Tag: gaming

Five or So Questions with Benjamin Woerner on A World of Dew

Check out the Kickstarter for A World of Dew!

Tell me a little about A World of Dew. What excites you about it?

Ever since I was a kid and saw my first samurai film I’ve LOVED Japanese history and cinema. I played Legend of the Five Rings when it first came out and am literally still playing it now. I’ve read and watched a ton of Japanese history and media and played hundreds of hours of games like Shogun 2: Total War.

But there was something missing. In a lot of Japanese Chambara films the heroes are not the Samurai, they’re all the other people: the geisha, the ronin, the sumo, the peasant, etc. There wasn’t a game where you play those characters. At least, there was a modern story driven game that does that. I wanted to play Sanjuro, Zatoichi, Sayuri from Memoirs of a Geisha, and Bob from The Last Samurai. I wanted to play the snow fight in Sword of Doom, and solve the murders like Sano Ichiro in did in the Laura Joh Rowland novels. My friend John Wick had written Blood & Honor in 2010. It’s a brilliant game, but you play Clan Samurai in a Clan. I wanted everyone else. So I wrote it.

Instead of Clan Samurai you play all the other characters: Doctors, Gaijin, Yakuza, and all the other characters I mentioned before. And instead of building a Clan and playing in the Clan you build a City. John’s game is set during the Sengoku Jidai (The 15th to 17th centuries) when Japan was fighting constant wars internally to unify itself as one true nation. My game is set after that during the Tokugawa Era (1600-1850s). Japan was united politically, but it was being torn apart by the rise of modernism and the merchant class culminating in the Boshin War and the restoration of the Meiji Emperor as ruler of Japan. Cities, not Clans became important. Important trade hubs like Nagasaki, Yokohama, and Hiroshima begin to grow like crazy with the influx of gaijin (foreign) merchants from all over the world. It’s also when most of the great Chambara films take place.

And because John’s game was so well designed for a Japanese setting I was able to port over the core mechanics, create all the new character rolls, new advantages, aspects, and create the City Creation System. The players and Narrators build a City by spending Build Points to create important Locations, Faces, and Threats in their City. The Locations all have built in mechanics to drive the campaign’s story forward and help the Narrator decide where to go. It makes the work of Narrating Samurai Noir stories easy and exciting. 🙂

What influences did you use in your art direction?

I had a kind of atypical childhood growing up. Not to get into it too much but I knew more about Tchaikovsky at 14 than I did about Nirvana (yeah I’m old). My mom was a High School teacher of French, English, and Humanities. Every year she’d take her students on a bunch of cultural field trips, and I went on all of them along with my dad and sister usually. 🙂 Some people think that’s weird, but I learned a lot about art, music, and theatre fairly young. And don’t worry, when I got to high school and college I had friends who taught me about Nirvana, Queen, and most importantly Daft Punk.

The point being was that when I was a young teenager I already knew about Hiroshige and Hokusai and all the other great Japanese woodblock painters. One I spent a year of college in the UK I was very lucky to see a temporary exhibit at the British Museum that had hundreds of original Japanese woodblock prints, plus a bunch of other cool Japanese stuff like swords, armor, and a full sized Teahouse. I split my entire Fall break between that and a Battletech video arcade in Piccadilly Circus.

I knew going into this project that I wanted to share all these beautiful prints with everyone who read my game. When John was developing Blood & Honor I was helping him and Jessica Kauspedas, my Art Director for this project as well, with art selection. I found a print on the Library of Congress, and then Jessica found this huge archive of scanned original copies of all these Masters. The Great Wave of Kanagawa is there, as is Kanbara Village in Winter, which was chosen by Weezer as cover art for one of their albums.

One of the major ideas in my game is the conflict between old and new, and I wanted to show that. Traditional prints of modern subjects: trains, people in modern dress, cars, steam ships, etc. So you’ll see that in there. Finally, I wanted art that showed some of the Giri (Duty/job) players can choose in the book.

So three things really, different professions in Japan, my favorite art from the Masters, and old versus new. 🙂

The Sound of Water is your stretch goal collection. How did you choose authors and artists, and how did you pair them together?

It was a bit of a scramble to be honest. Months ago I’d asked six artists and six authors to consider doing a Stretch Goal that would a chapter and chapter header art for The Sound of Water. Most of my artists agreed, several were busy, but were tentatively yes, and three of my authors agreed, two said maybe. As you know, the Kickstarter was delayed from February to May because I was incredibly sick for nearly two months (all better now). This caused some confusion with both groups. A few thought things had happened, others were available now, and some were not. So right before the Kickstarter launched I confirmed who was in, all six artists and three of the authors, and then put out a call for more authors. I got almost enough responses as I was launching the Kickstarter and then the Kickstarter exploded.

Not only did the Kickstarter Kick, but we broke the first and second Stretch Goals, and I got a ton of offers for writing and art. I picked authors and artists I knew and who’s work I both trusted and enjoyed.

When it came to pairing them together I made a couple of choices. I wanted first, people who were familiar with each other. You, Brie Sheldon, and Marissa Kelly ended up being the only two of the final twelve that knew each other, and I was certain you’d make a great team. You two were the easiest to pair. You are also my only all female team with Jolene Houser being my only other woman working on The Sound of Water. Two of my original authors who couldn’t write for the project because of conflicts were also female, and no other female authors stepped forward when I put out the call besides you, for which I am eternally grateful. I’m a bit bummed that we don’t have more women providing their talent to the book, but I am incredibly pleased with all the other authors and artists.

The next consideration was experience and exposure in the Industry. Don’t get me wrong. I think all of the authors and artists are amazing, but some of them have been around the Industry longer than others, and some of them have more name recognition and a bigger draw. John Wick and my massively awesome still secret Eisner nominated artist. They are both big names and I wanted to pair them together as a big draw to hopefully boost pledges.

Finally, I wanted to pair styles of artist with the subject matter that the authors were working on. Fabien produces some truly haunting art and Tobie’s A World of Shadows will be brought to life by Fabien’s art. Josh and Jolene both produce great content and Josh wanted Jolene to take the lead and decide, so that was a cool way to create a chapter and it worked great! Steve is working on Ninja and Caleb has a long history in the gaming industry creating some excellent character art (see his work in Realms of Sorcery the Black Industries sourcebook for the Green Ronin edition of Warhammer Fantasy). I knew that would be a success. Finally, Stan and John Kennedy are working on a chapter together, the subject hasn’t been revealed on the Kickstarter at the time of this writing. Rest assured that Stan’s style will pair beautifully with John’s subject matter. I can’t wait!

Is combat common in A World of Dew? If so, how does it work?

I was working on final edits tonight for the Violence Chapter – Between Two Breaths for A World of Dew. Violence happens, but it’s not like your typical hack n’ slash. This isn’t a game about minutiae, counting Hit Points, and proper Feats. Violence is quick and deadly like in Chambara films. The most basic violence in the game is called the Strike! One player calls Strike! and points at another player or the Narrator. They gather their dice, make their wagers and roll. The winner then spend their wagers to describe what happened even the death of the other character immediately. Like I said, quick and deadly.

