tabletop – Page 3

approachable theory: Tabletop RPG Dice Math

approachable theory logo. (By Brie Sheldon)

Hi all! I have a post today from Michael “Karrius” Mazur (email) about tabletop RPG dice math. Michael is a tabletop RPG player, more often a GM than not, and in his own words, he’s “always had an interest in tinkering with and designing game systems.” I asked him his favorite part about roleplaying games and he said it was that roleplaying games are a creative hobby with a low barrier to entry – and I like that too!

This post is definitely a lot of information, but I think Michael explains it simply and approachably. Please enjoy!

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Mathematical balancing can be an intimidating subject for RPG designers, but crucial for making a game that works like the designer intends is the solid foundation of having the correct dice rolling method. While familiarity with some methods of rolling are usually understood by designers, what questions to ask when deciding on a dice rolling system, the differences between said systems, and how to pick what’s most suited to the game can be a tough subject. The first question to tackle is often one of how many dice are appropriate.

The most familiar method of rolling dice in RPGs is the simple “roll a 1d20, add a number to it, and compare to a target number,” due to its use in Dungeons and Dragons and related spin-offs. One common modifier to that is instead of rolling 1d20, use the sum of 3d6. These two methods make for useful comparisons of the difference between rolling a single die vs rolling multiple dice and adding them. Both average out to the same result (10.5), and have similar maximums (20 vs 18) and minimums (1 vs 3). The following graph shows the probability curve of rolling each result on a 1d20 and 3d6, comparatively.

A graph showing the probability of rolling an individual result on 1d20 or 3d6. The 1d20 odds are a flat line, with 5% chance of rolling any number. The 3d6 results are a bell curve, as high as 12.5% for 10 and 11, and as low as 0.5% for 3 and 18.

This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual by Michael. Full details in alt text.

The probability of getting any specific result on a 1d20 is equal – each number is equally represented by once face of the die, giving a 5% chance of rolling any number in its range. The flat nature makes it easy to do calculations with – if you have something that activates on certain numbers being rolled (like critical hits on 20, or special moves on even rolls), it’s easy to just add up those 5%s, even in your head at the table. On the graph “Probability of Rolling a Specific Result,” the line for the 3d6 is a “bell curve” shape – the most common results are in the middle of the dice range, due to an “averaging out” effect, where there’s multiple different sums that can achieve them.

Rolling the maximum or minimum are far less likely due to having fewer combinations of dice that can achieve them. While a 1d20 can be expected to roll within a half point of the average result (10-11) one time in ten, and roll the maximum result one time in twenty, a 3d6 rolls within a half point of the average an expected one time in four, and roll the maximum result one roll out of every 216. Rolling multiple dice causes the “typical” results to be far more likely, and the extremes to be far less so.

click through for more!

The next step on the analysis is to understand that when you’re playing the game, for most rolls you’re not looking to roll an exact result – you’re looking to roll that number or higher – to succeed on the difficulty of a task. The following graph shows what the probability is of succeeding on a task for at various results needed, comparing 1d20 to 3d6.

A graph showing the probability of rolling a specific number or greater on a 1d20 or 3d6. The 1d20 odds are a diagonal line, with a 5% step each increment. The 3d6 results are a curve, with greater odds of success compared to 1d20 for results below 11, and lower odds of success for results above 11.

This chart displays the probability of rolling a specific result or greater, visual by Michael. Full details in the alt text.

What does it mean for the 3d6 that the extreme results are less likely, and average results more common? The biggest take away is simple: that if you’re already favored – and so the average result is a success for you – using 3d6 instead of 1d20 means you become even more so. But if you’re relying on an extreme result to have a chance of success, moving from 1d20 to 3d6 lowers your chance of success even more. Using a 3d6 allows a character to perform “lesser” tasks reliably, but struggle at performing tasks above their skill level. It promises easy success to the specialized, and warns away those not well suited to a task from even attempting it.

Situations where a skilled character repeatedly fails at a given task over and over become far less likely, which can ease frustration or keep a challenging monster fight from becoming trivial due to a few bad rolls from the monster. Systems that roll 1d20 allow a wider variety of task difficulties, which become possible for characters to attempt sooner, but continue to have a noticeable failure rate as a character grows. Rolling 1d20 gives a character less reliability, but also more leeway if they’re being forced into attempting more difficult tasks.

Deciding which tasks – reliable or risky – you want your dice system to encourage isn’t the only change in player behavior you’ll see from it either. An important consideration is how valuable a +1 bonus is to the success at any given task. This won’t be obvious to all players, but some will understand how this works, and others will pick up a sense of it as you play. The following graph shows the probability of a +1 bonus changing a failure to a success for each roll needed.

A graph showing the probability of a +1 bonus to a roll causing a success depending on what number is needed to be rolled for 1d20 or 3d6. The graph is the same shape as the odds of an individual result on 1d20 or 3d6. The 1d20 odds are a flat line, with 5% chance of rolling any number. The 3d6 results are a bell curve, as high as 12.5% for 10 and 11, and as low as 0.5% for 3 and 18.

This chart shows the probability of a +1 helping, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text.

The probability of a +1 bonus having changed a failure to a success is the exact same as the probability of rolling the number one fewer than whatever you’re trying to roll. As such, the graph of the +1 bonus helping is the same as the graph of individual roll results, except shifted one number higher. If you’re rolling a 1d20, no matter what task you’re performing, a +1 bonus is giving a 5% greater chance of success. If you’re rolling 3d6, that instead varies.

For tasks which are near impossible or very easy to perform, the +1 might not be worth sacrificing much for. But for tasks that you already have a near-even chance at, the value is very high – over twice as much as you would be getting on a d20! Players are more incentivized to spend resources or time in order to get any small bonus they can when they expect they’re close to the average of an attack or defense.

All of the above shows the difference between 1d20 and 3d6 – but what about other dice, or rolling even more? The following graph shows a comparison between six types of dice rolling methods, all with roughly even averages of 10-11.

A graph showing the probability of rolling an individual result comparing between 1d20, 2d10, 3d6, 4d4, 5d3, and 7d2. The more dice are rolled, the higher the likelihood of rolling the average results are, and the steeper the “bell curve” shape becomes.

This chart shows the probability of rolling a specific result, visual done by Michael. Full details in the alt text.

The more dice are rolled, the steeper the bell curve becomes. Anything that could be said about 3d6 in comparison to 1d20 is even more so for 4d4, and the trend continues to strengthen the more dice are rolled. If you want it so the average result comes up very often, and people with even small advantages are heavily favored, you want a system that rolls many dice at once. Another design consideration that emerges is the range of values possibly – when rolling 1d20, there are 20 possible results. When rolling 3d6, there are only 16 results – and four numbers (9-12) come up almost half of the time. When rolling 7d2, there are only 8 possible results, and two numbers (10-11) come up 55% of the time.

When so few numbers are likely to be rolled, this means that characters gaining small bonuses or penalties can very quickly put them in the realm of instant success or failure. It only takes a +4 to go from the average value to an instant success on a 7d2, as opposed to a +10 on a d20, meaning there’s not a lot of room for individual bonuses to make a difference and still have a chance of failure. This however also allows a stratification in difficulty – it doesn’t require very large bonuses for an expert character to be able to complete tasks a non-trained character cannot, keeping numbers reasonable if you want multiple tiers of difficulty.

In summary, there are multiple considerations that go into choosing the dice rolling method for your game. A single large die, or fewer dice in general, is more appropriate if you want a game to have multiple conditional sources of bonuses such as gear, positioning, and teamwork, to keep tasks from ever seeming too reliable, and to encourage risky maneuvers. Multiple dice, or smaller dice, are more appropriate if you want to make small bonuses matter a great deal, allow characters to treat lower-difficulty tasks as trivial, or to have hard tiers in difficulty. Neither method is inherently superior; instead, both are proper tools for their tasks.

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Thanks so much to Michael for the excellent article! Please share around and I hope you all gained something from reading this post on approachable theory!

If you would like to write an approachable theory post, send an email to Brie with your name, pronouns, and pitch. Responses may be delayed over the next two weeks as Brie is recovering from grad school, but they’ll get back as they can.

