Moments In Annalise

Here’s the (filled-out) play aid that I threw together for the JiffyCon Boston playtest of Annalise. Click for full size.

Whenever you get into a moment in the game, the group generates an array of possible achievements and consequences that could come out of the moment. If you read down the paper, you can kinda see the flow of the game based on which achievements and consequences were on hand for the various moments. Which is hella cool!

I plan to revise it into something a little easier to parse at the table (probably with little circles or boxes for assigning dice, with the chart at the bottom that tells you which number means which either relegated to a different play aid kinda thing, or integrated into the sheet in a less obtrusive manner).

Anyway, something I’ve been meaning to post for awhile. In general life news, we’re at the end of the season at the shop I work at, so we’re in the big final build crunch. Lot’s of overtime in the next two weeks, but no free time a’tall. I am waiting on the proofs for the next printing of carry, though, so that is probably the next thing I’ll be posting about.

Also, news soon about my booth at Gen Con!

JiffyCon Boston 08

Wow, what a great time!

This my first time co-sponsoring an event (along with Dev) and it went pretty darn smoothly. We had a good attendance of 30+, including peeps from far-flung NYC and New Jersey (thanks for making the trip, yo!) as well as locals and many representative from Western Mass. We even had more people than games in our morning slot, and Dev got to run a playtest of his game The Dance and the Dawn. So it was, like, Boston designer playtest day, between that, my Annalise, and Jonathon’s Geiger Counter.

I facilitated a very solid playtest game of Annalise in the morning, and played Misspent Youth (again, a playtest) in the afternoon. I think Rob got some good feedback out of that game, so that’s a nice feeling.

And I saw friends and had a good solid chunk of social time! Shreyas and Elizabeth were wonderful houseguests, and it’s always exciting to see the friends I’ve made since getting into this fragment of the hobby. Thanks everyone for coming!

And, without further ado, the pictures:

Jonathon and Shreyas have introspective moments while playing Annalise. Prominently displayed is our third sponsor and official morning fuel of JiffyCon, Dunkin’ Donuts. In the background are Melissa, Kat and someone I can’t make out playing the Dance and the Dawn.

Adam Flynn winds up for another knockout punch while running Spirit of the Century! for a full and (from what I was overhearing at the time) enthusiastic table.

There were some kind folks present who have been filming a documentary on Pandemonium, the game store that graciously provided our venue for JiffyCon. They came by and filmed a couple games and did a couple of interviews, and were generally cool people. Yay, JiffyCon on film! I’ll be sure to put a link when the thing is available.

Two friendly fellows whose names I, unfortunately, don’t remember (sorry guys! though, they were playing characters by the names of Sam and Cornelius, respectively) flank Eppy as he poses for me. Ah, always posing for me, thats my Epidiah. We were playing Misspent Youth, by the way.

My Misspent Youth character sheet and notes.

Emily Care Boss playing Shooting the Moon with John and Deanne Adams. John is aghast at the dastardly deeds of Emily’s shootin’ fingers.

Shreyas runs a playtest of Mist Robed Gate for a packed and super-boisterous table. There were tears AND Kung Fu. Most excellent.

So, again, thanks everyone for coming! It was a blast!

Fighting Competition

So, something I think I try in almost all of my designs is to have competition be a thing. Like, there are rewards there for you to mess with other peoples characters, even though you all are also cooperating with each other to make fun.

And it’s something that I always toss out after playtesting, because it always feels weird and forced to me, and I don’t actually like playing with that dynamic!

So, in Annalise, the downward pressure is now purely mechanical, I think. Even getting a lot of what you want out of a given moment will drain your resources (heh, drain, vampires, get it?!), and I think you will always have to be measuring your replenishing resource against whats happening in the fiction. I hope. Play will tell.

Anyway, I’m working on finishing the current draft for JiffyCon, and I think a last piece that I really like just fell into place. See, in the first (well, technically second) part of play, it is certainly possible that you will hit 0 in at least one of your core stats. What that means in the fiction is that the Vampire gains some kind of hold over you (be it mystical, emotional, mind control, whatever). This can potentially happen multiple times, though I don’t see it happening much more than twice unless you want it to happen to your character.