Healing is just the opposite, and the Doctor Giri is an important part of keeping characters alive.

While it isn’t always Violent the Sumo wrestlers, Sumo Tournaments, and Sumo Schools are all in the Violence chapter. Sumo characters have detailed rules about taking part in a tournament and bringing great Glory to themselves and their School!

What kind of play experience do you want people to get from A World of Dew?

A fun one! Hopefully, a samurai noir type experience. Being able to tell dark, gritty stories about ronin, geisha, gaijin, and more around their table is what I hope they’re going to get out of it. The ability to bring that experience of watching Yojimbo, Zatoichi, or Princess Mononoke from their TV onto their table.

The City Locations are designed to help drive the plot forward via the expenditure of Honor and Ninjo points. Ninjo points are also something that didn’t exist in John’s Blood & Honor. Ninjo is Japanese for Desire, and it serves a similar but more selfish role as Honor points. It helps turn the stories you tell into the noir tales we’re trying to experience. The quick and deadly violence, the Giri, and the Virtue Flaws are all designed to build on that dark noir story. The deep dive into Japanese culture that the rest of the game represents helps make it samurai. 🙂

What’s up next for you after this?

Oh boy, a lot. Getting the books printed before GenCon and out to the backers. Then getting The Sound of Water finished and out to backers before Christmas. Going to GenCon, Phoenix ComicCon, RinCon, and all the other cons.

Then writing another game. This time a hack of a popular new system setting it in a place it’s never been before. The most I’ll say right now is it’ll not be fantasy. There’s another BIG game design project I’m slowly chipping away at. Or more correctly, I’m slowly working towards getting the rights to design the game. It’s a massive IP that has no RPG developed for it, and a huge fan following that crosses over into the Gaming Industry. If I can get it I’ll be over the moon. I tinkered with the idea awhile back with a partner, but that didn’t lead anywhere. I’ve now got the bare bones for a new system and moving forward with that.

During all that I’ll continue to go to my daughter’s soccer games, play Lego: Marvel Superheroes with my three year old, and snuggle with my lovely wife while our corgi tries to snuggle under our feet. 🙂

Five or So Questions with Marissa Kelly on Epyllion

Marissa told me about her upcoming project, Epyllion, soon to be seen at Gen Con!

Tell me about Epyllion. What’s got you excited about it?

Sure! First, the word Epyllion means mini epic. It is a “comparatively short narrative poem that shows formal affinities with epics,” like the Iliad. I felt like the word literally captured the epic nature that a game about baby dragons should have… And yes! Epyllion is a Powered by the Apocalypse game in which you play baby dragons who must help each-other change, grow, and save Dragonia from the Darkness that has crept back into the land and threatens to corrupt all it touches.

I am excited to combine some awesome genres that I love, like My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Lord of the Rings, under my all-time favorite system to play out an adventure of epic proportions.


What are you pulling from My Little Pony: Friendship is Magic and Lord of the Rings to make Epyllion… well,epic?

When you first create your characters in Epyllion the game can seem very cutesy, but the threat of an ancient Darkness creeping back into the world tips the scales [pun intended] back to epic storytelling. Like in MLP or LotR the players are tested by this impending threat and are motivated to save the world they love.

I am a huge fan of both MLP and LotR so, as a designer, combining them and adding dragons into the mix has been nothing but fun. I wanted to make starting out as baby dragons feel like a hobbit being swept off on an adventure. I also wanted to make the friendships you develop with other PCs mean something, so like MLP’s friendship = magic, PCs can spend Friendship Gems to call upon the moons and perform magical feats.


What does using the Apocalypse system bring to the table for Epyllion?

The AW engine has helped me design a game in which every mechanic supports the fiction that the table can create, from the playbooks to the Dragon Master moves. All of the AW-hacks have been built on such a sturdy framework of easy, no-prep, “play to find out what happens” gameplay that Epyllion fit in flawlessly.


Is this a kids game, a grown ups game, or both? What do you want players to get out of it?

Both! The great part about “play to find out what happens” is that it is shaped by the DM (Dragon Master) and their players. The game has mechanics that enforce a “feel good game,” but the tone can be dark or light depending on who is running/playing it.


When can we expect to see Epyllion out in the wild, and what is up next for you?

I am planning to release the Epyllion: Drake Edition as an ashcan for GenCon this year. It will have all the rules you need to play the game and 6 playbook archetypes. Magpie will then run a kickstarter after that has some time to circulate.

As for what is next, I have a lot of fun ideas burning in my brain that I would love to get rolling on, but I am trying not to get ahead of myself.

Five or So Questions with Whitney Delaglio on Prism

I interviewed Whitney Delaglio about her game, Prism!

Tell me a little about Prism. What has you excited about it?
Prism is a paper & pencil RPG that uses a d10 system. Its world is based on a web comic series I have been working on called Prism the Miracle. There are six realms, each with their own God or Goddess. The Red Realm, and its Goddess that represents blood, and emotion. The Orange Realm, and its Goddess that represents the sun, and storms. The Yellow Realm, and its God that represents life, and light. The Green Realm, and its Goddess that represents the forest, and earth. The Blue Realm, and its God that represents the sea, and procreation. The Violent Realm, and its God that represents shadows, the moon, and death.

There are also seven available classes (Assassin, Brawler, Captain, Healer, Hunter, Knight, and Mage) and seven races (Barbed Fish, Chameleon, Humanoid, Mammal, Plant, Shark, and Weed).

I am a huge fan of aquatic creatures, so I am excited about bringing their neat characteristics to the game, as the world is primarily water-based. I also put in an element system. I always liked that feature in JRPGs. Prism also has a ‘Loyalty’ system where depending on who your character is devoted to, they will be rewarded, or punished for their actions. I put this in the game to encourage roleplaying. The populace of each realm behave in a particular manor, and each realm has its own dos and don’ts. Along with religion, there is also a royalty system if players would rather go into politics. Of course, there’s also opportunities for adventuring, battles, and warfare.

What sort of research did you do or development did you do for the different realms?
When I developed the realms, I kept their elements in mind for their geological appearance. For instance, the orange realm represents fire and storms, so I imaged the realm surrounded by volcanoes. I also wanted each realm to have certain mannerisms. So I developed how a civilian of each realm would behave according to their realm’s code of ethics. Developing classes actually helped me to do this. For instance, I imagined knights to be rustic, and friendly. A good amount of the orange realm’s funds come from weaponry and taverns. So, it made sense to make the realm’s populace earnest in nature and hospitable to others.

How do the classes and races interact mechanically?
I didn’t want any one race to sound less interesting than the rest or only be suitable for one class. So, I made sure each race had fun qualities that would make more than one class selection appealing. For instance, sea mammals have a quality that make then look extra adorable. Any class could use to feint being harmless.

Could you explain your element system?
There are nine elements: blood, fire, shock, holy, plant, rock, aqua, frost, and dark. Every element is either strong against, or negates each of the other seven (ex: fire is strong against plant but does nothing to aqua), save for blood. Mages use eight of them (save for blood) to cast spells. Healers use all nine to heal, buff, or debuff others. Chameleons use the elements around then to change their body type to give them an edge in combat. The blood element is used to manipulate the bodies of others. In this world, the inhabitants of the realms are not aware of the brain, so they believe that the heart is the center of all thoughts and emotions.