Updated 5/9/18 12:55pm Eastern to change “odds” to “probability.” Failure on Brie’s part to not catch that mathematical terminology difference. Sorry!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Archives of the Sky

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Aaron Reed on Archives of the Sky, which is currently on Kickstarter! Archives of the Sky is a GMless game with collaborative story telling, set in the broader reaches of the universe where characters seek purpose in the epic galaxy. It seems pretty nifty, so please check out the interview below! You can also peek at at a play example here.

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Kickstarter video for Archives of the Sky.

Tell me a little about Archives of the Sky. What excites you about it?

Archives of the Sky is a tabletop storytelling game that uses epic science fiction as a stage for stories about very human conflicts and values. I love sci-fi and roleplaying, but most of the existing games I know of in the genre focus more on its external trappings: spaceships, laser guns, and so on. There are a few rare exceptions that focus on the more human, philosophical side of sci-fi– “Shock” by Joshua A.C. Newman is one of my favorites– but I wanted a system that also took inspiration from GM-less improvisational games like Microscope, Fiasco, and Downfall. After a lot of iteration and playtesting, Archives is the result.

What excites me about it is that it really evolved into a great vehicle for supporting a group of people to collaboratively create an amazing story together. The mechanics of the game really work to provide a structure for a plot, and to ensure that plot is based around a conflict between beliefs. The characters are then forced to resolve this dilemma somehow, which means they need to get down to the heart of why the believe the things they do and why they’re worth defending– and that tends to lead to some great roleplaying.

four people in a semi-circle around a table filled with index cards, paper, and writing instruments.

A group of people playing Archives of the Sky. Index card tents! yay!

How do you set up a game of Archives of the Sky – who has input into the story, the characters? – and how do plot hooks happen?

Everyone’s involved with setting up the world and telling the story– there’s a role called the Archivist to help facilitate, but everyone has equal creative authority. The first thing you do when you sit down to play is create a House together, a group of near-immortal wanderers who have been exploring the galaxy for thousands and thousands of years. You start by coming up with their core purpose, which becomes the game’s first value. This might be something like “We preserve life,” or “We learn truths,” or even something simpler like “We hunt” or “We sing.” It’s something this House has sworn to pursue as their highest calling.

The rules walk you through fleshing out the House a bit more, giving them a few more Values and figuring out their place in the galaxy, and then each player makes their own character, someone within the House. Characters each have their own personal Values, which may or may not line up with the House’s Values, or with each others’. These are the seeds of stories– think of Captain Kirk in the early Star Trek movies, who has sworn to uphold the Federation’s mission of peace, but will also “never forgive” the Klingons for the death of his son. Clearly, he’s going to have to face this conflict sooner or later. (Sentences starting “I always” or “I never” make great Values, by the way.)

Once the game begins, players take turns staging Scenes that advance the plot. Each scene is based around a Question which that player has about where the story is going. So if a mysterious transmission was detected in the previous scene, the next player might ask “Who sent the transmission?” as their Question– or might introduce a new complication by asking something like “Why can’t we find the source of the transmission?” Everyone then collaboratively plays a scene around answering the Question, both playing their character as well as making things happen in the story world (like a GM).

Some “trove” cards, created by the players to support storytelling.

What are the basic mechanics like for social and other conflicts, and how do they engage players emotionally?

Players have the option of resolving conflicts through roleplay, but there’s a mechanic that provides a bit of randomness and an uncertain outcome that can be used by any player who wants it. Another thing you do at the start of play is create a deck of index cards called the Trove, each one with a single word on it. (The rules encourage you to pull these words from your favorite sci-fi novels.) When you want to resolve an uncertain outcome, you can draw from the Trove and let the word inspire the outcome. What’s great about this is the interpretation can be anything you want: literal, metaphorical, even tangential. So the word “fire” might inspire one person to narrate a catastrophic explosion, while another might read it as the fire in someone’s eyes as they pull off a wild maneuver.

Where emotions come in is when the story gets to a Dilemma, a conflict between two Values. This is a situation where the characters need to decide on a course of action, but either decision would threaten one of the Values in play. Say the players have created a House with a core Value of staying hidden; but one of the characters has a personal value to protect the helpless, and the House has a chance to save a lot of lives by coming out of the shadows. Can that character convince the others to change their minds and go against their House’s highest value? Or will she find a way to live with betraying what she believes for a greater good? It’s not an easy decision, because any character who acts against a Value they believe in might have to Adapt at the end of the session, making a permanent change to their character.

An example of a Value, “We Always Show the Truth.”

What was your playtesting process like? Tell me about any realizations you had, and how you dealt with necessary changes.

I’ve been making digital games for a long time, but this is my first fully finished and released tabletop roleplaying game, and one of the things that surprised me was how much more playtesting and iteration tabletop takes. With digital games, you spend some amount of time thinking of ideas, a hellishly long amount of time programming them, and then some amount of time playtesting: ideally throughout the process, but often closer to the end. With tabletop, almost all of your iteration time is spent actually playing the game and seeing how it works, with a few hours here and there to think through problems people are having and revise the rules.

Archives morphed a lot as it went through close to twenty fairly significant revisions (i.e. not just tweaking wording) over about two years. It accumulated more and more rules as I tried to get all the parts to work the way I wanted them to. The downside was this is as you went through a game, you kept bumping into new rules, and needing to stop to explain them. Finally I sat down and counted up the number of individual rules and mechanics in the game, and there were something like 27 of them. I challenged myself to try to make a version of the game that had only 10 concepts that needed to be explained. I think the simpler version that came out of that was when I really cracked the code of how the game worked, and from then on everything was just refinement.

The biggest two realizations I had were A) the game was really about Values, not the plot events (in the original version, you did a lot of writing down plot points on cards, moving them around the table, taking special moves to revise them, etc.– in the final version, all that focus is placed on the Values in play instead). And B) A bunch of separate mechanics in older versions could be combined into the simple rule “Ask a question to begin a scene.” So at certain times of the game that’s a fixed question; at some times there are some questions that make more sense than others; but it’s only one rule to explain, and everything else follows naturally from that framing, which simplified things a lot.

How do you put the “epic” into the game, with mechanics, narrative, and structure?

I wanted all players to get involved in telling the story: contributing details to scenes, helping build the world, and so on, but in practice people were often afraid to contribute when it wasn’t their “turn” to stage a scene. So I added the concept of two meta-roles, called the Epic and the Intimate, that people take turns playing. Your job when you’re the Epic is to look for opportunities to make the story huge and awe-inspiring in scope… so if someone mentions a spaceship, you might jump in with “It’s three miles long and made from some incredibly black material that totally swallows up the starlight.” By contrast, the Intimate looks for moments to keep the focus on emotions and small human details: they can ask a player what their character is feeling at any time during a scene, or add small touches of detail, like a texture or a significant glance between two characters. This system works really well to give players “permission” to tweak the story, and having those two things to focus on help make the stories feel like the kind of sci-fi I want to emulate.

The Archives of the Sky cover.

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Thanks so much to Aaron for the interview! This was a real cool game to learn about. I hope you all enjoyed the interview and will check out the Archives of the Sky Kickstarter today!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Patreon Spotlight: Kira Magrann

Hi all! I have a Patreon spotlight today and it’s on the designer and creator Kira Magrann, who makes some queer, experimental games that explore intimacy and cyberpunk themes, among other things.

kira, a dark haired femme person in a bomber style jacket with tigers on the chest

Kira Magrann

Bio via Kira:

Kira is a tabletop roleplaying game designer, queer NB cyborg, and snake mom living in Columbus, Ohio. She currently has a Patreon where she designs experimental games, a YouTube channel where she talks about game design, and she blogs a few times a month at Gnome Stew. With the support of her patrons she recently released a game about Lesbisnakes in wintertime titled A Cozy Den.

You can find Kira on Twitter: @kiranansi

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Kira, a femme person in a black and white flannel and jeans, kneeling not far from a large snake baring its fangs.

Kira and a big snake!

Tell me about yourself and your work. Who are you, and what does your work do?