The last (well, technically second-to-last) part of play is about confronting the Vampire. And I was all “so, how should that thing about the Vampires hold over you matter once you actually confront the bastard?”. And I came up with this little slightly baroque thing where you have a consequence (any moment has both consequences and achievements) that is automatically added to any moment during your confrontation with the Vampire. This consequence says “You give in to the Vampire.” Mechanically, if you have no holds on you, it’s present but it is guaranteed not to happen unless someone else at the table rerolls it on purpose, and it becomes more mechanically likely the more holds the Vampire has over you.

It’s a little pure system thing that I think (and hope) will really push the core arc of the game without having to force the people at the table to compete with each other. You can all get along great and really wanna help each other out, and it’s still a possible threat to everyone, all the time.

I hope it works! We’ll see soon!

Don’t Hold Back

I hope somebody tells me when I sell out. Seriously. Just send me an email saying  “dude. This thing you just did? You sold out.” I’ll appreciate it.

It’s kind of nice being around a bunch of people who are designing out on the fringe (Walton & Dev & Shreyas, for the record). It makes me feel warm and safe in my standardized/normalized design and business practices. But then I look back at the people setting those standards (Vincent & Evil Hat & Luke), and go “holy crap, I am doing something wierd and strange, aren’t I?”

I hope y’all don’t mind when I name names. It’s a response to the nethabit of never specifying who or what you are talking about. Particularly when yer yelling about trends in game design and publishing.

In happy news, Annalise playtest at JiffyCon Boston! Once that’s over, I should be able to finish up the current draft and get in touch with you poor bastards who have indicated interest in reading/playtesting. Then, once my current Wednesday D&D game wraps up in a couple weeks, full playtest with that group. Super exciting!

A Little Thing

I’m cleaning my desk, and I just found the stuff from my playtest of Annalise back at JiffyCon. Here’s the claims that were made during that game:

• theft
• iPod
• Jenny’s vulnerability
• car
• Piercings
• Heavily Tattooed
• “Victim of Society” type store
• Mr. Mysterious (used a lot)
• Crush (used the most, I think)
• could have been suspended (used)
• Blood (used, I think)
• The Tattoo Parlor
• Your Most Reviled Teacher (used one, maybe?)
• warning from a teacher

So, this little list makes me happy, in the “oh I totally remember where all those things came up in our game!” way.

Exciting Things

First: I played a 1001 Nights/Warhammer 40K mashup last nite. There’s a thread about it here at Story Games. It was an abnormal amount of fun. I think it was cuz we were using miniatures. Miniatures rule. I also got really excited about how Warp works. Anyhow, I look forwards to playing it more!

Second: In an hour or so I’m leaving for Dreamation. Unlike years past, I’m only there for a couple days, and I didn’t schedule anything. I’m looking forwards to treating it like a vacation, hanging out, playing informal games and seeing friends old and new. Yay Dreamation!

Third: Annalise is going well! I’m happy with the new new rules. The only problem is I’m having some language problems. I played with Shreyas over the weekend (oh, yeh, it’s actually really good as a two-player game, by the way. Super-exciting!) and was all “so, this thing I call a conflict, that’s not what it is, right?” and he’s all “yeh, that’s not at all what this is at all”. The best we could come up with is calling it an Event, because at least it’s not wrong, but I’m still trying to come up with something thats right to call it. Maybe this weekend will be helpful in that regard.

Anyhow, I need to clean up the text and rewrite some examples, but I think it’s almost in shape for sending off to people who aren’t me! I have some people specific I wanna send it to, but I’ll also be doing a public call (? ugh, such a gross word) for readers/playtesters in the near future. Stay tuned.

{Annalise} Changes & More Music

So I think my issues with the Claim economy are mostly fixed, so now I have to concentrate on re-imagining the central resolution mechanic. I really liked the thing that I had, but it was something that seemed to either totally make sense or just not click at all with players. Like, if someone didn’t get it after going through the process once or twice, they didn’t end up really getting it at all. So, as long as I was at the table to walk through it every time, it was fine, but it’s obvious that without me there to do that, it’s not intuitive enough for what I want gameplay to flow like.