What experience do you want players to get out of Prism?
I want them to above all have a fun roleplaying experience. A player having fun playing the game is the most important thing to me. I want them to enjoy immersing themselves, and their characters in the world of Prism. As I said, I wanted this game to be very roleplay heavy, so as I complete the game, I want to give the players the opportunity to do so, even in combat.

Five or So Questions with Epidiah Ravachol on Swords Without Master

Tell me about Swords Without Master. How excited are you?

I could almost throw up, I’m so excited. And wracked with fear. This project has been on my plate for almost four years now, and it’s come to mean a lot of things to me. It is one of the starting points for the journey that has led me to Worlds Without Master. So it’s quite fitting that it should be a part of the ezine.

By the time this interview is up on the web, Swords Without Master will probably be out and I’ll be feeling a whole different set of emotions. But right now I’m in the limbo between being done with my part of the game and awaiting its release. This is a tough place for me to be. I get real antsy and the brain starts cataloging the most annoying of all possible futures. I get in a lot of imaginary Internet fights during this time. History has shown that none of them actually come true, but a boy can dream.

But I am excited! I cannot wait to see what folks make of all the new stuff that’s available for the game since “The City of Fire & Coin.” And I’m eager to start working on the next step, even as I debate what that next step is. I have a trilogy of shorter games designed to teach the best practices for playing Swords Without Master that I may turn my attention to soon. Or I may indulge in my bestiary addiction and start putting together a Book of Perils for the game.

But there is no refreshing splash of cool water like writing fiction right after crossing a massive desert of game text. And I am secretly most excited about that.

Wolfspell was a huge hit. Tell me a little about your inspiration and design process. What made this cool game happen?

Wolfspell begins with the short story “One Winter’s Due.” The idea of two badass sisters who must transform themselves into wolves in order to fulfill conflicting oaths came to me at my own sister’s wedding. The story was an absolute pleasure to write, but long before I had finished it the game designer in me began lamenting that I “wasted” such a good premise on, of all things,fiction. What followed was a mighty battle of guilt and passive-aggression betwixt the two halves of Eppy until an uneasy peace accord was reached with the compromise that both got to use the premise.

It’s been a little bizarre since then. I’ve really enjoyed reading the play reports of Wolfspell. This is nothing new to me, and I often enjoy hearing what people are doing with my games. But since this one started as fiction first . . . it may be a bit like the difference between a composer hearing someone play their music and a musician hearing someone cover their song. Cool, but definitely a new experience that took a bit to get used to.

For those of us newer to your work, tell us about ‘The City of Fire & Coin.“

“The City of Fire & Coin” is a free preview adventure for Swords Without Master. You can download it here: http://dig1000holes.wordpress.com/2012/06/24/the-city-of-fire-coin/
It came out in June of 2012. It’s a bit of an experiment in game text. The whole thing is meant to be read out loud as you play your first game. So it presents the rules in a particular fashion modeled on how I teach the game when I run my demos, which, as it turns out, is very different from how rules are typically presented in a game text.

This method has its advantages and its disadvantages. You can open the PDF and start playing right away, without anyone in your group having read the rules before. And many have done so. But it does not make a particularly good reference book. The rules are arranged in the order you will need to learn them, not by associated concept. That plus having to read as if the rules were being read to you, make things a little difficult to look up. A bit like having to find the right spot to watch in an instructional video.

“The City of Fire & Coin” is meant to be part of a larger whole. The idea is that the eventual form Swords Without Master will take a number of different approaches to the rules, so people can pick and choose the ones that work for them.

There’s a lot more to the game what what’s in the preview, but it gives a really good look at the basics. “The City of Fire & Coin” contains just about all the rules you’ll find in the first half of the Swords Without Master text that appears in issue three of Worlds Without Master. And those are basically the only rules you should be using the first few times you play. Once you get a hang of the system, you can start adding some of the other stuff found in issue three.

What has been the biggest challenge of Swords Without Master?

I fell just a bit too in love with it. I can get caught up in big projects, in a recursion of revision, trying to hammer out one, giant, beautiful, perfect product. You can always add something to a project like that and it could go on forever.

Last year, when I put out Vast & Starlit and What is a Roleplaying Game?, both of which are about 500 words long, I had a bit of a crisis. The concept to execution times on those games were tiny. Especially compared to the four or so years I had been plugging away at Swords Without Master at that point. It started to seem a bit hopeless. Why the hell was I writing all these words for something that I’ve explained in 10 minutes? I honestly considered abandoning the project at that point.

That is, ultimately, why I decided to publish it in Worlds Without Master. To force myself to write a much smaller version of it–though it still turned out quite a bit larger than I had planned for–and to give myself a venue for future exploration. It turned out that last bit was the most important bit. As I was stumbling over my deadlines, it was helpful to remind myself that I don’t have to shove all my design into this one text. I could leave some ideas out for now and concentrate on the most important parts.

In the end, I shoved a lot into there anyway, but it was still tremendously helpful knowing I didn’t have to shove it all in there.

What did you enjoy most about creating Wolfspell – the mechanics, writing “One Winter’s Due,” both, something else?

That game fell together so easily. Or, at least, that’s how I remember it. I think there was a few early drafts that were just wrong, wrong, wrong. But when I hit on what I was doing, it just flew out. And the early playtest was pure joy.

Oh, but the best part was researching the wolves! What a lovely excuse to sit down and watch whatever I could find on the Internet about wolves.

Five or So Questions with Sage LaTorra on Black Stars Rise and More

I got to interview Sage LaTorra about his current projects, like Black Stars Rise!

Tell me about Black Stars Rise and your other current projects. What are you excited about?

Black Stars Rise is a game I’m working on with Adam that draws on X-Files, the comics of Jeff Lemire, and certain parts of the Cthulhu mythos, especially True Detective. I actually started working on it last year but had some trouble explaining the type of game I was going for. Then True Detective came along and now it’s easy to use that as a touchstone.

What’s exciting there is mostly how we’re messing with moves and relationships. It still uses a lot of Apocalypse World move elements, but how you get those moves, and how they change during play, is considerably different. We’re also exploring some really cool ideas for covering the normal parts of life, though those are still in design.

Also with Adam, I’m working on Inglorious, our Dungeon World war supplement. For me the most exciting bit there is how we’re approaching mass combat rules. I think most battle rules for RPGs are heavily influenced by adversarial tabletop wargames, things like Warhammer 40k. We’re drawing on the adjudicated, anything-can-be-attempted war games that were popular training military commanders, in the vein of Verdy du Vernois. Instead of swapping to a more cut-and-dried balanced war game our mass combat system is about judgement and information.

Those are the main projects, though there’s a few things that are either earlier or I’m less involved in. Adam has a Mass Effect-styled game in the works that I’ve given some feedback on, but it’s so early I don’t know what direction it will take, or how much I’ll be involved. I also recently played Apocalypse World: Dark Age and immediately wanted to make stuff for it. I have no idea what the future of that is, since Dark Age is so early, but depending on where Vincent goes with it I could see my stuff ending up being a separate game, a supplement, or fodder for Vincent to make his own stuff.

