I’m working on the rules, but I want to design in the open so that I can get feedback and suggestions. Here are my base concepts for the game:

1. This will be a LARP in the American Theatrical style. No foam weapons, and the game runs similarly to a tabletop roleplaying game.
2. Sessions take approximately four hours and can be linked into an ongoing game.
3. The game can be played with minimal intervention from a Game Master, although an organizer may help with bookkeeping.
4. The game can be played while standing and moving around, with limited interference from out-of-character mechanics.
5. Direct combat is not useful. Any victories or defeats will happen through social interaction.
6. Special in-character skills or abilities may help a character, but they will not take the place of social intrigue.
7. While a player’s strategy and charisma will be helpful, a player lacking social skills or cleverness can still have fun and influence things.

My idea so far is a combination of concepts from the card game Whist, the TV show Survivor, and the mancala game Oware.

Read the rest of Courtly Intrigue LARP Rules Part 1...

Games take a set of rules describing how things work, and they apply those rules to a world state to determine how that world changes over time. Sometimes the rules are very simple; “Snakes and Ladders” has about four rules. Sometimes, they are extraordinarily complex; World of Warcraft has rules that govern the actions and interactions of thousands of actors at once, with each actor having maybe a hundred different ways to affect the progress of the simulation. All games, however, share these fundamental attributes: they simulate the changes in a system over time using a set of rules.

Inherent in their status as a simulation is the fact that games are abstractions. No simulation can be an exact model of real life. Therefore, games use only a subset of the rules present in the systems they simulate. Sometimes, games simulate the real world: Roller Coaster Tycoon simulates the everyday workings of a theme park. Sometimes, they simulate a fantastic world: Morrowind is a simulation of the fictional fantasy island of Vvardenfell. Sometimes, they simulate an abstract world: Conway’s “Game of Life” simulates a world composed of either a grid of unicellular organisms, or a world of multicellular organisms with a very strange way of living. In all these cases, however, the designers of the game have chosen which rules to include in the simulation and which to abstract away. Roller Coaster Tycoon does not require the player character to get sleep. Morrowind allows the PC to eat, but does not require it. The “Game of Life” uses a very limited set of rules.

What distinguishes a game from, say, the sort of airflow simulation used by aerospace engineers? Player interaction. In games, players can modify the progress of the simulation. They can change the starting parameters, or choose what an actor will do, or even modify the rules of the simulation as it progresses. It is this interactivity that is essential to the nature of games. Games simulate worlds, but their most important property is that they allow the player to affect the simulation. It is from this ability that goals emerge, that agency arises, that fun appears. Games are simulations with life.

The Cam is not the only global LARP campaign around; One World By Night is another organization that runs a similar campaign for the old World of Darkness setting, for example. As far as I know, though, the Cam is the largest global LARP around. A global campaign means that local games are connected to games across the US and the world, so that I can go on a trip to California and use the character I play in Charlotte to a Camarilla game there. Events that occur in Alabama can affect nearby locations, and there are periodic conventions where players and characters from all over the world come to play in a single game. This results in all sorts of interesting consequences and annoyances.

Read the rest of A Global Chronicle...

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon, Zekleinenezzar, who had taken over their town. They took refuge in an abandoned fortress overlooking the abandoned city of Decolay, which has been taken over by kenku, goblins, and possibly other forces. They returned from a trip to the dream world to find kobold worshipers of the dragon making advances on the fortress.

The party consists of:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner; he is branded Etzlojek the Traitor by the attacking kobolds
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard with a penchant for shapechanging spells
Donaar, dragonborn warlock and enemy of dragons, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, stalwart dwarven fighter grossed out by bugs, who was visiting family in town and seems to have vampire heritage
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is level five.

Read the rest of Dream Project 5 – The Battle for the Fortress...

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon, Zekleinenezzar, who had taken over their town. They took refuge in an abandoned fortress overlooking the abandoned city of Decolay, which has been taken over by kenku, goblins, and possibly other forces. The fortress itself has the power to transport them to a dream world where a scholar named Sampa seems to be guiding them from the past.

The party consists of:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard with a penchant for shapechanging spells
Donaar, dragonborn warlock and enemy of dragons, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, stalwart dwarven fighter grossed out by bugs, who was visiting family in town and seems to have vampire heritage
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is level four.

I’m curious about something before we begin. Are these adventure summaries interesting to anyone except me and my players? I’ll probably keep posting them regardless, but I’d like to know if any readers not involved with the campaign enjoy these.

Read the rest of Dream Project 4 – Attacks on Two Cities...

