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!

Piecemeal Armor Rules for D&D

So I’m playing D&D with my monday-then-tuesday-but-now-wednesday group. It’s fun. My character is badass and emo at the same time. She’s a rogue/cleric, and so far she’s exploded a skeleton (by turning it) and stabbed a dude in the lung, but then she healed it.

Anyway, the setting is a world that the DM has made up, based very loosely on Dark Sun and some other stuff. There a mountain with a dragon below it, and there’s 7 Giants who spend all their time keeping the Dragon asleep, cuz if it wakes up everythings gonna die, and this whole thing is surrounded by trackless desert, and so on. So, we geek out about cool stuff from Dark Sun that should exist in this world, and piecemeal armor kept on coming up. Like, gladiators with platemail arms and chunks of chainmail, elven nomads rockin’ layers of skins with metal sewn into them, whatever.

So, with some spare time in my weekend, I made up some piecemeal armor rules. I really like them! They’re only a little more complicated than armor already is in D&D, and I think they lend a lot of flavor to the whole endeavor. There’s also a system for piecemeal armor getting destroyed in combat, which is easily extensible to being a general armor destruction system that doesn’t involve any new mechanics beyond what you already use in combats. Which is pretty cool.

Anyway, pending DM approval, we’re gonna use ‘em in my game. I’m posting the 5-page PDF here also, in case anyone is interested in checking them out, especially people with more experience with 3.5 than I have (which is anyone who’s played it for more than 2 sessions, at this point).

So, the D&D Piecemeal Armor Rules are linked right there. Lemme know whatcha think!

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.

2007 Recap

Guess it’s time for one of these, then.

2007 was interesting. I hated the internet a lot, so I think I dropped out of many of the web-based social circles that you, gentle reader, are involved with. I also had a lot of personal upheavals that severely impacted my leisure time, especially in the late-winter-spring-early-summer. Even now, I’m pretty gunshy about posting things to forums, and while I’ve been keeping contact with individuals, I’m pretty certain that my “online identity profile” is much lower than it was at, say, this time last year.

Which is totally fine with me, let me tell you what.

Umm, other than that, lesse…Hamsterprophet Productions did fine, overall. Due to aforementioned personal ish, carry was out of print for a couple of months that it really shouldn’t have been. I think that that killed any momentum it may have had left from Gen Con and Ron’s excellent AP at the Forge, and sales have pretty much flattened out since it’s been back. If I had the time and energy to proselytize for it, I’m sure it would do better, but hey, I am what I am.

I’m almost out of stock of the perfectbound version of Timestream, which is good.

And, while I started poking around with little projects off and on, I finally have traction on a game that I’m really excited about (Annalise), and which will be taking up most of my time for the next year or so, I think.

This has, however, been an EXCELLENT year for my actual play. I think I’ve logged the most hours playing games this year than ever before in my life, and the vast majority of those hours have been solid fun. My brain is bad at dates and remembering things, but to the best of my recollection:

Playtests

• Snow From Korea, at Dreamation. This was with Shreyas and Russell (and someone else? Adam Dray?), and it was really beautiful!
• Misspent Youth, at DexCon. There’s a whole post that I need to make detailed how this game inspired me for Annalise.
• In Frankenstein’s Wake, a game that came out of my BibliOdyssey Design Challenge, by Eric J. Boyd. It imploded!
• Project Donut, two separate oneshots. Can’t talk about it.
• Darkpages. A metric ton of Darkpages - it was my Monday groups game for most of the summer, in addition to a couple of oneshots at SGBoston, and then I ran a session at Gen Con. It’s been really satisfying to be doing longterm playtesting, and see the feedback work it’s way into Jared’s brain and back into the game.
• Annalise, of course. I ran one complete game (5 sessions, I think) with my Monday group, and then I’ve done a couple of single sessions since then with evolving rules tweaks. Every time I play it I fall in love with it again.