What are the key elements of shows like True Detective and X-Files that you want to show through in Black Stars Rise? What are you doing mechanically to evoke them?

Well first it’s probably worth mentioning that the way the X-Files connection is presented is “it’s like The X-Files, but Mulder and Scully never show up.”

With that in mind, BSR is focusing on people caught up in a mythos that’s beyond them. You might be a detective, sure, or have a weird old book in your library, but you’re not playing an occult investigator (or at least not when you start). You’re a person who’s caught up in a twisting world but you still have the touchstones of a normal life.

The other big element is the mythos. We’re trying to make the game helpful in building your own mythos, like The X-Files black ooze and smoking man, or The King In Yellow. Your characters will see aspects of it, and across multiple characters you as a player will see more of it.

True Detective is a great example of normal people caught up in something bigger and stranger. While they are investigators, they’re homicide detectives, not occult explorers. Then as this case takes over their lives it twists them.

Tell me a little about the website you have for Black Stars Rise. What motivated you to make it and have so much information for free?

Free is good. Right now what we need is play and feedback, and we want that from anyone who’s interested, so why not make it free? Eventually, if we continue to like where the game is headed, there will be versions that aren’t free. But at the moment the best arrangement for everybody is to make it free.

I’m also glad to feel like I’m giving back to gaming as a whole. These ideas are more useful when everyone can use them freely, not just read them for free.

I trust that, if we get to the point where we ask for money, people will help us out and pay. Money does help the game creation cycle going.

What do you think the benefits are to hacking games as opposed to creating your own core system? How far do you think you have to go before it’s no longer a hack – and is Black Stars Rise going to go that far?

Everything’s a hack, or nothing’s a hack, depending on how you define the term “hack” (which probably depends how much you like the word). Play is hacking in a lot of ways.

Personally I tend to call it a hack as long as it still requires another game on hand to play or learn. Once the text is self-sufficient, even if it’s re-explaining things from another game (like we did in Dungeon World) it’s no longer a hack to me.

What do you think makes Black Stars Rise have such a unique experience for those who play it?

I’m not sure any game produces a unique experience. Games are tools, so I think what most games do is make certain experiences easier. It’s possible to, say, do a fast-paced action game in d20, but you’d have to put a lot of work in to get all the rules down to the point where you could actually move at a fast pace.

The thing we’re trying to make easy with Black Stars Rise is playing as a person who’s entire world is shifting around them. To that end, we’re doing a lot of things with hidden information. All the basic moves have a normal version and a number of ‘wounded’ versions. In certain conditions you’ll wound a move, which means flipping it over and revealing the wounded version, which is different than the normal one. Each character may have a different wounded version of each move, so maybe under pressure your character gets shakey and mine gets panicky.

The other bit that’s not quite there yet is that we want to make the everyday routines of life both useful and dangerous. These are the things that keep you grounded, but also the things that can drive you even further away when they go wrong. We haven’t nailed that yet, but I think we’ll have something to show soon.

One thing that I think needs to come out of that is the ability to both play day-to-day and to jump ahead years. True Detective does this wonderfully well, it’s a huge inspiration. We see that these people have normal lives, and see how their priorities between all the things in those lives, plus all the elements of the case they work, play on them.

Thanks, Sage, for a great interview!

Five or So Questions on Piece of Work

I interviewed John LeBoeuf-Little, Kit La Touche, and Austin Bookheimer from Transneptune Games  about their current project, Piece of Work. Piece of Work is a cybernoir game, blending the grit and grim of noir themes with the high-tech punch of cyberpunk.

Tell me a little bit about your current project. What should I be excited about?

(JOHN) So, Piece of Work is set in the near future dystopia, with cyberware and megacorporations. You’ve been pushed out of society by an unjust system where citizenship is predicated on having a job. Now you have a grab-bag of personal problems and almost certainly a grudge against the people who’ve done you wrong. It’s quiet tension punctuated by staccato action. We call it cybernoir.

But enough with the pitch. The game has a ton of things I’m really excited about. We’ve spent an amazing amount of time trying to get the tone just right – cybernoir is surprisingly fragile to maintain, so every mechanic we have is tuned to keep attention on the parts that matter. It’s a pretty sweet mix.

I love the die mechanic particularly. We ask questions at the table about why your character is doing whatever they’re doing. Based on how you’re doing it, for whom you’re doing it, and why you’re doing it, you get better or worse dice. Each game I’ve played, there’s been this wonderful moment when someone picks up the dice and thinks about what’s about to happen and you can basically eat it with a fork because they say “No, damnit, this is about revenge” and everyone gasps. It happens all the time and I love it.

Give me a little more about cybernoir. What kind of play will I find in this genre?

(KIT) So, we start with the familiar near-future dystopia: corporations have become the de-facto powers of the world, everything and everyone is ground under them and their profit motive. (Of course, “near-future” is perhaps a bit optimistic; we keep coming across things we thought we made up for this in the news.) But instead of the usual “they supplant governments”, we decided that governments are a useful tool for them—privatize profit, socialize loss, right? So, that’s where the System comes in: citizenship, and all the benefits and rights that comes with, is contingent on employment, but there’s a cost to having non-citizens around, so a system alarmingly like debt-bondage comes up, where the unemployed are given employment and limited citizenship benefits, but without real choice in what they do.

So that’s the world, right? You are people who’ve fallen off the corporate ladder, and are dangling above the precipice of the System. You’re probably doomed, like Deckard in Blade Runner, to be unable to make the world you want, but maybe you can help get someone else to safety, to salvation, to justice, and in the process, get yourself part-way to redemption.

There’s a kind of beautiful hopelessness baked in—I’ve mentioned Blade Runner, but perhaps it’s worth also comparing it to neo-noir cinema like Chinatown or Romeo is Bleeding. Everyone knows the end of Chinatown, right? “Forget it Jake, it’s Chinatown.” You’re almost certainly gonna be dragged down into the mud and gutter, but you stand a chance of doing something selfless and good before that. You’re in too deep to save yourself.

(JOHN) So all the things Kit mentioned are completely correct, but I thought I’d add that cybernoir is a complex of two other genres – noir and cyberpunk.

Much of old film noir is about proper ‘society’ and with the protagonists not really fitting that mold. Often, something has changed them to make them outsiders – they were falsely accused of a crime, or got mixed up with the wrong crowd, or they couldn’t let something go. They’re filled with iconic personalities, and everything is connected somehow.

In cyberpunk, there’s the disaffected oppressed, striving in spite of a massive, uncaring, inhuman world that sees humanity as a product to be commoditized.

In cybernoir, you get an interesting blend of these two – the characters are people who no longer fit into society because of these very noir reasons who are then exploited by the system for the benefit of those in power. They have very noir sensibilities – for them, everything is personal. But they also have very futuristic abilities – cybernetics and other advanced technologies.

What went into designing the die mechanic? How does it work?

