Key Our Cars

Watched “The Gamers” last night with my children aged 10,8,8. They thoroughly enjoyed it with near constant LOLOLOL from them. I must say I’m not shocked given who their parents are.

I do wonder if children notexposed to PnP RPG game play since roughly birth would have found it as funny for the same reasons.

Interestingly due to +David Warren ‘s methods of running a playtest using Hell Wards (WIP) I’m going to add in riff on the fate point mechanic. They’ll be called Karma (WIP) and when a player does something that’s just OMFG cool or fails in an epic fashion or just says something incredibly funny, or stupid, the director will hand one out.

The Karma chips can be burned when a character makes a roll for a +1 success on the roll but as of right now my thinking is they burn them before they make the roll. This makes them a tactical choice rather than a safety net.

Safety nets are fine, things like Fate points where you can just add a success to your roll or Bennies where you get a do over help the players avoid that sense of failure. But they steal some of the tension from a roll. As long as you have that safety net sitting there it’s hard to get invested in the outcome of a roll. But when you have to decide to burn your net before you even know if you really needed it, then you as the player have some choices to make.

And really does every roll need a mulligan? Does every kid need to ‘win’ a prize in the science fair? We seem to have gotten away from the concept of failure being a valid option for any contest.

Hell Wards System

So one (+David Warren ) of my gaming group (+Scott Stone +Laura Dollins +Temple Smith +L. Scott Rubin and myself of course) started Directing his new campaign using Hell Wards (Working Title) that I designed (am designing). The catch phrase for the system is “Because sometimes the numbers just get in the way…”

Overall the system worked well for the setting. The freedom to narrate, unbound by character sheets of numbers allowed for some very fluid and over the top action sequences. Getting out of the mindset of stats, skills and 4 pages of computer app generated crunchy bits does take some getting used to from the game mastering perspective when you’ve been using nothing but such systems for 20+ years. Not having to worry about the crunch so much is though ultimately freeing and gives true sandbox ability to the person guiding the game play. You can go anywhere the players take you without having to jump on a train at any time because you spent 4 hours designing encounters and by the gods you’re going to use those encounters if you have to put straight jackets on your players and drag them to them by teams of wild horses.

Instead of being the games train conductor master you merely provide cues and set up scenes based on the players’ choices. A big win win for everyone.

We started our career as new recruits/trainees in a black ops group working in a near future America. The world has changed for the worst with the eruption of a super volcano that’s created a nuclear winter. The subsequent food shortages have resulted in hundreds of millions of deaths which then resulted in diseases, riots and unrest causing more chaos. Power struggles at the local and world levels have realigned a lot of the socio-political power blocks.

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Belated post, been doing home repair/remodels for the last couple of weeks. But enough excuses.

I ran a playtest using the Hell Wards / Hell Wardens gaming system I designed. It’s a light mechanics, one page character sheets in biggish type.

Although the system is intended to be aimed at a 1950′s era ‘OSS/Dept 13′ type setting, I just used it to continue a zombie apoc story line I’d started in another system. One, because that’s what I had ready and two, to see if it could pick up a storyline based on a more detailed system.

A few places to make minor changes in the system came to light but all in all it worked pretty well. We were able to co-operatively tell a great story, there were some memorable scenes and in the end the survivors got away on a ferry boat with several of them bitten and one infected and in-character no one knows who may or may not turn. The single unbitten person locked themselves in the engine room and isn’t coming out.

We started our arc on the 5th floor of a building with a biggish collection of survivors as the undead milled around the city. The players created their characters adding them to the survivor block, a process that took maybe 20 minutes which included explaining how the system worked to a great degree. No computer apps, no spreadsheets, no poring over lists of powers, feats, knacks necessary.

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One of my rare PSA’s.

http://www.reuters.com/article/2012/03/01/twitter-data-idUSL2E8DTEK420120301

Twitter users are about to become major marketing fodder, as two research companies get set to release information to clients who will pay for the privilege of mining the data.

Boulder, Colorado-based Gnip Inc and DataSift Inc, based in the U.K. and San Francisco, are licensed by Twitter to analyze archived tweets and basic information about users, like geographic location. DataSift announced this week that it will release Twitter data in packages that will encompass the last two years of activity for its customers to mine, while Gnip can go back only 30 days.

“Harvesting what someone said a year or more ago is game-changing,” said Paul Stephens, director of policy and advocacy for the Privacy Rights Clearinghouse in San Diego. As details emerge on the kind of information being mined, he and other privacy rights experts are concerned about the implications of user information being released to businesses waiting to pore through it with a fine-tooth comb. Read the rest of this entry »

Haven’t been working on gaming relating stuff a lot the last week or so. Home repair, woodworking, researching solar alternatives ($$$$) as a long term goal to reduce dependence on the grid. Going to try my hand at building a solar oven, I caught a youtube video of someone who actually bakes bread in one. I have to see if that’s true. I also caught some DIY ways to turn ceiling fans into wind generators using fairly readily available parts. We get quite a bit of wind around these here parts, enough to make a wind turbine viable.

That’s the problem with having an interest in practically everything, there’s always something shiny beckoning for my attention.

In gaming related news, I’ve had the idea for Hell Wards of making Gear = automatic successes with the caveat that when you, the player, sets the number of dice that gear is worth, you can’t unset easily and to use gear you have to expend an equal amount of the appropriate Resource. So if you decide your skill with or just the general effectiveness of a pistol is worth 3 dice, you have to use at least 3 War resources in order to gain the benefits of the pistol. It would make gear both more reliable and more risky to use in high amounts.

I have the first playtest of HW this upcoming Saturday so we’ll see how it goes.