I’m a queer cyborg game designer living in Columbus, Ohio. I’m a horror movie lover, snake mom, and I’m working on making my hair look like Major Kusanagi’s. My work, my game design work anyway, aims to educate, titillate, and inspire. When people play my games I want them to feel things and have learned something they didn’t know before. Hopefully the designs and concepts are also accessible enough to reach a diverse audience which is something I work hard at doing.

a series of images depicting different colored snakes with captions for high femme to stone butch, descriptors to identify characters, detailed with stats in the image text.

The identification stats for lesbisnakes in A Cozy Den, featuring a range from High Femme to Stone Butch.

details of the identification stats including presentation like lipstick, butch and femme aesthetics, and some details of how the scales of the lesbisnake impacts the presentation of the character.

Descriptions of the various stats in A Cozy Den, including presentation.

You’re a known activist and queer designer. How does your perspective regarding these things affect your design work and the work you do for your Patreon?

Gosh, well, being an activist and a queer designer means that basically all my work will have some aspects of those two parts of me in them. Everything I make is queer, or cyberpunk (emphasis on the punk), or related to queer or feminine monster metaphors. It’s a huge pool of inspiration to pull from, which means I can make games that are kind of like, combinations of these things, and maybe not like, 100% just one of them. So A Cozy Den, my game about lesbisnakes, is about half snake half lesbian mythical monster creatures who are trying to live together during the winter. It’s also a non-violent game and focuses on cozy stories and mechanics. It also uses lesbian terminology, your stats being derived from a scale of High Femme to Stone Butch. So that’s easily like, all three of my main interests in one game. This is how all my games go! I basically draw from what’s important to me in my personal life, and also the genres I’m inspired by and care a lot about.

three lesbisnakes - femme heads and torsos on snake bodies - communing.

Three lesbisnakes from A Cozy Den.

Tell me a little about A Cozy Den. What inspired you to write the game? What about it speaks to your design and you as a person?

A Cozy Den came about because I’ve been obsessed with snakes since I adopted my 8 year old corn snake Sol about a year and a half ago now. I basically read about them daily and am in all these FB groups in the snake community and just love them so much. I’ve actually loved snakes since I was a child but never really owned any until now (I’m 37!). I had recently learned that snakes den together, and it really humanized them, painted them in a more communal and cozy way.

I like finding ways that make snakes less scary for people, because I think that removing fear even in a small way toward an animal can make huge changes in a person’s life and in removing fear in the world in all kinds of ways. I’d also been really into lesbian lifestyle history at the time and watched this short documentary on lesbian communes, and suddenly it clicked… snake dens and lesbian communes are so similar in all these ways like, culturally. They’re outsiders, American culture is kind of afraid of them, and the communes in the 70s and 80s in particular were very purposeful outsider ways for lesbians to live outside of the norm in America.

“What’s a Den?” section of the A Cozy Den text.

So I basically just combined the two and was like, I can make a game that can teach simultaneously about two things I love: snakes and queer history. That is so typical of my design style. I’ll basically find all these connecting points with the many genres and things in the world I love, combine them into an interesting genre game setting, and somehow teach about them in the game. I’m queer and a snake lover too, so this game is very personal, very much about me and the things I love. I also wanted to experiment with mechanics, to see if I could make a pbta game without physical conflict as the main driver. I’m more and more interested in games that don’t have violence, and instead create different types of feelings or situations. So in A Cozy Den all the conflict is inter personal… can the characters get along with each other during the winter in a closed space? What does cozy look like in a tabletop game vs a video game? There’s a lot going on in this tiny weird game, and its very much how my design brain and personal brain work. I could talk about it for awhile lol.

The “Healing” section of A Cozy Den.

Your new videos have been well-received! How do you decide what to do videos about? What is your process for creating the videos?

So, my videos, basically I recently got obsessed with YouTube (you’re probably seeing a pattern here with my creative obsessions) and I was like, shit, I could do this. I’ve always wanted to learn more about video making and a lot of my personal media on my insta has been drifting toward video too. Whenever I want to get better at something, I get obsessed with it and do it until I get better. It’s worked ok so far although I wish I could stick with one thing it’d be easier lol.

My videos are about my design process and thoughts, so while I’m working on things throughout the week I try to note particular issues I’m having while writing or designing, or thoughts another youtube video or article made me have, and then I write those down. Then I pick one, and make a word document with a bunch of bullet points stream of conciousness style what I might like to talk about in that video topic. Then I’ll step away for a few hours or a day, come back to it and clean it up.

I’ve cleaned up my extra bedroom office so that the space behind me looks decent and I have windows in front of me for natural light, and I just use a very cheap tripod from amazon and my iphone for recording. Then I’ll record in about 50 second pieces (I’ve found smaller ones are easier to upload to dropbox for whatever reason), upload them to dropbox, download them to my computer (this usually takes hours) then edit them in a free editing program I have on my ubuntu computer called kdenlive. I don’t do anything fancy with the editing, just add music and text. Once that’s done I’ll upload to youtube!

A video from Kira’s YouTube on Playtest Process and Design Iteration.

There’s lots of tricks on youtube to get more traffic and stuff in like, the way you tag things and name stuff and put ending credits in… all those I learned from watching videos on youtube about how to do it. I want to get a little more vloggy with my videos in the future, play with cinematography more, but for right now I’m trying to get a rhythm and skill set to just make them regularly. I think of my youtube channel like a blog basically, like, what would I write about to the community on g+ or gnome stew, then instead of writing I just film it. I’m getting better! It’s still mostly an experiment.

What are some goals you have for your Patreon and your design practice in general?

My Patreon is helping me become a better designer while simultaneously putting out content that I can’t make anywhere else. It’s a really unique opportunity to be able to explore whatever kinds of games my heart desires and not worry to terribly about the “sellability” of it, y’know? I think a lot of creators know what types of content really sells, something with fantasy fighters, something grimdark, something with skullduggery… basically new takes on the typical rpg stuff.

In order to create something truly new and different, it means that you’re taking a huge chance as a creator that no one in the rpg community will be interested in playing your weird stuff. So having this patreon to support me even a little monetarily helps me make those unique and innovative games. Also it is paying my bills! I’d love to get it up to 1500 a month, cause then it’d legit be like a part time job! But until then I’m scrambling to fill the extra money in with freelance work which to be honest is kind of overwhelming. It’s a dream to be able to live off my patreon. I think it’ll get there.

a sheet of paper titled Actions with various actions described for characters to take in A Cozy Den.

The Actions from A Cozy Den with some handwritten markup.

When do you experience the most joy, and the most satisfaction, while creating?

Wow this is a spectacular question and I’m not sure 100% how to answer it lol! The whole process for me is very joy inducing. I’m a hyper creative person and my imagination is always on overdrive, so coming up with the ideas is really fun. I also love to be critical, and I think editing is a critical skill, so basically the part where you’re taking the ideas and narrowing them and sculpting them into something more specific is also really satisfying. The act of writing is sometimes a little tedious, but when I get a flow going I disappear into the document for hours at a time and that flow feels really good, creatively.

I do really love collaborating, especially when I’m in charge of a project and can choose who else is on my team. I’m very proud to work with other marginalized creators and hire them to create art or other work like in A Cozy Den or RESISTOR. Sharing creative work is definitely scary, but I love creating artwork that people use or wear, so when people are getting the game and playing it I feel very accomplished and get this feeling of sympathetic joy. So I guess those are my favorite parts of creating, and the things that give me the most satisfaction in the process.

A sheet of paper titled Copperhead Lesbisnakes that includes various stats and details on the character in A Cozy Den.

A character sheet from A Cozy Den.

Patterns and colors for the various lesbisnakes in A Cozy Den based on their stats.

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Thank you so much to Kira for stopping in to talk about her Patreon, A Cozy Den, and her design! Please check out Kira’s work and share around this spotlight to show off the cool work she is doing.

You can find Kira on Twitter as @kiranansi and on YouTube, as well as through Patreon where she designs experimental games, and sometimes at Gnome Stew. Make sure to check out A Cozy Den, too!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Familiars of Terra

Hey all, I’ve got a great interview with Elizabeth Chaipraditkul on the new tabletop game Familiars of Terra, which is currently on Kickstarter! Liz got in touch and when I heard “familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in a beautiful world where everyone has their own animal familiar” I knew many of you would be super amped to check it out. So here’s the interview!