(JOHN) Oi. We’ve been tweaking the die mechanic for a long time. It started out as a cool mechanical toy – roll three dice and take the best two. Each die was always intended to be scaled up or down independently, using any of the standard sizes (up to d12). Each of the dice represents a different thing – your character’s motive, what gear you’re using, and for whom you’re acting. But it didn’t used to be so cleanly delineated.

I forget who first suggested that there be a die for your character’s Motive, but it fit perfectly. You get a better die for motives that are more noir. If you’re doing it for money, you only get a d4. If you’re just in a hard spot and you have to roll anyway, that’s a d6. If you’re acting to get respect, that’s a d8. If you’re doing it out of passion – love or hate – you get a d10. And finally, there’s a motive that particularly drives your character based on its perspective, so you might get d12 when you’re trying to find out The Truth or you might get it when you’re trying to Clear Your Name.

In our earlier playtests, the other two dice were Gear and Cyberware. But it was pretty clunky. We tried a bunch of things – rules for gear breaking, ways of making cyberware more distinct from gear… what we finally came up with was that two dice dedicated to Things was a die too many. This was kind of a frustrating time for PoW; I’m pretty sure this was after Kit had returned from Metatopia, and at the time, the game kind of looked like a cyberpunk heartbreaker with a vaguely interesting die-mechanic. It was a misguided mess.

We had one of our famous kitchen conversations where it came out that I really wanted three specific stories for Piece of Work – noir and cyberpunk, but with an undercurrent of hope. I wanted players to eventually get charged about the world and to at least try to do something to make it better. And that wasn’t being reflected at all in the dice. That galvanized the third die as a kind of activism die – we call it Scope in the game. You get better dice for acting on a bigger scale – if you’re acting just for yourself that’s just a d6, but if you’re helping a friend that’s a d8. If you’re helping someone who’s innocent, that’s a d10. If you’re trying to save the downtrodden in general, that’s a d12.

Oh, and I guess I should talk about the other side of the roll – where you compare your result to something. We’ve had a few false starts with that as well; originally it was entirely set by the GM, then it was set by the GM but depending on circumstances might be increased or decreased, and sometimes if you had gear it might go up or down… anyway. What we have now is that you ask yourself questions about the situation and based on the answers, the target goes up or down in fixed amounts. Questions are a design theme that permeate through most of the game. In this case, it’s questions like “Is it dangerous?” or “Do you have back-up?”

The result of all this is when you want to break into a file cabinet for records about where the corporation moved your family after they fired you and you have a kick-ass lock pick set you scored while growing up, you get to roll better dice than if you just want to boost some intel in order to sell it for cash. And if it’s immediately dangerous or requires a light touch, then you need those better dice.

What’s your favorite scene you’ve played out in playtest, and how do you think it’s unique to Piece of Work?

(JOHN) There’s a bunch of really good ones. I think there was a great moment where our ex-assassin clone ended up wanting to get some information out of her friend’s father, but her Professions were shaped pretty narrowly – she was mostly a killer. So to get the information required her to beat up this old man, because she didn’t know how to be any other way. It was a very emotionally charged scene.

Another one that was really good was a scene at the end of a session mid-way through one of our playtests. The previous session the heroes had done a raid on a corporate research facility. They’d found out some uncomfortable truths and spent the whole session trying to damage control fallout from crises, but it didn’t really work out. The last scene was them in a safe house, staring at a pile of cash they’d ‘liberated’, drinking scotch, and saying nothing to each other, because things had just gotten that messy.

What’s up next after Piece of Work?

(KIT) OK, so I am really excited here. First, “Transneptune Games” is really a loose collective, so we’re all working on things at the same time—John’s spearheading Piece of Work, while Austin’s working on a few different things, including his own take on cybernoir, where everyone plays facets of the main character’s memory of an event, and you reconstruct things, in a world where memory is editable and pluggable.

But what I’m working on is maybe our next most far along thing. It’s called Et in Aradia Ego, and it’s a game about young people carving a space for themselves in the manner-bound world of Jane Austen, in a game of manners, madness, and magic. You’re not perfect demur well-mannered people, and you’ve caught the attention of a fairy who wants to help you get what it thinks you want, all to its own ends.

This time period and topic are really interesting to me. It’s easy and tempting and wrong for modern readers to see it as a very proper and laced-up period, but it was in so many ways acutely modern: you’ve got Romanticism and Byron, proto-free-love utopians like William Blake seeing ecstatic visions of magical beings, awesome feminists like Mary Wollstonecraft, and the birth of modern scifi from her daughter, Mary Wollstonecraft Shelley. On top of this, the King is mad (and, worse, German!), and mumblings about Republicanism rear their head. That’s without even getting into the fact that the country is at war with Bonaparte, but, just like recent US wars, doing its utmost to ignore that on the homefront.

So, there are a number of things I like about this period—it’s really unstable, uncertain which way to grow, torn between the poles of the Enlightenment and Romanticism—and adding in a “helpful” fairy who’s really trying to abduct you for its own amusement just heightens it.

The game focuses heavily on relationships, and asks you to make a lot of judgment calls about how interactions went, while building up dice from every interaction towards a moment-of-truth roll. At least, that’s how it is now—it’s been through many incarnations, and might take some more before it’s ready.

Thanks to John, Kit, and Austin for a great interview!

Five or So Questions with John Harper

I got to interview John Harper about his current projects, including Blades in the Dark!

What are you currently working on? What projects have you excited?

I’m working on a game about criminals in a fantasy city called Blades in the Dark. It’s set in the same universe as my previous mini-game, Ghost Lines — vengeful spirits, weird electroplasmic tech, lost magic, strange cults, etc. I expect Blades will be a larger product (by my standards, anyway), maybe a 32 page booklet or something along those lines. Like a lot of game designers, I’m very inspired by the Thief video games and this is my stab at a game in that vein.

(Two other current game projects in a similar style are Dagger & Shadow by Matt Snyder and Project: Dark by Will Hindmarch. We’re all playing in that shadowy sandbox and it’s inspiring to see what they’re doing as I work on my thing.)

Blades is currently in closed playtest, but will open up for public playtesting in a few months.

I’m very excited about a few projects my friends are working on. Undying, by Paul Riddle will hit Kickstarter this year. It’s a beautifully designed diceless game (hacked from the bones of Apocalypse World) about the deadly predator vs. predator world of vampires. It’s my favorite take on vampires I’ve seen yet. One of the most fun mechanics allows you to actually play out centuries of existence for the vamps, with each game session representing an important night in their immense lives, with decades passing between each. Our playtest game was set in Paris in 1899, 1920, 1944, and would continue on to 2010, 2065, and possibly beyond. So cool.

Sage LaTorra is working on a modern day game of weirdness, somewhat like The Twilight Zone or True Detective, called Black Stars Rise. It’s about ordinary people who are confronted with something totally inexplicable and how they deal with it. They don’t solve a mystery or anything, they just try to cope with it and survive. You play different people in different places over the course of a series, seeing the weirdness manifest in different ways and gradually building up a picture of some larger horror. It’s in playtest now and we’re having a lot of fun with it.