Single Sessions/One-Shots

• A couple games of carry, at Dreamation and DexCon. Good times had by all.
• Dust Devils hacked to a space bounty hunter thing. Fun, but I still need to play Dust Devils straight and see if it works for me.
• 1001 Nights, like, a thousand and one times. At least four times that I can remember, and I’m sure another one or two are in there.
• Was my hardcore Primitive game in 2007? It may have been late 2006. Anyway, it was fun. I need to play more Primitive.
• Giants, at JiffyCon. I’m hoping to get a multi-session game of this in, and soon.
• Ganakagok, once at Dreamation and once at Origins, and ohmygodIlovethisgamesomuch. I mean, I don’t think it’ll replace InSpectres as my favorite game, but it is definitely the game that touches me the most in play.
• Oh, yeh, InSpectres a couple times, both running and playing it. KaKAAAW!
• Dogs In The Vineyard, finally. At Origins. Just the one town, and I kinda sucked at running it, but it was still cool.
• Acts of Evil, at Gen Con. Umm, I dunno if I’m up to playing it on my own, but damn it’s a artistic game. And I mean that in the most complimentary way possible.
• Roanoke, at Gen Con. It was sweet and educational to us brain-damaged story-gaming folk.
• A one-session version of The Mountain Witch at DexCon, which worked out really well. I love running this game.
• Agon. Eat my spear!
• The Pool, finally. It’s really good.
• Oh, and Unistat, finally. It’s also really good.
• Best Hunter Squad, at Gen Con. I died!
• Contenders, run by Malcolm on his Rock Star Tour. This is a good, good game. Maybe one of the best that’s come out in the last 1-2 years.
• I’m sure something else is in there, but hey. That’s a good start!

Long-form/Multisession

• Three-session arc of The Mountain Witch. It was REALLY good, despite some interpersonal issues among players. I was superhappy with it. I love running this game.
• GURPS. That’s right, I’m playing GURPS weekly. I took a break in the fall, but I’m on my fourth arc (each arc takes about 3-6 weeks, and they revolve through different genres and characters). It’s been satisfying in the long-term-character-immersion way, and socially the game is awesome.
• Darkpages, though it’s technically been playtesting, took up most of my summer.
• Again, playtesting, but Annalise is a longer-form game, and it was really nice to play it out as such, though I’ve been evolving the rules like whoa since then.
• Aberrant! My Monday group is on the second of three story arcs, and it’s been a blast running this game. We’re all on the same page about how fiddly we need to be with those silly rules, and there’s something that just feels right about using the character powers and such as written. There’s three characters, and each story is focusing primarily on one, and we’re right at the midpoint of the series. It’s fun and exhausting, sometimes - I have to do prep! Whoa!

So, playing lots of games is fun. And totally educational to me as a designer, and just as a fan of the genre. I’ve learned a lot this year.  And that’s what counts in my book.

{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.

{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!

Another Adventure Begins

I began playtesting my new game, Annalise, last week.

From my current intro:

The games is about creating Vampire stories from the perspective, not of the Vampire, but of his victims, servants, enemies, and others affected by his appetites. This is creating the story of Dracula by playing Van Helsing, Mina Harker and Renfield; it is the story of Lost Boys by playing the younger brother, the two vampire hunters and the grandfather.

We did character discovery and the first scene of the first phase of play, and it was solid. I mean, I took a ton of notes, and I have an idea of stuff to start carving away now, and we obviously have just barely began to engage with the economy and reward cycles, but my group seemed pleased with the core stuff and we’re looking forwards to continuing it (or at least I am).

Anyway, I’m polishing up my notes and procedural rules text into a more human-readable document. The stuff for the first phase of play is all done (with copious examples!), and the second “half” of the game is mostly elaborations and modifications of the mechanics for the first part, so it shouldn’t take so long to finish up.

The point being, by next weekend I should have a fairly usable playtest draft. So, if anyone’s interested in checking it out, lemme know!

Oh, and here’s a first draft of the “first half” character sheet. It’s looking like you’ll need a different sheet for the second half, and this one is actually already out of sync with my latest rules revision, but whatever. I’m digging how it looks so far.

Annalise Character Sheet

I’m excited.

Dreamation AughtSeven, Part Deux

Whew. I’ve actually been, like, working on games the last couple days (not to mention real life work), so my desire to get this post written has ebbed. But if I don’t get it down tonite, I’ll probably forget so many things that it won’t be worth writing.

Now, where was I?

Ah, yes…

Saturday

So, with a solid 3 hours and 15 minutes of sleep under my belt, I dragged my ass out of bed and wended my way down to the game room for my 9am session of carry. Surprisingly enough, I had four players; Don, one of many Matt’s, Jeff (who has played the game before and in fact ran a session of it at a NC Gameday event(!)), and Greg.

Don played Daniel “Locker” Jones, with a Burden of having persistant shell shock and continually seeking releif in drink, drugs and faith; Matt played Efram “Chameleon” Osgood, with a Burden revolving about being scared to go home to his pregnant girlfriend who doesn’t answer his letters; Jeff played a trigger-happy and authority-hating Anaconda; and Greg played my favorite iteration of Cowboy so far, who saw the war as his ticket out of the pig farm, but now he was lost and adrift in a country he hated.