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A dark skinned person with a beard, wearing a fancy shirt with a fur collar, with an animal that l can only describe as a poodle with wings. SO CUTE.

Tell me a little about Familiars of Terra. What excites you about it?

Familiars of Terra is a tabletop roleplay game set in Terra, a fantasy world in which every person has an animal familiar. As a heroic Seeker you travel the lands with your familiar healing the devastation of a war which left nations scared and people scattered. The game is all about exploration, adventure, and heroics. If you’re a fan of the Golden Compass or Pokemon you’ll probably enjoy our game.

What makes me most excited about Familiars of Terra is that it is a very positive game. Yes there was a war, yes your main job as a Seeker is to make sure something terrible like that never happens again, but behind all that is hope. Being a Seeker is about making the right choices when they matter most and when there are grey decisions – helping, healing, and thriving. I wanted to make a game that left people feeling good about themselves, that built them up, and also had a bunch of awesome animals in it. 🙂

What was the initial design and conception process like? If you just woke up one day and wrote it, what was the spark? If it took a longer road, how did you find your way?

After I finished WITCH I kinda needed a break from the dark. I love dark, dramatic games, but focusing so much on that type of world was really exhausting. You can’t live in shadows forever it isn’t healthy. So Familiars of Terra really came from a place of wanting to design something happy and uplifting. I wanted to write about heroes and cool animals. That’s where the game really began. From there I started testing different mechanics with dice and then eventually with cards – once we had the base system it took off from there. Funnily enough, I had a really clear picture in my mind of what Terra looked like right from the start, so the mechanics was where I had to invest a lot of development time.

Left to right: a person with a beard and mustache, a necklace with a big shiny gem in it, and a fancy shirt and collar in blue and beige; a dark skinned person with round pigtails, in a cream colored midriff shirt and beautiful facial jewelry; a white person with red hair wearing a brown vest with a fluffy collar over a light blue dress; a dark skinned person with dreadlocks, wearing a purple-ish scarf and a long green vest; and an indigenous-appearing person wearing a strappy vest, with organic lines down their cheek in red, carrying a large stick on their back.

When you say grey decisions, what do you mean by that, and how does it tie to the heart of the Seeker-familiar relationship?

By grey decisions, I guess I mean very real decisions. Life is really difficult with out any supernatural threats and the choices we make as humans are tough. In Terra I wanted to tackle real problems, but then in a fantasy world. You basically play a modern day hero and that means the decisions you’re faced with are realistically tough – we don’t have many true villains in the game, but we do have a lot of people who think differently than one another. We have people who hurt people to help themselves (or their families) and Seekers are often faced with greed. However, as a Seeker you fight for the greater good – you’re part of the generation that will heal the world. It’s your job to make the tough calls and practice radical empathy and creative problem solving. You’re faced with grey decisions, but you play hope :).

A person wearing flowing clothing with beautiful geometric patterns who has a red line across their cheeks and nose, carrying a harpoon-like weapon and standing beside a large deer with a saddle.

How do the mechanics tie in with your familiar and that relationship?

Actually, in Familiars of Terra you have one character sheet for two characters. Half your sheet is for your familiar and half your sheet is for yous Seeker. You can make checks with either and as a player it’s basically like playing one soul in two bodies. Also, familiars are always the one to fight! Humans are weak compared to familiars, so in order to protect their companions, familiars are always the one to get into a scuffle. We have lots of cool Combat Powers for you to pick and customize how your familiar fights. Finally, each familiar gets a legacy which is both story and mechanics. By following a story you create to your familiar’s epic destiny you earn cool new Traits which alter how your familiar looks, moves, and even fights.

How do players engage the mechanics to express empathy, and how do the familiars help with that?

A lot of our mechanics work by ‘defining’ things. You can buy Items and then in the moment when you want to use them – you define the item’s history and how it is used. This encourages player’s creativity and allows people to take different paths to problem solving. A lot of times you make a check and you’re done – you succeed or fail and sometimes that’s absolutely terrible when you’re trying to do something kind or empathetic. When I was creating Familiars of Terra I really wanted to make sure doing something empathetic or creative (or anything really) relied on more than that. By having a mechanical work around your character can use one check isn’t the end of empathy, it’s a challenge and an encouragement to use the items you have at your disposal to still reach your desired outcome.

Familiar-wise, even though familiars can fight, they definitely don’t have to. In fact, lots of familiar’s traits are based around healing, comforting, and empathizing. For example, you can have a comforting familiar who can calm situations and make people feel better in their presence – much how ‘mundane’ therapy dogs do as well :).

A red-haired person in a green jacket and yellow dress reaching their hands up to the sky where cats with wings are flying, with the text “Familiars of Terra” over the background of a seaside sunset.

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Thanks to Liz for the great interview and for sharing Familiars of Terra with me and you all, my readers! I hope you enjoyed the interview and that you’ll check out the Familiars of Terra Kickstarter and maybe help it reach its goal!

P.S. – I tried to find out if it was okay to use “dark skinned” as a descriptor and I saw it used in some places where it seemed okay, but if it is not, please email contactbriecs at gmail and I will update the post as soon as possible. Thank you.

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Quick Shot on Vintage RPG

I recently found an Instagram account called @vintagerpg, thanks to being tagged in by John. I was immediately enthused by it, excited to see all of the different games showcased there. There’s not a lot of interestingly showcased and easily accessible game material history/curation, and the creator, Stu Horvath, shares a lot of great information about the games shown on Vintage RPG. Stu was willing to answer a few questions of mine – check them out!

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What inspired you to start your Instagram? What makes you excited to post?

My friend Ken (@zombiegentleman on Instagram) prodded me to start @VintageRPG. Over the last couple years, my collection went from respectable to Serious and, coupled with the fact that my brain somehow got packed with RPG history, it just seemed like a no-brainer to find a way to share it. Instagram seemed like the place to do that.

The excitement, that’s changed and evolved a bit over the course of the feed’s (shockingly short) existence. I’ve written about tabletop RPGs in the course of my career, so at the start it was mostly just an extension of that, maybe in the service of some nebulous larger project. A lot of the early entries seem like notes for a book, or something along those lines. Still do, I guess. As the feed drew more and more followers (it blows my mind that so many people are following me – I truly expected a couple hundred folks and for the whole thing to fizzle after a few months), I’d be lying if I said that watching the Likes accrue didn’t give my lizard brain some primitive satisfaction.

I spend a few happy minutes every day rooting for new posts to break my top ten most liked. Lately, though, I’ve been enjoying puzzling out what folks will respond to and it is always a surprise. I run a criticism site called Unwinnable and we long ago closed the comments sections because they were so toxic. The experience with @VintageRPG has been the complete opposite: almost entirely positive, an outpouring of enthusiasm and personal stories. When communication works on social media, its a hell of a drug.

How do you curate the games, and where do you find backup information for them?

Curation is improvisational. A lot of it comes down to my whims – what I feel like photographing and writing about on a given week. A lot of it is context. I try to not do too much of any one thing in consecutive weeks. If I’m bored, I’ll do something from totally left field, like covers of fiction books that inspired games. A lot of it is just plain editorial instinct, too. I try to work four to five weeks ahead to give myself some ability to address what I think my followers want to see. Big name games, like D&D (a mainstay) and some of the big licenses like Star Wars and Middle Earth Roleplaying get a lot of attention and demand a lot of interaction, so I try to cool things down after a big week with more obscure games I am passionately interested in but probably won’t generate a ton of comments, like the modern indie I covered last week.

I’ve been reading, reading about and playing RPGs practically my entire life, so a lot of what I’m writing is stuff I’ve internalized or my critical impressions of art or mechanics or theme or what have you. I have a near complete run of Dragon Magazine that has contributed greatly to my historical knowledge, as has Shannon Applecline’s four-volume history of the industry, Designers & Dungeons. If I’m in a bind, I hit up RPG.net or just reach out to the creator in question – a lot of RPG designers are pretty accessible online these days. If all else fails, I guess – and if I get it wrong, someone who knows better points it out in the comments, which is always pretty great.