And off course Dagger & Shadow and Project: Dark, which I already mentioned. And that’s just the tip of the iceberg. There are so many exciting indie games in the pipeline I could fill this whole interview talking about them. 🙂

Blades in the Dark sounds interesting. Can you tell me a little more about it?

It’s a type of game I’ve tinkered with a lot. Most of the games I run tend to be about a team of freelance criminal types operating in a sandbox of some kind: Our long-running Stars Without Number game, the prohibition-era Bootleggers game (another RPG project of mine), the original World of Dungeons series… even all the way back to old Talislanta campaigns. So it’s something I enjoy doing and have a lot of experience with. I’m trying to incorporate some of that experience and the lessons learned into the design and procedures of Blades.

For example, I’ve found that I like to have a flexible central mechanic that can suit a wide variety of situations. But most generic mechanics are pretty bland and the GM has to do all the heavy lifting to convey the tone of the game (gritty, in this case). So I designed a set of three core rolls, representing a spectrum of fictional positions, from worst to best: A desperate gamble, a risky maneuver, and a display of skill. The results of these rolls are primed to spark outcomes that suit the tone and style of the game, so the GM can focus on assessing the fictional situation and choosing the right roll for the moment.

Because the selection of the roll is a judgment call, though, the GM and the players use that decision point to craft their own unique instance of the game. When your blade-master fights three thugs in a dark alley, is that a desperate gamble, a risky maneuver, or a display of skill? The game provides a procedure to determine this, but it’s dependent on which particular details of the situation the group values most and gives the most weight in the assessment. So (hopefully), you end up with a mechanic that’s consistent, reliable, and responds to fictional details, but is nevertheless a unique construction refined and ratified through the process of play by a given game group.

I’m pretty excited about it! There’s lots of other stuff too, like managing your criminal enterprise and dealing with your character’s vice and lifestyle considerations. It’s been a long process of weekly playtesting and refinement, but it’s really fun and the game is starting to come together.

What do you think is inspiring the interest in stealth games recently?

If I had to guess, I’d say it’s the impending release of the new Thief video game. We’ve all been following it through its development for years, and it’s influenced our thinking, surely. Also I have to acknowledge Dishonored, as well. The style and feel of that game is incredibly cool and has taken up permanent residence in my brain.

What is the motivation for releasing so many products for free, and what benefit do you see from it?

Most of the games on my site have been created for play by my local game groups. Lady Blackbird was originally made in an afternoon so it could be run later that night for someone new to RPGs. I released them for free because I had already done the work of making the materials, so why not just post the PDF for anyone else who wanted it?

In the case of something like Agon (which I charge money for), the situation was slightly different. It was also born out of play, but the actual product involved writing and publishing a book, which was additional work that I wanted to be compensated for. I have some loose plans to do some work on Patreon, for this reason. There are several projects which I’ve never committed time to finishing, since the materials I made for local play are not very useable by others. With some patrons, I’ll invest the extra time to make them more polished and complete.

The main benefit I see with free games is exposure. Free games reach lots and lots of people They’re easy to share. Lady Blackbird has been played by thousands and has been translated into over a dozen languages. I want my games to be played, first and foremost. More play equals more success. So in that sense, giving the games away has helped them become more successful. Not that it’s entirely altruistic, of course: that extra exposure helps draw people to my other games that I sell for money. So it’s a marketing strategy, too.

(Quick aside: Lady Blackbird is also shared and talked about online for another reason, having to do with its specific construction: it’s an adventure module with pregen characters and situation but it has absolutely no spoilers, so everyone can freely talk about everything that happened when they played it, without worrying about ruining it for other people. In fact, it’s extra fun to compare your particular game of LB to other people’s.)

Years ago, my friend Clinton Nixon made a game called The Shadow of Yesterday, and decided to give the entire text away online, in addition to selling the printed book. People thought this was nuts at the time, but of course it totally worked. Dungeon World has followed in his footsteps by releasing their game text under a Creative Commons license.

Do you have any suggestions for people wanting to layout their smaller games?

Don’t try to reinvent the wheel. Find layouts that you like and studiously reproduce them. I don’t mean steal the actual art, of course. I mean, measure the text boxes, page proportions, type sizes, etc. and use them yourself. Page layout is a craft, like building a bookcase. Study the canons and classic methods and copy the masters, like an apprentice carpenter. Also, be very suspicious of any typeface less than 50 years old. There are lots of good modern ones, but the glut of crappy internet fonts has lead more than one novice designer astray. When in doubt, stick with the classics.

Graphic design and layout are deep, complex art forms. They’re worth learning, for sure, but don’t expect to pick them up quickly or easily. Whenever I see someone online ask “How can I learn to do layout and design for my game?” I translate it to “How can I learn to compose a symphony?” It’s just as vast a question, with no simple answers, just hard work.

What’s next for you after Blades in the Dark?

I’m not sure! There are several projects on the back burner that will come back around again, especially Danger Patrol. I’ve been tinkering with some board game designs too, which is a new thing for me and quite fun. But there’s really no way to tell. I just follow wherever my inspiration leads me.

Five or So Questions with Adam Koebel

Content Warning: There have been multiple statements against Adam Koebel for violation of consent , abuse, and abuse of power. In accordance with my policy on perpetrators of harm, I am putting this notice to raise awareness of the statements of the victims and ensure future readers are aware.
I got to interview Adam Koebel about his current projects and his photography. It was super fun!

Tell me what you’re currently working on. What’s new and big in the world of Adam?

Right now the big thing on my plate is working on what’s we’re tentatively calling Inglorious – which is the Dungeon World “mass combat” or “war” or “large scale conflict” supplement. Whatever your preferred method of describing big messy battles with lots of craziness going on. Sage and I have been hammering away pretty hard at that, and it’s in the hands of playtesters right now. So we’re kind of in that harrowing phase of wondering if we’ve made something as cool as we think we have or if we’re just embarrassing ourselves with something crap. There’s always that to wonder about when you’re in the process of unleashing new stuff on the world. I think it’ll turn out okay, though. We’ve been really inspired to make it particularly old-school in the sense of it being inspired by pre-D&D war-games with a referee. Blame Jon Peterson for teaching us what a kriegspiel is.

Other than that, working on some miscellaneous little projects. Helping Sage polish up Black Stars Rise (his minimalist creepy horror game) and poking away in fits and starts at my unnamed space-opera-future-romance-game-based-on-an-IP-I-would-never-be-able-to-afford-in-a-billion-years project. Taking photos of myself and posting them on G+. Getting in heated debates about design. Making new friends on Twitter. Business as usual!

Inglorious sounds interesting! What kind of mechanics are you messing with for mass combat?