So I have this new thing now, that doesn’t break conflicts down as much, and has a different way of using the dice, and it inspired (like so many other things) by Otherkind. Basically, you’ll have some number of dice in a trait, and you’ll be rolling that many dice (say, 5) against some number of dice rolled by your Scene Guide (say, 6). You roll em and order them in ascending order, then match the orders to create pairs. So, like, if you roll 6,5,4,2,2 and the SG rolls 5,4,4,3,3,2, the pairs will be 6-5, 5-4, 4-3, 2-3, 2-2, naught-2.

Then, then owner of the higher die in each pair assigns the pair to either Victory or Growth.

Then, you get to use claims to reroll stuff and sometimes shift pairs from one pool to the other.

Then, whoever has the highest single die in Victory wins and gets to say how, and then the winner of each other pair in Victory gets to add additional stuff, complications, etc. Then all those dice go back to the traits and pools they came out of.

Then, each high dice in each pair in the Growth pool feeds into the individual characters experience economy, and the lower dice in each pair goes back to the general shared Scene Guide effectiveness pool.

I think this will be easier to grok. I hope it will, at least. It keeps all the dice on the table for the entirety of the conflict, which should help. It makes conflicts a little more totalizing that I know that I’m comfortable with, but at the same time, the pair-by-pair narration in the older system was something that often got skipped over in play, so maybe expanding the scope isn’t worst idea in the world.

* * *

Anyway, the interesting part: the Annalise soundtrack thus far tonite:

• Healer - Falling Whispers
• Orgy - Pure
• Depeche Mode - Judas
• Goldfrappe - Oompa Radar
• Bush - Machinehead
• Rammstein - Amerika
• Depeche Mode - Only When I Lose Myself
• Healer - Yailly
• Bush - Chemicals Between Us
• Lords Of Acid -Hey Ho!
• She Wants Revenge - Sister

JiffyCon was Fun!

Yay!

There were some serious driving adventures, what with getting stupid lost trying to get to Stow to pick up Dave Younce (who is cool and I hope to see more of in the future) on the way out, and getting pulled over (but only given a warning!) on the way back. If you haven’t yet, you should check out the pictures put up by Bret and Shreyas. Here’s what my morning Annalise game looked like (sans players):

The game went very well, I thought. We managed to get through the whole thing in the 4.5 hours or so of the morning session, with three players. This is a fairly accelerated pace, as the game is designed to go for maybe 3 or 4 sessions with 4 players, but I think we made it work just fine.

Our story was a small one. We played three high schoolers in a small town in middle America, two girls who were friends and thought that they were better than everyone else for different reasons, and a geeky guy who felt like he had to to handle everything important by himself. He has a crush on one of the girls. They all end up going into the big city to see a KMFDM show, with some stoner goth friends. At the show, they see their Con Law teacher, all gothed-up, who doesn’t seem too happy to see them. Over the course of the show, a Mysterious Stranger appears, and it becomes apparent that a segment of the crowd is very, very enthusiastic. Blood begins to pool on the floor. The Mysterious Stranger is very interested in the girl that the guy has a crush on.

The show ends, and the kids are kept from leaving by a number of tattooed strangers who seem to be taking orders from the Mysterious Stranger. The other girl is taken to an abandoned office by a “bouncer”, and the guy and girl (who has started to reciprocate the crush) are stopped by their teacher, who had tried to warn them, and now says that he’ll get the other girl if they think they can make it out on their own. The Mysterious Stranger stops them as they try to leave, the guy (who reveals that he hears voices in his head) ends up taking him out by stabbing him in the neck with the inverted crucifix worn by one of the tattooed guys. They run for it.

The teacher takes out the “bouncer” and frees the other girl, and tells her to run for it when he gives the word. He gives it, and she starts across the club, and sees her goth friends tied up in chairs and bleeding out of open wounds, with a bunch of creepy tattooed people dancing and, uh, partaking. She reveals that she doesn’t think that anyone is actually good enough to be her friend, and she escapes before anyone can stop her.