What are a few of the coolest things you have discovered while running the account? What’s something that just really blew you away with how unusual or interesting it was?

I am going to answer this two different ways, if you don’t mind.

One of the most surprising things was actually discovered by my pal and DM, @JohnMiserable. We had played through a series of classic modules – Against the Slavers and Against the Giants – and, using Vintage RPG, I publicly guilted him into finishing up the drow modules after a long hiatus. In one session, he noticed something in Bill Willingham’s art for the D&D module D1-2: Descent into the Depths of the Earth and it just blew all our minds.

[The following Instagram embed includes art from the aforementioned module, captioned: OK, check this out – don’t flip to the second image yet. This is an illustration from D1-2 – Descent into the Depths of the Earth by Bill Willingham. I posted it a few weeks back. We’re playing it in a 5E conversion now and our DM, @JohnMiserable, spotted something super cool in there. Can you see it? OK, you can flip to the second image now. Captain America’s shield and Iron Man’s helmet, in a drow chest, decorated with what some might call Spider-Man eyes. What the hell did the drow do to the Avengers?!”]

OK, check this out – don’t flip to the second image yet. ¶ This is an illustration from D1-2 – Descent into the Depths of the Earth by Bill Willingham. I posted it a few weeks back. We’re playing it in a 5E conversion now and our DM, @JohnMiserable, spotted something super cool in there. Can you see it? OK, you can flip to the second image now. ¶ Captain America’s shield and Iron Man’s helmet, in a drow chest, decorated with what some might call Spider-Man eyes. What the hell did the drow do to the Avengers?! ¶ #DndD #ADnD #DandD #TSR #TabletopRPG #RPG # #DescentintotheDepthsoftheEarth #D1 #1980 #BillWillingham #Drow #IronMan #SpiderMan #CaptainAmerica #Avengers
A post shared by Vintage RPG (@vintagerpg) on Sep 1, 2017 at 9:38pm PDT

Second, a few months ago, I scored a copy of something I have been searching for a long time: the 1983 Imperial Toys catalog. I love it because Imperial Toys sold knock-off D&D toys and just, you know, totally ripped off the art for the cover in a way only a Hong Kong toy manufacturer in the 80s could. It is delightful in every singe way. So I love it for that, but I also love it because no else does. Most people probably have no clue this exists or how weird it is. That I was able to find something so disposable as a dime store distribution catalog feels important to me in a way I suspect few people would understand. And that’s OK! That’s why I’m here, doing my thing.

[The following Instagram embed includes images from the 1983 Imperial Toys catalog, including a Pegasus and two-headed dragons, and the caption: “This week, I’m talking about knock-offs. First off: one of the crown jewels of my collection, the 1983 Imperial Toys catalog. I have been looking for this for a very long time and finally scored a near-perfect copy last month. The reason for my desire should be apparent from the cover art, which rips off two things I love in dizzying fashion. First off, don’t those dragons look familiar? That’s because they are crude, modified traces of David C Sutherland III’s art from the Monster Manual. Then there’s the Pegasus/Centurion that seems to want to capitalize on Clash of the Titans.

The toy line was called Dragons & Daggers. It was a blatant attempt to capitalize on the popularity of LJN’s Dungeons & Dragons toys (right down to the sliding puzzles), aimed at the five & dime market. I got the two-headed dragon at my local Ben Franklin (which I just learned was a chain!). Later additions to the line were a variety of cool riding beasts made in for the scale of Battle Cat and Panthor from the He-Man line. Catalogs like this (and maybe catalogs in general) feel special to me. By their nature, they are disposable, so there can’t be that many of them still in circulation, especially in the case of distro catalogs like this that were aimed toward business owners. I suspect not a lot of collectors know about the odd little corner of D&D history this occupies, and likely even fewer care. It is special in another way. The other toys and junk in the catalog are an amazing trip down memory lane. I have zero nostalgia for this stuff and would never have remembered them if not for seeing them here, but I appreciate the chance the catalog affords me to catch a glimpse of those long gone five & dime shelves.”]

This week, I’m talking about knock-offs. First off: one of the crown jewels of my collection, the 1983 Imperial Toys catalog. ¶ I have been looking for this for a very long time and finally scored a near-perfect copy last month. The reason for my desire should be apparent from the cover art, which rips off two things I love in dizzying fashion. First off, don’t those dragons look familiar? That’s because they are crude, modified traces of David C Sutherland III’s art from the Monster Manual. Then there’s the Pegasus/Centurion that seems to want to capitalize on Clash of the Titans. ¶ The toy line was called Dragons & Daggers. It was a blatant attempt to capitalize on the popularity of LJN’s Dungeons & Dragons toys (right down to the sliding puzzles), aimed at the five & dime market. I got the two-headed dragon at my local Ben Franklin (which I just learned was a chain!). Later additions to the line were a variety of cool riding beasts made in for the scale of Battle Cat and Panthor from the He-Man line. ¶ Catalogs like this (and maybe catalogs in general) feel special to me. By their nature, they are disposable, so there can’t be that many of them still in circulation, especially in the case of distro catalogs like this that were aimed toward business owners. I suspect not a lot of collectors know about the odd little corner of D&D history this occupies, and likely even fewer care. ¶ It is special in another way. The other toys and junk in the catalog are an amazing trip down memory lane. I have zero nostalgia for this stuff and would never have remembered them if not for seeing them here, but I appreciate the chance the catalog affords me to catch a glimpse of those long gone five & dime shelves. ¶ #DnD #DungeonsAndDragons #ADnD #DandD #AdvancedDungeonsAndDragons #TSR #RPG #TabletopRPG #roleplayinggame #dragonsanddaggers #ImperialToys #ClashoftheTitans #HeMan #fiveanddime #BenFranklin #MonsterManual #DavidCSutherlandIII
A post shared by Vintage RPG (@vintagerpg) on Dec 11, 2017 at 12:05am PST

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Thanks so much to Stu for the interview! I hope you’ll all check out @vintagerpg on Instagram.

Do you have a favorite pre-2000s game cover or piece of game art? Share it on Instagram, G+, or Twitter and tag it #myvintagerpg.

Feel free to tag me in, too – I’d love to see what you love!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Imp of the Perverse

I am legit delighted to say I’ve yet again had the chance for interview time with Nathan Paoletta, this time talking about his new game Imp of the Perverse, which is currently on Kickstarter. The game’s design has been percolating for a while, and I can’t wait for you all to hear more about the project. Check it out!

Note: Images are the collaborative work of Nathan and cartoonist/illustrator Marnie Galloway.

A dark red image with an illustration in black and white showing a monstrous imp wreathed in smoke, creeping behind a woman reading a book. The text reads, “IMP of the PERVERSE: A Psychological Horror Game of Monster Hunting in Jacksonian Gothic America. Quite nice, really.

Tell me a little about Imp of the Perverse. What excites you about it?

Imp of the Perverse is a psychological horror game of monster hunting in what I call “Jacksonian Gothic” America. Your protagonists are members of society in the historical 1830s or 1840s, but with a little extra – an Imp of the Perverse on their shoulders, impelling them to do terrible deeds. Only by hunting down those who have already given in to their Imps, and thus turned into literal monsters, can yours hope to rid themselves of their Imps and regain their humanity.

I’ve been working on this game for a long time! I recently uncovered my very first files of notes on the first ideas I had, and it’s dated 2006. I’ve always been a fan of the work of Edgar Allan Poe (hence the name of the game, of course) and the compelling nature of his work seemed very gameable to me once I started making games, but it took me a really long time and the experience of doing so many other games (carry. a game about war., Annalise, World Wide Wrestling, etc) to figure out the “in” into the stuff that resonates with me.