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon who had taken over their town. They arrived at their theoretical refuge to find the city of Decolay in ruins, and camped in an abandoned fortress overlooking the town. The fortress seemed to be able to transport people into long-lost dreams in their sleep, where the party was guided by a tiefling scholar named Sampa. The next morning, the party made an alliance with a kenku tribe, the Ravencrows, living near the southern edge of the city, and explored an old botanical laboratory.

The party consists of:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard
Donaar, dragonborn warlock and enemy of dragons, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, stalwart dwarven fighter grossed out by bugs, who was visiting family in town and seems to be developing vampiric tendencies
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is level three.

Read the rest of Dream Project 3 – The Kidnapped Farmer...

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon who had taken over their town. They arrived at their theoretical refuge to find the city of Decolay in ruins, and took refuge in an empty, abandoned fortress overlooking the town. The purpose of some of the strange structures there was revealed when the party found themselves sharing a dream, where they encountered the private demons of a long-dead eladrin noblewoman and saw echoes of a tiefling scholar named Sampa.

The dream was experienced by five people:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard
Donaar, dragonborn warlock, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, stalwart dwarven fighter grossed out by bugs, who was visiting family in town
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is level two. Note that I began doubling experience at this point.

Read the rest of Dream Project 2 – Exploring Decolay...

The bittersweet mood, morbid theme, and cool antagonists reminded me of shows like Angel, Dead Like Me, and Death Note. So I decided that I wanted my campaign to run like an episodic, ensemble-cast television show. I also wanted to explore giving players more control over the game, while maintaining primary authorship as GM; tossing a strong flavor of the indie RPG into a traditional system. As a result, I’m using two techniques: Episode Previews and Cutscenes.

Read the rest of The RPG Campaign as Episodic TV: Two Techniques...

When we last left our game, the citizens of Meersha had fled a dragon who had taken over their town, heading north to the city of Decolay, which had been out of contact for years. When they arrived, in the midst of a thunderstorm, they found the city partly burned, with scattered fires and little signs of life.

The caravan was guarded by five people:
Etzlojek, kobold rogue and lover of fine things, adopted by the town’s general store owner
Eva, student of the local ritual mage and magic shop owner, who seems like a perfectly normal human wizard
Donaar, dragonborn warlock, who ended up in town after his home city was overrun by undead
Diesa, dwarven fighter, who was visiting family in town
Sully, formerly-retired half-elf paladin of Erathis and party NPC, who ran the tavern in Meersha.

This is the second half of level one.

Read the rest of Dream Project 1.5: The Fortress of Dreams...

For a while, I’ve wanted to run a tabletop game where the play shifted between a dark, gritty, waking struggle for survival and a wondrous, fanciful dream world that the player characters entered when they slept. This is not that campaign, but it uses the “dream world” motif that I’ve incorporated into several of my games. Below the fold, I’ll give a summary of the first part of the campaign for those who are interested.

Before then, however, I should discuss my current feelings on D&D4e. First, the combat system is a lot of fun and very slick, but it requires a lot of effort and attention to keep it from becoming a tactical strategy game. In the game so far, players basically just say “I’m using Scorching Burst” or “I’ll do a Deft Strike.” I much prefer a game where players describe their actions with more flavor and color, and often do actions that aren’t straight from their power list. I’ll work to encourage this in the future.

Second, I still don’t have a handle on Skill Challenges. They make sense on paper: a way to structure non-combat encounters to have the same randomness, flow, and structure as combat encounters. However, in practice they feel very clunky. Twice I’ve had a single character take lead on a major NPC conversation, and instead of having them make repeated Diplomacy checks, I’ve just roleplayed it out. Maybe I need to make the Skill Challenge mechanics more explicit; maybe I need to abandon them altogether.

Finally, the XP system feels slow. Ten encounters between levels is a lot. I’ll be giving double experience in 4e in the future, just to restore a sense of progression to the game.

Now, for the story so far. This is the first half of level 1.

Read the rest of Dream Project 1.0: The Flight from Zekleinenezzar...

Clearly, I’m trying to set up a dilemma here. This formula could be a shortcut to mortality for the player characters, but it is very dangerous; not only could it kill you, but it can also create new monsters to make everyone’s life more difficult. As a GM, when you set up this sort of dilemma, you want to create inter-player tension and discussion. I think I succeeded. At the end of this week’s session, the player characters sat down and discussed the dilemma in detail, and they each had interesting perspectives.