The next day, their Con Law class goes as normal, except that they get one significant eyebrow from the teacher. The guy and girl have an awkward “hey-you-like-me-huh” conversation, and kind of end up asking each other out.

I still have some work to do on the game, specifically with messing with the main conflict mechanic so that it makes sense to people other than me, but I’m amazed with how solid it is. We had a really fun game, and many thanks to Kat and Melissa for playing with me!

In the afternoon, I played Jeff Lower’s Giants with Jeff and Shreyas. Here’s the map from our game. It’s really cool. I played a fire demon giant and Shreyas played a giant Wolf lord, and we stopped the Eternal Winter from coming by laying waste to a human city with an insane king. The game is fun, and I want to play a long-term game of it, maybe after the holidays. I mean this as a total compliment, though it may sound bad: The game is like being a Giant. Simple, direct, big (in scope and character), and without a lot of extraneous material. And making the map is super-fun.

Dinner was big and fun, and I got to catch up with people and just spend quality time.

After dinner was also big and fun. I ended up splitting off from the Baker’s and going over to Julia’s with Dev, Dave Younce and Eppie, and later Other Nathan showed up. We hung out and petted Julia’s beautiful cats and played Murder Ballad Blackjack. It’s like Baron Munchhausen for folk song nerds. I liked it!

And then homewards, with misadventures.

I feel…not recharged, per se, but more just reassured that the people I know from this community rock, and that I can depend on them to have a good time sharing a hobby I love without needed to engage with all the shit on the internet that I hate. And that’s a good feeling.

Can’t wait ’til the next one.

Update & Some Music

I’m heading out to JiffyCon on Saturday, which I’m mega-excited about.

I’m running a weekly Aberrant game for some friends, which is going well and is scratching all my long-term-established-setting-high-character-immersion itches.

I was playing in a weekly GURPS game with rotating “campaigns”, but I’m sitting the next cycle out. I need time to work on Annalise. It’s, as my buddy who’s playing in both of these games with me and who playtested Darkpages and Annalise with me aptly said, “A different kind of fun”.

Speaking of, I’ll be running it at JiffyCon, and shortly therafter have it available for interested readers, I expect. This is the first game I’m writing while listening to an extensive soundtrack (or any soundtrack at all, really), which has been a very rewarding ritual. So far tonite:

• Depeche Mode
• Goldfrappe
• Rammstein
• Oingo Boingo
• Lords of Acid
• Healer
• Evanescence
• The New Pornographers
• Rilo Kiley
• The Cure
• Sisters of Mercy
• Bauhaus

Though, the single theme song for the game is definitely Bat for Lashes’s ‘Sarah’.

{Annalise} More Playtesty Goodness

Played some more Annalise tonight. One of my players ended up not coming, cuz of a scheduling snafu, but it turns out the game is fine with people coming in and out. We brainstormed some stuff to get him up to speed next week, once idea of which is made of awesome sauce, maybe.

How the game works is, each player has a scene for their character in rotation, and when it’s your turn you pick one of the other players to be your scene guide. The other people get to have a hand in your scene, but it’s basically you and the scene guide until you’re done. Anyway, we have four people, so it could maybe be really effective to have two pairs going at once, until all the characters are up to speed. We shall see.

Anyhow, I recorded the session, which I hope turns out to be as useful as I think it’ll be. We discovered that there’s some kind of creepy occult group centered around mystical glyphs that get carved on people’s teeth, which may or may not be in the service of the vampire. My character isn’t willing to let anyone or anything get the better of her, and she’s trying to figure out what’s up with this cult; Jesse’s character keeps on getting these messages, through various channels, that someone or something is “watching him”, and he’s trying to figure out the cult as well, using math; and Can’s character is rapidly getting absorbed into the cult, though he may or may not end up fighting against it. Pat’s character is the unknown equation - so far, all we know is that he’s on someone’s trail, though not for what purpose.

This game centers around my favorite part of roleplaying, and it’s working in that way really well. It needs some economy fixing, and we have yet to see how the second half of it plays, but I’m feeling really positive. Really, really positive.

Yay!