So now I’m excited to be so close to done with something that’s been on my mind for so long, and just really pleased with how the game has turned out! It reliably does the things that I personally like the most in tabletop – good solid hooks for characters with enough space to develop in play, clear direction in what you do, the opportunity to get deep into your characters head without demanding that as the only way to play, and specific GM tools for developing situations that you’re excited about, and then making decisions in play that all build to a fictional climax without depending entirely on personal storytelling skills. In fact, one of the sneaky goals of the game is to subtly teach players who may have never GMed before how to do it (or at least, how to do it in this game). One of the conceits is that if your character gives in to their Imp (a very possible but by no means inevitable state), you build the character as a new monster for the next hunt and take over the Editor (GM) role – I hope that players will be excited to do that when it comes up in long term play and feel like they have the foundation to do it even if they’ve never GMed before.

Image of the Kickstarter bits – quickplay cards, a clothbound hardcover, and a note on illustrated monsters and custom chapters! All of this is themed in red, dark red, black, and gold.

I have to ask about this transferable or shared GM role. What kind of powers do Editors hold, and how do they use them?

I think it’ll be familiar to most folks as a “traditional” GM kind of role. The Editor is in charge of coming up with the monster, setting up situations that challenge the protagonists, describing the world around them, playing NPCs, all that kind of stuff. This game is not Powered by the Apocalypse, but I absorbed many of the Agenda/Principle lessons from Apocalypse World, and do have a similar charge for the Editor in this game. Your job is to:

create monsters and put them in the same social context as the protagonist characters
construct a compelling, dark world full of challenge, doubt and wonder
engineer specific situations for each protagonist that dare them to embrace their darker self
demonstrate the consequences of the protagonists actions with integrity (in this order: integrity to the dark Gothic world, integrity to the characters development so far, integrity to the demands of the unfolding narrative, and ideally all three)

The game also asks the Editor to do specific prep (building the monster and the web of social relationships it influences). The goal here is two-fold: to give the Editor plenty to work with in play, so there’s always something to fall back to to keep the story going, and to draw them into investing in the world they’re preparing. The game shines when everyone is invested in what happens to these fictional characters, and prep is structured to make it as easy as possible for the Editor to do that.

As a player, you see the “effect” of the prep and the Editor’s agenda from the player side, and then when it’s your turn the game says “here are the tools the Editor you just played with used to make your game happen, and you saw how it went, so now it’s your turn to take them for a spin.” Obviously if it’s not within the players comfort zone there’s no artificial dictate that they MUST become the GM, but (again hopefully) by the time you get through a couple Chapters of play you’ll be able to see how it all works and maybe excited to try it out yourself!

How did you build and design the fiction of the game, especially ensuring you could integrate the imps without it seeming negatively garish or absurd?

The concept of “you play a character with an Imp on their shoulder pushing you to do perverse things” has been the central idea from the start, along with the idea that monsters should be unique to the perversity that spawned them, but developing the rest of the context took a long time. I knew I wanted to keep the realities of the historical time as the counterweight to the fantastical elements, but there were a lot of versions of doing that over the years. I had a key playtest that put me on the path to figuring it out – at the time, the characters were all part of a secret society of monster hunters who were recruited when their Imp appeared, and then kind of sent on a mission to hunt down the next monster. It worked to get everyone in the same place at the same time, but also felt very “you meet in a tavern” in a way that didn’t sit well at the table. We spent a lot of debrief time just kind of brainstorming about it, and someone made a comparison to the gravity well of a black hole, and the metaphor fell into place for me.

A series of symbols illustrated in maroon and white – a rose, a quill pen, a book, a gun, a compass, and a shovel.

A monster is the result of an Imp gaining the most power in the world of the living, and so when it appears everyone else who has an Imp can feel it, drawn to the perverse “gravity” it emanates. Implied by the dynamic of “when you know a monster appears, you know you have to do something about it” is that normal people CAN’T do anything to stop monsters, they’re too horrible and powerful, and the protagonists know this. And then, embedding the protagonists as well as the monster in a linked web of relationships gives the context for why they might care about this situation in particular, and have specific people they want to protect or save.

Beyond the basic concepts of Imps, monsters and the Shroud between worlds, one of the long-term mechanics is that the players build up the nature of their own gothic world through play. Between sessions, one of the things players can do is spend resources to establish facts about the Shroud and monsters. I want to provide the baseline fictional frame for “here’s what you do and why” and then see how different groups take that through the act of play, rather than build out a bunch of metaphysics for players to learn up front.

How do you handle a concept where the characters are continually tempted to do wrong, while they are hunting those who failed to resist the temptation? I’m really curious: what does morality look like in Imp of the Perverse?

One of the core rules is this: you are playing a historical character, but you are a modern person. We care about the actual concerns of the people playing at the table, not what we think other kinds of people might be worried about. So, perversity is always relative to something you actually think is wrong – for players, this is something that you should be interested in exploring and (possibly) overcoming, while for the Editor this is something that you want to see the protagonists destroy. The game doesn’t make overt moral judgements of what is and is not perverse, in that the development of individual perversities is totally freeform. But there are guidelines – it should be something that actually makes it hard to live a normal life, that the character sees the clear downsides of, but that is, well, tempting. Perversities are not superpowers, but they have both up and downsides. Then the mechanics provide specific moments where you choose whether it’s worth the temptation in order to get what you want right then in that moment. The game does give you permission to use whatever means necessary to destroy or deal with the monster, in that they are almost always worse than you, so in that way there is a bit of a moral statement of when violence is justified; but also, the means by which a monster is resolved can be very contextual to the individual monster and the nature of the protagonists, so it’s not ALWAYS a fight to the death.

There is also a bit of the morality of the era (or at least, my read of it) in how characters are built. For example, if you make a character who has a child out of wedlock, you’ll have the Scandalous Quality, or if your spouse is dead you’ll be Bereaved. These reflect the general sense of how people in your social circles view you, and have an equal ability to be used in play as more “positive” Qualities, but they do reflect a certain moral sense that centers on your family as the fundamental important thing in people’s lives – an important piece of embedding the characters in the society they’re a part of!

The words “IMP of the PERVERSE” in shimmering gold with filigree above and below.

You’ve been working on Imp of the Perverse for a long time (2006, right?)? What are some of your favorite moments of design and creation in that path that resonate with the game, and with you, today?

This is a great question, and a hard one because the arc of the design has basically been one of long gaps punctuated by short periods of focused progress, so it’s all kind of one amorphous blob of experience in my head. I’ll try to tease out some moments when I felt most satisfied that I was on the right track, because they stand out to me the most. First, when I decided to cut down the original idea of “play all kinds of different stories with these protagonists” down to “what if it’s just about hunting down the monsters in this world” (which was originally going to be one mini-game inside the larger game…) that was key to cutting the design space down to a manageable level. When I had the first playtests of the central die roll mechanic that tempts you towards perversity and saw it work, that was great. The game needed development to support that mechanic and fine-tune it, but I saw players engage with the critical decision point (do I or don’t I? is it worth it?) and that’s the beating heart of the game. The aforementioned playtest where we workshopped ourselves into the “perverse gravity” metaphor starting pulling the fictional frame together for me. I ran a long-term playtest around then where we got to see a protagonist fall to the Imp and then the player take up the Editor-ship, which worked great and let me go ahead and play on the other side to feel more of the player experience. Recently, I think one of the most gratifying moments I’ve had was at a convention game, where afterwards the players told me that they felt like they found it very easy to get into their characters and make principled decisions based on those characters. That was nice to hear as a GM of course, but also validation of the design goal of really putting players into the fictional world of their protagonists and giving them clear structure and direction for play through how the characters are made and interact.

And of course it is viscerally satisfying to see players defeat the horrible monsters I make that embody the things I really, truly want to see destroyed in the world!

Cover image, similar to the first of the image in the post: a dark red image with an illustration in black and white showing a monstrous imp wreathed in smoke, creeping behind a woman reading a book. The text reads, “IMP of the PERVERSE: A Psychological Horror Game of Monster Hunting in Jacksonian Gothic America.

Thank you so much to Nathan for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed reading about Imp of the Perverse and that you’ll check out the Kickstarter running right now!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on CAPERS

Today I’ve got an interview with Craig Campbell on CAPERS, a super-powered roleplaying game set in the 1920s, which is currently on Kickstarter! Craig talks about the setting and the mechanics of the game in the following responses – check them out!

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CAPERS cover by Beth Varni.

Tell me a little about CAPERS. What excites you about it?