One character, a loner soldier and sometimes thief, wanted nothing to do with the formula. Screw the alchemy, screw the existing monsters, just get the hell out of town. Another, a naive tinkerer with Tesla’s right hand, was all for trying the formula for himself. Build a cage around the experiment area, sure, shoot him before he turns into a monster, but he wanted to take the chance. Finally, the flighty con artist of the group had a brainstorm. The tinkerer can try the formula, and if it works (and maybe even if it doesn’t), the surviving party members can sell the formula to other Prometheans. With the promise of money, the soldier was won over, and a plan is in place… for now.

As a GM, I get the most amount of glee from when players are deliberating over these sorts of interesting choices. If the choice is easy, it’s not providing the players much (high-level) agency. Only when a decision is difficult — when there is no clear “right” alternative — are the players truly choosing their own path through the narrative. And if there’s inter-PC conflict in the decision process, then that just makes my job more of a success.

So for now, I’m feeling good about my campaign. We’ll see how next session goes.

This world is not as it should be. There is no truth. Reality is what we believe it to be. If you think you can fly, then that flight is real to you. Others may see you plummet and die, but you might live on, soaring above the clouds. Anyone can dream, but it takes someone special to make those dreams real.

Here is the release of my May game: LORE, the Lightweight Omnipotent Roleplaying Engine, and its first sourcebook, Belief. Together, they form my first tabletop roleplaying game system.

LORE is an attempt to address some of the common problems with tabletop RPGs. It has an interesting dice system; a quick, easy, and original character creation system; and a system that’s lightweight, because roleplaying happens beyond the rules.

Belief is a game about changing reality, about subjective viewpoints, and about the search for a better world. It owes heavy debts to other sources, but it is its own being.

Download LORE and Belief.

Both of these books are beta releases. They have been playtested, but not enough for me to say they’re finished. Please, read them, play them, and comment with anything you think I did especially right or that I could change for the better. I’ve provided them in bookmarked PDFs slavishly laid out for optimal printing at your local print shop, and they’re released under a Creative Commons by-nc-sa 3.0 License.

These are just the initial releases; I wanted to get them out and in people’s minds so that I could start getting feedback. Expect extras like quick reference sheets and maybe an adventure or three in the coming weeks and months.

There are two classic responses to this issue. The first is the author-is-king approach: refuse to go along, chastise or punish the characters, and mold them to Your Story. This, of course, ends with an adversarial player-game master relationship and probably some grumpy folks in your house where they can break your stuff if they want. The second response is the players-are-god approach: let the players have the sort of fun that they want to, and adapt accordingly. This can end in a muddled mess, where adversaries planned to be scary and bad end up being too hard to kill and trying too hard to be funny.

I’m trying to reach a middle ground. I’ll present the players with the world more-or-less as it was originally intended. Vampire princes will be grumpy, monsters will be scary. The players, however, can be as cheery and carefree about it as they want. I’ll feed them straight-men for their jokes all day long, including burly bikers named Jim and long-suffering, maybe over-indulgent vamp princes. But when it comes to conflict, I’ll expect them to match their humor with actions.

In a sense, I’m turning my game into a Marx Brothers film. The players aren’t nearly as silly or disruptive as Groucho, but I’m going to aim for the same feel: NPCs will play it straight, but indulge the PCs their jokes and play around a bit. As in Duck Soup, it may all end with the walls shot to pieces and the characters wisecracking about it, but I’m going to try and enable silly, humorous play within a darker, more serious framework.

I’d love to hear what you think! Comment if you have any opinions on the things I discuss in this episode.

Case in point: I’ve just started up a campaign of Promethean. It opens with the player characters being drawn to a mysterious, sprawling house, where they discover an otherworldly being called a qashmal who dispenses a cryptic riddle.

This is the second time I’ve run the beginning of this campaign with different players each time. The first group did what I expected: they searched the building top to bottom for clues, then proceeded to follow up on the riddle. This latest group, however, decided against that.

Read the rest of Never According to Plan...

Read the rest of The Eye of Boccob...

As with digital games, playtesting is the only way to really get a feel for a tabletop roleplaying system. Some systems look great on paper, but don’t do so well at the gaming table. Conspiracy X‘s revised edition (I haven’t played 2.0) is one of these. It’s a great setting, with some unique mechanics, but the basic rolling is a nightmare when you actually try it out. So even though I’d done brute-force statistical analysis of LORE‘s dice-rolling, it was only in play that I could get a real test. So how’d it turn out?

Read the rest of First LORE Playtest...

Many tabletop roleplaying games and many digital games have a game mechanic called the “critical roll.” With this mechanic, a particularly good skill roll, say a 20 on a 20-sided die, can be a “critical hit,” which is better than a normal success. Likewise, a roll of 1 on a 20-sided die could be a “critical failure,” a “critical miss,” a “fumble,” or a “botch.” Critical failures result in an especially bad outcome.