What we’re trying to do with Inglorious is port the core concepts of Dungeon World out of the dungeon and onto the battlefield. The idea that narrative is paramount – that what really matters at the table is the stuff that the players’ characters are actually seeing and doing – is something I don’t think we’ve seen in many mass combat systems before. So we’re playing around with the idea of units designed much like monsters, with their own stats but also their own agenda and foibles. Players who want to lead an army will have to rely on messengers or magic to carry their orders to their troops who, depending on the way the dice fall, will interpret those orders according to their tags. So, it’s going to have all the potential for chaos and craziness that you’d see in a more tightly-focused dungeon-based adventure. We’re really being influenced by what came before – by Chainmail and older games in the genre. Though, there’s definitely some impact on the mechanisms coming from some more modern war-games we’ve been playing lately; astute readers will see some similarities to Sekigahara or Commands & Colors when they bring Inglorious to the table. Influences aside, our big goal was making sure that Inglorious felt like a Dungeon World game. That drove our designs more than anything.

Dungeon World was a huge success. What’s your takeaway from the success and aftermath?

It’s crazy, right? I think that we had some idea that the game would be popular. To be completely honest, we kind of hit the right audience at exactly the right time with a product I think that people were already looking for. Most of that was blind luck – I’m sure that if D&D Next had released a year or two earlier, we wouldn’t have seen as much of a big jump in not-quite-D&D games and their popularity. We’re lucky to belong to this weird little outcaste set that’s are filling that “waiting for D&D” void – 13th Age, Torchbearer and Numenera particularly. Rob Donoghue said some really smart stuff about the D&D Offramp, as he calls it, over at The Walking Mind a while back (http://walkingmind.evilhat.com/2013/09/16/d20-and-the-dd-off-ramp/).

I think the takeaway has been that dungeon crawling as a genre still really represents what “roleplaying” is for a lot of people. We were surprised because I think at first our intent was to make a D&D for the Apocalypse World crowd but we ended up making an Apocalypse World game for the D&D crowd. Some of our most ardent supporters are folks with little to no experience in the hobby outside of Good Old D&D (whether that was actually a TSR, Wizards of the Coast or Paizo “version” of D&D…) who discovered Dungeon World looking for something with a different focus, but that felt familiar. What I’ve really loved, though, is seeing how people are taking it and making their own. I’d like to think we set a positive precedent by making the game creative commons licensed and offering The Planarch’s Codex as a “launch title” for the game. I like the idea of DW as a platform rather than just a game in and of itself. There are some amazing supplements for it that we had literally nothing to do with. It’s a great feeling!

What I really hope, in the long run, is that DW is a comfortable start for folks who want to expand and try new stuff. A Dungeon World fan who’ll give Sagas of the Icelanders a try because the system feels familiar or who’ll pick up a copy of Dogs in the Vineyard because it’s connected to DW by way of Apocalypse World. I think everyone should try every game there is – an informed gamer is a happy gamer.

Tell me your secrets about this unnamed space-opera-future-romance-game. What are the mechanics? What does it feel like? (No need to name the IP.)
It’s okay! It’s fairly easy knowledge to come by that I’m working on adapting some of Dungeon World’s mechanics to a Mass Effect game. It’s an amazingly deep canon with great setting and characterization but what really drew me to Mass Effect is the humanism of the stories it tells. That’s not to say I don’t love transhuman sci-fi, Freemarket and Eclipse Phase are both favourites of mine. What I love about it is that it is, ultimately, about being human. Not transcending your humanity, not becoming part of the galactic melting pot but really embracing your humanity and staking a claim on the galaxy. On top of that, I love what Bioware is starting to do with game-character romance? They have this cavalier attitude, barring a few missteps, wherein your protagonist can love who you want, regardless of their sex or gender or even species. I want to make that a core part of a tabletop game, because I think the venue of face-to-face roleplaying can create an experience that video games aren’t able to, yet.

It’s an ambitious adaptation, but I’m trying to bend the apocalypse engine to my will by stealing liberally from all the other games published using it and putting in some weird twists. It’s a little like DW was to D&D – I want the game to feel like a proper tabletop RPG and leverage all the cool, intense personal stuff you can experience in that venue but also, I really want to make it feel like a Mass Effect game. I want players to make Renegade and Paragon choices. I want shield timers and ammo types but I also want big messy interspecies poly love. I’m smiling just writing about it, which must mean I’m onto something.

Your photos are great! What kind of camera do you use? What do you like most about photography?

Thanks! I’ve been taking photos longer than I’ve been designing games, though I mostly do it for fun, these days. I picked up a Sony RX1 from a camera shop in Akihabara this past June and it’s really fired up my love of photography. Right now, I’m really into taking convention shots – some of my favourite photos in the last year have been folks at GenCon or GoPlay Northwest just hanging out and playing games. It’s such an intense experience, certainly as intense as sports or theatre, but so intimate and subtle. It’s really great being able to capture someone in a passionate moment at the table. I don’t think anyone is really taking convention photos like that right now.

Thanks so much to Adam for the interview! You can catch him on Twitter @skinnyghost and read more about Dungeon World here.

Five or So Questions with Nathan Paoletta on World Wide Wrestling

I got to talk with Nathan Paoletta about his new project, World Wide Wrestling!

Tell me a little bit about your project. What is exciting about it?

The project is a professional wrestling RPG built on the Apocalypse World engine, called World Wide Wrestling. I’m a big wrestling fan, and started the game just as an exercise in modeling the kind of wrestling I really enjoy watching the most – character-driven, consequential, with the in-ring action feeding into the development of the characters over time and vice versa. As it turns out, the game really delivers on that experience, and playing it is super fun! The AW engine is a really good chassis for representing the world of wrestling with it’s iconic archetypes, ever-evolving storylines and abrupt changes of fortune. I’m running a long-term playtest game right now, and I haven’t looked forward to each weeks session so much in a long time. And, best of all, it’s making some of my RPG friends more interested in wrestling, and bringing some of my wrestling friends more into the world of RPGs, which is super-great!

What kind of players, aside from wrestling fans, do you think would dig World Wide Wrestling?

I think anyone who’s interested in over-the-top action and melodrama can find something to dig. Wrestling is basically the combination of universal storytelling tropes with superhero personae, so there’s a lot of potential avenues to get into the right mindset for it. If you have vague memories of being a kid and watching Hulk Hogan and Macho Man bodyslam each other and how awesome that seemed at the time, you have enough context to play the game, I think. I’ve had a lot of playtesters tell me “I’m not a wrestling fan, but I want to check it out now since I played this game,” which is great and tells me that it’s “working” on some level. I don’t really want to convert anyone or anything silly like that, but there’s a lot to love in wrestling and if the game can open up someone’s horizons to the good parts, that’s a win for me. And it’s definitely a low-investment, pick-up and one-shot friendly beer-and-pretzels style game, so it’s easy to check out and see if it’s really your thing or not.

Did you alter the *World mechanics much for the game? If so, how?

They’re pretty significantly altered! It’ll be familiar to people who have played other *World games, but I ended up spindling and mutilating a lot of the basics. Some stuff that’s the same is the core rolling +Stat and picking results from a list mechanic, having playbooks (“Gimmicks”), and gaining Advances to improve your character. On the player side, the mechanics and Moves are all about gaining Heat (roughly analogous to Hx) with the other wrestlers in order to gain Audience (kind of an inverted Harm track, actually). You’re not in physical danger (though you can get injured relatively easily if you have bad rolls), but your popularity is always at risk! On the MC side, a lot has changed. Creative (the GM role) literally books play like a wrestling booker, deciding ahead of time who’s going to win what match in order to advance the storylines. Players have the agency you’d expect in any other RPG, though, so they’ll throw wrenches into the plans all the time, and there’s a structure in place to help Creative make it look like they had it planned that way all along. I’d say that there’s actually more similarity on the surface than there is under the hood, so to speak. It’s been a really fun process to work through!