Our story ended up revolving around one of the Fodder characters, Elmo “Saint” Smith, and how his general irresponsibility and drug pushing contributed to the devestation and capture of the squad by the NVA. We had a lot of really solid Burden-addressing scenes and conflicts, and the first Action scene of the game saw I think the largest amount of fallout I’ve had yet - 31 points for poor Don to spend killing his own squad.

We had a really solid sequence in a Vietnamese village that started with Cowboy impaling a VC assassin on his bayonet (but he was justified in the eyes of the others!), and ended with I think all of the characters addressing part of their Burden’s and leaving the village peacefully.

Anyway, another solid game, and I was pleased that we managed to hold it together that early in the morning.

I grabbed lunch with Adam and Jeff (of the Sons of Kryos), who I kind of forcibly introduced, but we had a nice lunch talking game design, geek culture and all the wierdness that is the SCA.

I took a double booth shift that afternoon, and ended up talking a bunch with Shreyas and Bill White (Mr. Ganakagok). Sold some games, too, though I wasn’t pushing too hard. Dreamation isn’t a big sales con (or so we thought….), and I didn’t really feel comfortable trying to pitch people on stuff unless they obviously wanted to know more about a particular game. There was definitly a sale pattern, where sales would peak right before and right after the scheduled game sessions, as people either decided to pick something up before they forgot, or had gotten out of an awesome game and decided to grab it right away. During the game time, it was much more relaxed.

Oh, and did I mention that the first printing of carry sold out after my morning game? Which was unfortunate, because some people (Dave!) wanted to get it, but weren’t around until the afternoon, and it was gone gone gone. It’s the worse kind of good, and I should have more soon - but hey, I sold out! Hooray!

Anyhow, it was ticking down to my 8 pm slot, which I had scheduled to run Timestream. But, what with the no sleep and the sitting down all afternoon and the having two intense sessions under my belt already, I was really not feeling the good vibes, especially for a scenario that I haven’t run before and wasn’t sure was going to be fun. But I was all “well, only Adam and Shreyas are signed up to play it anyway, so I’ll cancel and we can playtest one of their games instead!”

Then I went up to my paper on the big board upstairs, and uh-oh…..4 other signups! The hell? After some waffling, I decided that it was actually more pressure to try and make a 6-person game work, and I just wasn’t up to it. So I tracked down those I knew, and made sure to talk to the other people when they showed up, and it was fine. Except one woman seemed really angry, but it didn’t feel like it was because of the game being cancelled, it was more that the game was cancelled. If you get me.

Oh, and the IGE party was in there as well! I ate Kat Millers With Great Chili… and chatted and was generally satisfied.

So, I cancelled Timestream, and played Shreyas’s game Snow From Korea with Shreyas and Adam and Russell Collins instead. The game is really fun, and once Shreyas makes it less broken it will be even funner. I really liked how once all the cards are on the table, you can look down and you feel like you’re in a Shogunate playing silly one-up-manship games until someone freaks out and kills someone else. It’s grand.

And then after that I took a couple minutes to regroup, and then sat down with Shreyas and Kevin Allen Jr to mock pretend playtest the skimpy beginnings I had for The Imp of the Perverse. I had character sheets (well, the idea for ones, at least), what more do you need to play a game? I mean, seriously.

Anyway, it turned into a cool mechanics jam where we played around with the Conflict Matrix until it turned into something that worked, and it really helped in unjamming my head for working on the game in general. I’ve been thinking about it and writing on it and chatting about it pretty much non-stop since then, and when it’s done it is going to be unlike anything we’ve seen so far.

Kevin is the little demon in my head that breaks down my inhibitions and shows me that I can go for it a million percent. Shreyas is the little angel on my shoulder that tells me I can actually do it. And they both lead by example.

Man, Saturday was long!

After Imping, we settled in with a big ol crowd of people and chatted, and we all eventually ended up playing Jared A. Sorensen’s Action Castle! (an implementation of his Parsley rules). It was….uh….”fun”

And then I went to sleep.

Sunday

Woke up, went out to breakfast with Mayuran and Kevin and Terry, who I had seen around but not really met, and it was nice to kinda talk to her a bit. Then I had to get stuff together, and track down Mr. Keith Senkowski and practically force money down his throat in order to buy a great print of one of the images on this page (4th from the right on the top).

And then a long string of goodbyes and promises to get down to NYC to see people in the not-so-distant future.

One 3-hour car ride with Ben Lehman later, I was dropping him off and picking up my girlfriend from the airport in Providence, and that was the end of my Dreamation.

Whew.