Critical rolls typically represent the fickle hand of luck. Even in a game where randomness determines every important outcome, it is possible for characters to get especially lucky or unlucky. Sometimes, that arrow flies just right and hits the dragon right in the eye. Critical hits are often a cause for celebration among tabletop roleplayers, and critical misses are moments of frustration and (usually good-natured) anger at the game and the game master. Many digital games that use tabletop RPG-like mechanics also use critical roll systems. Notably, the action-focused game Team Fortress 2 also incorporates this mechanic in the form of random critical shots, which do more damage than normal shots and are more likely the more damage a player does.

Like many tabletop roleplayers, I’m working on a roleplaying system of my own, called LORE. During the development process, I’ve done a lot of thinking about a lot of the common elements of tabletop RPGs, and critical rolls has been one that I’ve focused on. I’ve decided that critical rolls have a part to play in game mechanics, but that there are many pitfalls that should be avoided. Here are my thoughts.

Read the rest of Fumbling Critical Rolls and the LORE Approach...

Tabletop roleplaying games, as I’ve mentioned before, can adapt to players’ actions much more easily and completely than digital games. This is due mostly to the GM‘s ability to roll with the punches and make up stuff in response to an unexpected path taken by the party. Since the origin of tabletop roleplaying games, the roleplaying proper, that is, the social interaction, character quirks, and people-focused play, has been largely separate from the rules. Tabletop RPG rules focus on things like combat, non-social conflict resolution, and supernatural powers. All the fluffy social and character-building stuff is allowed to just occur, with the rules keeping out of its way. Sure, there might be a Diplomacy skill or a Charisma statistic, but those are usually reserved for small parts of the roleplaying: deciding if a character’s argument was convincing enough, or just how pretty the elf princess is. Few systems dedicate more than a page or two to rules governing seemingly important things like falling in love or becoming homesick.

And that’s just fine. Combat, magic, disabling booby traps: these are things that most of us will never experience, things which are nice to have codified and defined for easy processing. Social behavior, however, is something that’s familiar to every tabletop gamer. Even the most reclusive, introverted dice-roller has the experience of getting together with people around a table to play. Human beings understand social situations better than just about anything else, so our creativity is broader and deeper in that area. And I think that’s the interesting part of roleplaying.

Read the rest of The Space Beyond the Rules...

First, as with most top ten lists, there is an issue of definition. What is a game? The much-lauded Chris Crawford has claimed that a game must be made for money, must have a goal, and must allow you to attack your opponent, among other things. By this definition, The Sims, Tetris, and the original release of Cave Story are not games. Many other definitions of games include “fun,” “play,” or “artificial,” although mathematical game theorists would vehemently argue otherwise. Let’s see if we can come up with a definition in the spirit of The 99th’s list.

For the purposes of this post, a “game” is a goal-oriented activity with artificially-established rules that are shared among multiple participants, called “players.” Players need not play simultaneously or adversarially. By “historically important,” I choose to mean “most significantly contributed to and/or were most necessary for the existence of the sort of games I discuss on this site.” As an initial disclaimer: I am not a historian. Now, for my version of The 99th’s list.

Read the rest of The Most Important Games...

This adventure is designed for four 3rd-level characters, and should provide them with half of a level’s experience, or take them to fourth level if you double experience as I do. Note that because I double experience, this adventure contains a full level’s worth of treasure. GMs using this adventure will want to adjust accordingly. The full adventure is after the break.

Read the rest of Morbus 3 – The Dizzying Tower...

In the descriptions, you might see the terms “simulationist” and “narrativist.” I’m using those words to describe how the game approaches the details of its rules. A simulationist game, in my way of seeing it, is one which offers a realistic and internally consistent world model which provides specific rules for a wide range of things. A narrativist game, on the other hand, is vague on details; generally, the players and game master can go along with the story, with the rules providing much broader strokes.

Here are the games that jumped out at me, in no particular order:

Read the rest of Some Free Indie RPGs...

Simple. Imagine the perfect video game engine.

Read the rest of Why Should Digital Game Designers Care About Tabletop Roleplaying?...

This adventure is designed for four 2nd-level characters, and should provide them with half of a level’s experience, or take them to third level if you double experience as I do. Note that because I double experience, this adventure contains a full level’s worth of treasure. GMs using this adventure will want to adjust accordingly. The full adventure is after the break.

Read the rest of Morbus 2 – Rescuing the Orc Princess...