CAPERS is a super-powered RPG of 1920s gangsters. Players portray bootleggers and mobsters working to make their fortune and their mark during Prohibition in the U.S. And they have low-level superpowers. But so do their rivals and so do the feds. The game uses a press-your-luck playing card based mechanic. You might have a successful card flip but only be barely successful and opt to flip another card to try for a better success. But you might fail in the process.

I’m not a huge comics fan, but I am a superhero TV and movie fan. I love stories of people with extraordinary abilities in what is otherwise our normal world. There’s plenty of supers games out there set in the modern day (and plenty that are about HEROES), so I decided to explore a period in history from a less heroic angle. The Prohibition era has always interested me and I enjoy the romanticized movies and TV shows that tell stories set during that decade. So I thought it’d be fun to explore it in RPG form. There aren’t many RPGs that touch on the 1920 other than Call of Cthulhu stuff. And the majority of supers games fall in the comic book style, capes and cowls and all that. These two things make CAPERS pretty unique, but also familiar.

It’s become sort of a chocolate and peanut butter thing for me. I took two things I really dig (super-powered characters and the 1920s) and mashed them together to see what would happen. I feel it’s worked out pretty well.

A different kind of car chase by Beth Varni.

Where did you build your setting from? Did you use a lot of realistic resources or did you span out?

The world of CAPERS is based on real-world history but with some liberties taken. Most notably, a small percentage of people started exhibiting extraordinary abilities shortly after the Great War (WWI). For the most part, the origin of these abilities is kept vague. However, there’s a chapter that brings science into the game setting, along with a largely not understood source for the powers.

A trio of primary backdrops have been developed for the game – New York, Chicago, and Atlantic City – along with a bit of info describing a handful of other cities. Much of what’s described there is based in real history, though some details have been changed and some new things have been added, wholly from my and other writers’ imaginations. A general overview provides context for the world. What are the new technologies of the era? What’s popular in entertainment? What is life like in the 1920s.

Several notable personalities of the era are present. Enoch “Nucky” Johnson and Al “Scarface” Capone are described in some detail and provided with stat blocks. However, given that the well-known personages of the time are largely Irish and Italian guys in their 20s-40s, historically, I’ve taken some liberties. Atlantic City’s Mayor Bader is a black woman. Charles “Lucky” Luciano has become Carla “Lucky” Luciano. And the hardcase DOJ agent making trouble for Capone in Chicago is Vanessa “Ness” Elliott rather than her real-world male counterpart. Additionally, a wider variety of characters of color, female characters, and LGBT characters are presented to round out the world. All in all, this is presented simply as “how this world is” though some of the animosities between different ethnicities remains for flavor, such as Capone’s largely Italian gang squaring off against Dean O’Banion’s largely Irish northside crew in Chicago.

Concussion beam in action by Beth Varni.

How do superpowers function in CAPERS? What makes them really pop?

First a bit on the game mechanic.

The game uses playing cards, rather than dice. Each player, and the GM, has their own deck (52 suit cards plus 2 jokers). Your character has six traits – Charisma, Agility, Perception, Expertise, Resilience, and Strength. Each trait is ranked from 1 to 3 (higher if you have the right powers). When you make a trait check, you look at the trait’s rank and that is your card count. If you have a skill appropriate to the trait check, your card count is increased by 1 .

To make your trait check you flip cards. You can flip as many cards as your card count but can stop at any time and take the most recent card flipped as your check. The pip count of the cards flipped (2, 3, 4, etc, on up to ace) determine success or failure, whilst the suit of the card determines the degree of success or failure, starting with clubs (lowest) and proceeding alphabetically to spades (highest). So, you might succeed, but barely, and choose to gamble for a better success by flipping another card… but risking failure.

Each superpower has a standard effect, the thing it does or effect it generates most of the time. Each power also comes with a variety of boosts. You choose which ones you want when your character gains a power and gain more boosts as you increase a power’s level. Each boost makes the standard effect better or more versatile, provides an alternate standard effect, or provides something else your character can do related to that power. However, each boost you use in a turn reduces the card count of whatever you’re trying to do by one. You can stick with your standard effect and not suffer card count reduction OR you can use several boosts to gain other cool stuff but reduce the chances of success on your action for that turn.

It’s a “press your luck” system. The combination of trait check mechanic and boost use makes the system a balancing act for each character each turn. More power equals reduced chance of success. Less power means greater chance of success. You also have a sense of what cards remain in your deck, so that colors your choices as well. Players have found the system very engaging. You’re making active choices whenever you’re flipping cards, not just rolling a die and looking at the number.

On the street by Beth Varni.

What were challenges you encountered trying to emulate both a unique time and place and a very trope-heavy genre?

Combining a specific time period and a trope-heavy genre can easily become overwhelming. The first thing I did was make a conscious decision that CAPERS is not a superhero game. It’s not a supervillain game. It’s not even a supers game really. It’s a gangsters game where the gangsters and law enforcement HAPPEN to have superpowers at their disposal.

Once I focused in on the gangster game, it became a question of what tropes of supers were appropriate and which weren’t. I wrestled with a number of powers I thought were cool, but ultimately ended up being too complicated for a game that is, at its core, a stylized cops and robbers game. I also scaled back the POWER of the superpowers. There’s no mind control. That’s a power that becomes to easily abused unless you give the target ways to get out from under the influence. And if you make that readily available, mind control loses its “cool factor.” There’s no magnetism control either. It’s just too darn versatile compared to the other powers in the game. There’s a reason Magneto makes such a formidable foe even on his own.

So, too, I looked at other tropes of comic book stories and developed my own take on them (or had another designer help with that). A 1930s version of super-science. An explanation for where powers come from. Alternate Earths and planar travel. Super-prisons. That stuff is in the game, but it’s all optional.

There are a lot of chances for something to fail, even though it’s got a lot of chances to win. What makes failing in CAPERS interesting?

I’m a big fan of failure in RPGs. They add drama, insert complexity, and turn the story on a dime. That said, I don’t want every failure to be a huge narrative-laden thing that slows the pacing down. In CAPERS, you can succeed with a complication (a mini-failure), fail with a special bonus to help you next time, straight up fail (with no additional effect), or botch. Each type of failure has its place and helps the story in a different way. Complications add interesting tidbits that make the encounter more fun. Failure with a bonus later incentivizes the player to take further risks. Straight failure keeps the pacing moving. And of course, botches make for the best stories, especially when the characters ultimately succeed later, overcoming the botch.

The playing card mechanic requires the players to make choices on whether they keep the card they have or flip another and take a chance. A player who succeeds with a complication may choose to suffer that complication just because the group needs a success, even if it’s minimal. A player who fails with a bonus later may take that failure because they’ve suddenly come up with a cool idea for their character’s action next turn and want that bonus to come into play for their big risk.

How failure plays a role in a character’s actions is in the player’s hands a fair amount of the time. It’s not entirely at the whim of the random. It’s my hope that this provides for a more memorable story for the players.

CAPERS is coming from Craig’s company, Nerdburger Games!

—

Thanks so much to Craig for the interview! CAPERS looks pretty cool and I hope you’ve all enjoyed learning about it, and that you’ll check it out on Kickstarter today!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

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Death in RPGs – Let Me Live (revised 2/17/18)

Hi all!

I recorded this recently and had to make some updates, but now it’s a new video on a new URL: https://youtu.be/Uluvyh64_P8

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

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Quick Shot on Fate Accessories Kickstarter

Hey all, got together with Fred Hicks real quick to ask him a bit about the Fate Accessories Kickstarter that’s currently running. See what he had to say, and check out the Kickstarter too!

—

Dice with matching Fate points.

What is the Fate Accessories Kickstarter about, both as a product and as your vision?

The Fate Accessories Kickstarter is a follow-up to our 2014 Kickstarter for Fate Dice that launched that whole line (now 11 catalog entries deep) and breathed new life into the whole Fudge Dice thing. In the years since the Fate Dice have continued to be a real tentpole for us in terms of revenue, but our initial stock from that run has been dwindling. We’ve sunk profits from the line into reprinting the most of the stuff that’s getting low or even ran out (in the past several months we’ve gotten reprints rolling for the Antiquity, Eldritch, Centurion, and Vampire sets), but we also want to expand the line with more dice offerings in new styles and quantities, as well as launch a new line of Fate Point tokens that are color-coordinated with an existing (or to-be-funded) set. We’ve got a bunch of potentials waiting in the wings that we really want to show people, get their thoughts on, and get their help expanding the catalog.

