demeanor" in that game. After playing D&D and similar games where a character is pigeonholed into an alignment that's often a vague fit at best, this method of describing a characters underlying motivations rather than their actions, and tying opportunities for enhanced protagonism into the character's defining personality, really gelled.     For those not familiar with the system, all characters have a "Nature", which is an archetype that reflects their inner motivations and agenda in the world. There's maybe 20 basic archetypes that can be slotted into this spot, with more in the various sourcebooks for the game line. If you do things that align with you...

They exist , and they've existed for a while.  In some ways I like them, and in some ways they're annoying... ...but custom dice are there and they do influence the way a game is played. I mentioned in the last post that I like the obligation system in the FFG Star Wars games... here's the bit where I say that I don't particularly like the custom dice in that system, but I can see how it can be modified and exploited to get some interesting effects happening in a game. At the simplest level, that game system offers degrees of success, and then the possibility for side effects happening as the result of a task. However, there are plenty of other ways to do this without spending too much money on an extra set of dice that you'll only ever use for a single game. The down side to this sort of effect in play is the fact that sometimes you need a bit more imagination to work out what kinds of side effects might go right, or might go wrong, when a task is performed. So it ...

One of the things I do like about the Fantasy Flight Star Wars games is the obligation system . It basically means that characters get a leg up in the world, by linking themselves to key elements of the world. A bit like I described with the lifepath system ideas in the previous post . An obligation is basically something that you owe someone due to something they've previously done for you. To pay off that obligation, you need to do something of equal value (or with interest). By starting a campaign off with this, you instantly begin with a positive and a negative, and that gives the story an instant kick of momentum. This is either something I'd add into a lifepath system, or something I'd allow players to choose for their characters if they have something in mind.   I also like the idea in the Star Wars games where an obligation has a percentage associated with it... in 5% increments. You basically roll a die, and if it's lower than your obligation, then you can'...

Over the next few posts I'm going to look at a few of my old Game Mechani(sm)s of the Week and see how they might be applied into different games as modular components.  I kind of started this with my last post about Otherkind Dice , but I'm making it a bit more formal over the next few posts. So now I'm looking at the idea of the Life Path .  Traveller, Cyberpunk, Mekton, Mutant Chronicles, Burning Wheel, there are a few others too... The idea of a lifepath system is to show that a character doesn't exist in isolation, they have already connected into their world they have been living and have developed as a response to the events that have happened in the world around them. Many of the lifepath systems describe a character's life year by year, offering a key event each year that defined their life at that time.  The thing about a lifepath systems is that it can immediately give context about the world where a series of RPG sessions will be setting their stories. ...

The last couple of modular components have been fairly vague, and nothing specifically mechanical about them. So this time I'm going to add something back a bit more crunchy back into the list. I love Otherkind Dice.  I first mentioned the concept back in 2009 , then revisited it in 2010 when I first designed the game FUBAR ( Available for free over on DrivethruRPG ). I looked at is as a concept called Danger Dice back in 2011, and indicated that is was my favourite game mechanic back in 2018. I even revisited the concept earlier this year when I went through the process of designing a game from scratch.  The idea is simple and can basically be applied to most games that have a resolution system based on determining the outcome of specific actions and tasks, rather than focusing on the outcome of entire conflicts. That's a pretty weighty sentence, and after all the academic papers that I've been reading over the past few weeks it's kind of to be expected, but I'...

 You know what I said in the second post ... ... ignore it.  I'll clarify that a bit. When I said that a switch needs a good balance to it, weighing up the pros of the potential advantage and cons of the potential disadvantage, that's still kind of true. But a good narrative isn't always about balance.  I've written that players are often participating in roleplaying sessions for a combination of escapism and telling a good story. That escapism often requires letting them do things easily and show off their characters strengths, but a good story often has obstacles where the characters are underdogs and have little chance of success. Imbalance often swings between extremes. Sometimes the heroes are on top of the world, sometimes they are facing drama, sometimes they have no idea what they're doing because they don't have all the facts. I like to make sure things swing in all sorts of directions, as long as it can be justified by the narrative. 3rd Edition D&...

 Apparently, according to some sources, the first game to do this really well was Sorceror (written by Ron Edwards and published by Adept Press)...but I distinctly remember seeing implementations of relationship maps back in World of Darkness games in the 90s. The idea is that different characters in the story are connected to each other, Points (or nodes) on the chart indicate who they are, and lines between them can be used to indicate who connects to whom...but there can be more than this. Relationship maps can be simple... ...or quite complicated... They can link only the characters in a campaign, or they can link characters to places, and to objects that may be important to the story. The links can also depict more than just a connect between elements of the setting. I like to add symbols to the lines between nodes, or colour code them. In this case, the nodes are groups, because these are the important units of the story. Within each group there could be a separate relationsh...