Character failure isn’t always a bad thing– if you step back from your character’s eyes and think of the game as a story, you might even root for your character’s failure at times. Failure can show adversity…, create sympathy…, feel right…, provide material for character introspection, and more. But when you get to the climax of the story, it sucks when the dice come up ones and you’re just a sidekick and someone else laps up the glory.

This is a problem in tabletop RPGs and in digital games. Does the game master or developer/game engine just allow the Total Party Kill, even if the fate of the world is at stake? If the player misses her chance to find a vital clue, is she out of luck? Martin lists an array of possibilities, and they’re equally applicable to digital games as to tabletop RPGs. I’ll discuss how digital games can deal with failure after the break.

Read the rest of Alternatives to Failure...

I intend to make each adventure “episode” wrap up a little story as well as being part of the larger campaign plot. For the players in my campaign, each adventure will take their characters up a single experience level, but I’m doubling experience point rewards in my game. Normally, it takes ten encounters of the party’s level to level up, but I’m aiming for just five. Because of that, if any GMs are following along with my campaign, they will need to add more encounters to keep the PCs at an appropriate level for these adventures. On this blog, I will report the normal, non-doubled experience rewards for encounters. The adventures will, however, dispense all of the appropriate treasure parcels for a four-person party, so you may want to change that.

I’ll try to present each adventure independently of the larger plot. I’ll tie them together periodically with summary posts explaining their larger context. This particular adventure, The Attack on Furrowcross, is appropriate for four first-level characters who have not yet formed a party with each other. It features a goblin raid on a market town. The details, with full spoilers, are after the break.

Read the rest of Morbus 1 – The Attack on Furrowcross...

I haven’t addressed roleplaying games directly on Ludus Novus much. At first glance, they don’t fit in with video games all that well, and several times I’ve used them as a contrast to video games. However, there’s a distinction that I can make that I think makes them seem less distant.

When people say “roleplaying game,” they are usually referring to a rules system, often combined with a setting. To be clear, I’m referring to “tabletop” or “LARP” roleplaying games here. Dungeons and Dragons. Cthulhu Live. Traveller. Each of these seems so much broader than, say, Half-Life 2. While HL2 only offers one storyline, D&D is limited only by the Game Master and players’ imaginations. However, I think that a better analogue for a video game would be a roleplaying campaign.

I’ve run my short “one-shot” campaign, “The Dead of Apartment 4C,” three times. Each time, a different set of players has run through roughly the same plotline, just like each person who plays Half-Life 2 experiences the same potential narrative. The campaign uses the Fudge system for its rules, and I as Game Master have been the referee. For Half-Life 2, the Source engine is its rule system, and the player’s computer or console is the referee. Roleplaying games and video games look a lot more similar when we match a video game title to a roleplaying campaign rather than a system.

After the break, I’ll do a quick runthrough of some of the RPG theory I’ve picked up.

Read the rest of Character Sheets: An RPG Primer...

The music for this episode is “The Acorns. Seedin Time in The Oak Room.” by Loveshadow, and is available under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial 3.0 license.

References:

• John Searle’s Chinese room
• ELIZA

The music for this episode is “Big Bad World One” by Jonathan Coulton, and is available under a cc by-nc-sa 2.5 license.

This episode, unlike most, is available under a cc by-nc-sa 2.5 license.

References:

• Doom by id Software
• Prince of Persia: Warrior Within by Ubisoft
• The Craft of Adventure by Graham Nelson
• Adventure by Will Crowther and Don Woods
• Pac-Man by Namco
• The Legend of Zelda by Nintendo
• World of Warcraft by Blizzard Entertainment
• Prey by Human Head Studios and published by 3D Realms
• The 7th Guest by Virgin Games
• “Rameses” by Stephen Bond
• “Photopia” by Adam Cadre

The next episode will be about the length of games and how that relates to game classification. Is there a distinction between an interactive “short story” and an interactive “novel”? If you have comments or ideas, contact me at gregory@ludusnovus.net.

The music for this episode is Enrique Granados’s “Spanish Dance n. 2” performed by Mario Mattioli, and is available under a cc by-nc 2.5 license.

This is the first episode in which I’ve talked much about table-top roleplaying games.

References:

• Doom by id Software
• Hamlet on the Holodeck by Janet H. Murray.
• “Rameses” by Stephen Bond
• Dungeons & Dragons currently published by Wizards of the Coast

(Note: I’m going to start putting the titles of IF pieces from the IF Comp in quotes, as that competition is intended for short works, so participants presumably intended their pieces to be analogous to short stories.)

Anyway, I found time to see a lot of cool stuff at the convention.

Read the rest of Gen Con Report...