Who is your favorite wrestler? You can pick more than one!

Oh man, the hardest question! Well, not really, it’s more like the answer is always changing. But my favorite pre-modern era wrestler is definitely Macho Man Randy Savage, may he rest in peace. I will also always love The Undertaker, who is technically still wrestling (once a year at Wrestlemania!). There’s an amazing tier of young talent in the WWE right now that I am really, really enjoying watching. Roman Reigns is a warrior prince who deserves all of your tribute, Antonio Cesaro is probably the guy I most love to purely watch wrestle, and Bray Wyatt is the greatest, creepiest character the WWE has had since I’ve been watching wrestling. On the indy circuit, there’s a pretty well known dude named Jimmy Jacobs who I think is great. El Generico was my favorite indy wrestler until he retired to go work with orphans in Mexico, but there’s a guy on WWE’s developmental show NXT named Sami Zayn who has a lot of the same moves, and I think has a bright future in wrestling.

What else are you working on? What’s next for you?

Once WWW is out in the wild, I’m going to be bouncing back to my other game-I’ve-been-working-on-forever, which is a monster hunting game set in the gothic world of Edgar Allen Poe called The Imp of the Perverse. The mechanics are pretty solid, but I have some period research to finish and a bunch of writing to do for it. That will be in playtest for awhile yet, and it’s probably going to be my next big thing after WWW. I’m also working on a second edition of my Vietnam war drama game carry, mostly to update the physical book but also doing a full edit and revision of the text. I have a 2-player fantasy struggle-between-good-and-evil-for-the-fate-of-the-world game that I’d like to get back to soon. There’s a couple concepts I have for microgames, and who knows when one of those gels and demands to be finished. And I want to maintain releasing cool stuff supported by my Patreon backers, so I’ll have little things coming out every couple months through that venue, hopefully. Lots of stuff, I guess!

Thanks to Nathan for the great interview! You can check out Nathan’s Patreon and his website to keep up on his current work!

Five or So Questions with Stras Acimovic on Playtesting

I got to interview Stras Acimovic, Ace Playtester, and get some great suggestions on playtesting as a designer and a player!

Tell me a little about your tabletop background. What got you into gaming?

I think it was the old Milton Bradley copy of Hero Quest. Hero Quest is an old 1980s board game, played on a board representing rooms divided up into a dungeon, with one player acting as the GM and the rest playing barbarians, elves, dwarves and wizards. We played through all the adventures, and since everyone was still psyched, I just kept making up more. I spent many evenings getting grumbled at by parents who had no idea why we were cooped up playing a board game instead of ‘being outside’.

My first actual tabletop RPG was a 1st edition copy of Warhammer Fantasy RPG (in French of all things) that the brother of a friend of mine at the time had and ran for us. We were thrilled the ‘big kids’ would play with us.

As for my background, I’ve been gaming over two decades doing everything from crunchy traditional games, war games, more recent story games, and larps (boffer, rock-paper-scissors, parlor, nordic). I love trying out new things, and one of my favorite things is bringing back interesting, little-known games to share with my gaming groups at home.

What is the most important thing to remember when playtesting games?

Be generous and play to the spirit of the game! Knowing you’re in a playtest means being willing to go with the flow and make up some mechanics to tide you over on-the-fly. Often I see people try to break a system to ‘test it’ or simply play straight, without looking for ways to engage with the direction of the game. Playtests often only have the skeleton of a system in place. It’s not fully fleshed out, with all the bits polished. Seeing what the whole thing is supposed to look like is sometimes difficult, but do the best you can to try and get to where the game purports to take you, and then see which bits chafe, get in the way, or help you get there and make note of all three for feedback.

Also shorthanding notes during game can be an important playtesting skill to acquire. You’d be surprised how much you forget if you don’t jot down a phrase or word to remember it by.

How can playtesters give the best feedback to designers? What sort of feedback is most useful?

How you feel about something is valid and important. If mechanics frustrate you, or confuse things, this is important to note and often useful to designers in my experience. Similarly important is noting what worked well. Many people forget this step (or don’t notice it because it’s ‘working well’).

Writing down context for rules you have to house-rule-on-the-fly can also be important – not just what you encountered, but what was available as tools, and what you decided to go with and why.

A lot of designers can’t be present at your table so well organized and detailed AP reports are some of the only ways they can get feedback. I wish that there was a culture of ‘replays’ outside of japan. In japan many folks record the audio of their game, and transcribe it into a record called a ‘replay’ usually with some commentary. Sometimes what’s reported on in an AP report is summarized and specific details that a designer might catch watching a playtest are overlooked or edited out. Replays tend to be a bit more robust as a medium for communicating such things.

As a designer: remember to include questionnaires with your playtests.

What games have you enjoyed playtesting recently, and why?

I played a number of excellent ones recently, picking just a few is tough. There have been a number of thieving and scoundrel-themed games my groups have been enjoying.

I’ve really been digging Will Hindmarch’s amazing Project: Dark. It’s a Thief (as in The Dark Project) style game that makes characters using a deck-building mechanic with regular decks of playing cards. I’ve always loved playing thieves and scoundrels in RPGs and I’m a huge fan of first-person sneaker games like Dishonored, Thief, Mark of the Ninja and the like. This game really delivers on the tactical plays and stealth action. I got to try it as a player a couple times, and just ran a beta at CONLorado as a GM for the first time. Will’s flair for adding little NPC dialogues (called ‘eavesdrops’) is absolutely awesome, and I’m really excited about the KS for it.

Another game my groups have been excited about is a project by John Harper called Blades in the Dark. Interestingly enough it’s also a thief/roguish game, but this one focuses on building Thieves Guilds and organizations and lifting your group of ne’er-do-wells up the shadowy ladder of criminal prestige in the city while negotiating the dangerous seedy underbelly. It’s been undergoing some heavy revisions lately, but promises to be pretty exciting.

What is the biggest difference between playtesting as a player and playtesting as a designer?

As a player you, of course, hope to have fun despite any Beta-bumps, and provide useful feedback. So you hope for a smooth, fun game that works.

As a designer, a playtest that goes ‘well’ and has no bumps is sometimes the least helpful. Recently I was in a game that had all sorts of problems, but was very helpful to the designer because each issue reinforced a mechanic that was removed or changed recently, and showed exactly what made the game sing when put in place, and crash when removed.

Also, as a designer, sometimes the most useful playtests are the ones where you can just hand your stuff to someone who hasn’t played with you and casually kibitz and listen to how they interpret rules and read the game without inheriting all the shorthands and assumptions you teach when running the game that can get passed on.

Thanks for the questions!

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Thanks to Stras for the interview! You can check out some of his actual play reports and game design musings at Platonic Solids.