Infernal dice style.

What have been some of the challenges approaching reprinting and expanding – both creatively and from a business perspective?

I’ll answer this backwards. 🙂

Dice are expensive, not on an individual scale, but on a manufacturing-run scale. When we get dice made it’s a 5000 unit minimum order with the folks we have our primary die mold with, so that means for any one packaged dice item it’ll cost us in the low 5-digits (think $10k-$15k range) to get another run made. Our original runs that were Kickstarter-funded in 2014 were manufactured at around 8000 units each, but as we approached 2018 most of them were down to around 1000 units or less. They’ve been a good supporting pole of our company’s revenue stream, so letting multiple catalog entries run dry just wasn’t an option.

So we looked at the most popular ones based on the last few years of data and made sure to get reprints of those rolling. Our Core Dice had already sold out, but the iridescent material we use there is a bit more difficult to source, which increases the minimum print quantity, so we decided to leave that one be (especially given something I’m about to get to below). We also decided we’d let our two licensed sets, Winter Knight and Atomic Robo dice, run their course without a reprint. I love the sets, but I also like the idea of not needing to pay royalties on our dice sales. We’d already brought back the Antiquity one, so that meant Vampire, Centurion, and Eldritch Fate Dice needed the reprint.

Of course that meant that the dice money we could have spent on developing and releasing new sets was spent on reprints… which brings us to our first Kickstarter of the year. Given that it had been four years since our first Fate Dice kickstarter, we felt it was a good time to turn to our fans again and ask for some help funding an expanded line.

Creatively, tho, man, that’s the more difficult part of all this. There are only so many materials styles and distinctly-different colors you can offer before there starts being some kind of overlap. And honestly that’s not something we came to terms with as much as we should’ve before we launched. We faltered a bit in our first week of the Kickstarter because we didn’t make a good enough case that we were offering enough new and different, despite it feeling really obvious to us how things were different even if they fell in the broad categories of “green” or “blue” or “purple.” But recently (just yesterday at the time I write this) we started off our second week of the KS with a reshuffling of our stretch goals to put the new and different more visibly and more close at hand, which seems to be working as we’re getting a new surge of interest.

This was made possible in part because we’re bringing a new dice construction method to the party: layered dice, where different colors of material are injected in sequence, letting you produce dice that have a striped or gradient effect depending on what colors and sequence you choose. Of course, that triples the difficulty in color selection, but does let you produce some dice that definitely don’t look like any others we currently have.

Malachite dice design.

How do you choose what products are the right ones to bring back or newly develop – what ones really called for the action, and which ones are you most excited about?

I’ve already talked about some of the decision making that went into deciding what we brought back, so I’ll focus on new development here.

We knew we wanted to get into the Fate Point token space. Campaign Coins did a great set of metal Fate tokens, and those are still out there if you can find them, but we didn’t want to get into metals manufacture. That left us with the idea of creating a line of Fate Points tokens that use the same material as an associated set of dice; if we get the chance to expand the line further, we’ll do more tokens in more styles to match other sets we’ve had done (or will have done). That’s the other baseline goal of the Kickstarter, to make a new accessories line of Fate Points possible.

We’ve also prior to the Kickstarter begun an effort to make sure there are single player packs of Fate Dice out there — ones that contain 4 dice instead of 12 — as we’ve been hearing over the past few years that there are folks who want to buy a specific, single style of dice rather than a 3-style pack. As a dice addict I don’t really understand that line of thinking, but I know my biases are not universal! So that’s what gave birth to our Fire and Midnight Fate Dice single-player sets at $6 each. Our layered dice will also come in that kind of packaging, in part because they’re a little more expensive to make, so that lets us price them at $8 per set — a 12-die set of all layered dice would need a price a lot higher than the $15 we normally charge for 12-die sets.

New materials styles and new construction methods tend to play into our choices of what to develop as well. Another set we had made without Kickstarter backing is our Frost Dice 12-die set that we released a year or so back. That came about because our manufacturer told us about a “matte” finish that could be applied to translucent dice, which give them a frozen-liquid appearance. It’s an attractive set. Obviously the layered dice from our Kickstarter stretch goals also arose from access to a new construction method. To a great extent what can be done in manufacturing tends to drive the creative side of this more than the reverse — what methods can be used act as a fruitful constraint on the creativity.

As far as what I’m most excited about from the Kickstarter? Besides the Fate Points, it’s definitely those layered dice. Have a look. 🙂

Aquatic dice design.

—

Thanks, Fred, for a great chat! Make sure you all check out the Fate Accessories Kickstarter to see what Fred &co have to offer!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Five or So Questions on Faerie Fire

Hi all! Today I have an interview with Shannon Campbell from Astrolago Press about the new bestiary currently on Kickstarter, Faerie Fire, which is compatible with Dungeons & Dragons 5th Edition. Shannon is the creator alongside Dillon MacPherson and Malcolm Wilson. The Kickstarter runs until the morning of February 7, 2018. Check out Shannon’s answers below!

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The Conglomadog by Kory Bing

Tell me a little about Faerie Fire. What excites you about it?

Faerie Fire is a collaboration between myself and two of my gamemasters: Dillon MacPherson and Malcolm Wilson. The three of us are friends and colleagues and we’re all very passionate about tabletop gaming–we’re active homebrewers, Dillon and Malcolm especially.

There’s loads of things that excite me tremendously about Faerie Fire: the fact that it’s full of items and creatures that the three of us have enjoyed so much in our own campaigns, and now we get to share them with everyone; the list of incredible illustrators that I’m so grateful to have had the chance to work with; and the fact that it’s entirely up to our own creative vision what goes in the book. AND THE AESTHETIC IS KEY. I’m super stoked to get to work on such a vibrant, colourful project. We wanted to make a really wild book that felt a little bit sexy, a little bit dangerous–but at the same time super inclusive.

What was the inspiration for Faerie Fire, and how did you start compiling and creating all of this content together?

To start, a lot of it was homebrew we had developed for our own campaig
ns. Dillon and Malcolm have known each other for a decade and as they were both game designers and avid game masters, they were constantly developing and exchanging new content. They’d always wanted to make a tabletop compendium of their own, and the success in recent years of similar projects spurred them on. I’m a writer and narrative designer in video games but I’ve also had experience as an editor on various print publications–including Bones of the Coast, a Kickstarter-funded comics anthology I helmed in 2016, and The Underground: A Sam & Fuzzy RPG, a tabletop system & setting I edited a couple of years ago.

Right away it seemed clear to me that we should do something aggressive and bold–that it wasn’t enough to just produce content that was the same flavour as the vanilla stuff already widely available. We were spending a lot of time in the fairy realm in a campaign that Malcolm was GMing and it seemed like there was a lot of content there to explore and develop–and it quickly became clear that anything we made for the Wilds would be anything but vanilla.

Pox and Pilfer by Amy T. Falcone

Why did you choose to use 5e as your base? Is any of the material flexible to use in other systems, even just the flavor?

Dillon and Malcolm have been playing for 10 years but I only came onto tabletop games with D&D 4th edition, which I played for about a year before 5e came out. After that I went through a handful of systems–but I kept coming back to 5e. I like long-form storytelling and character-driven stories, and 5e is just the right combination of intuitive and versatile–and it’s so, so homebrew friendly. Pretty much every 5e campaign I played ended up having homebrew added before too long: custom player races and classes, new magic items, weird hybrid monsters–and everyone I played with was always happy to go off book. 5e feels like a robust and elegant toolset.

One of the things we’d really like to do with Faerie Fire is make it Fate-compliant as well (I’m a huge fan of Fate Accelerated)–whether this is done as a stretch goal, or as a side hobby over the next year, is hard to say. We think that the style and aesthetic of Faerie Fire would readily fit into a lot of systems and worlds–though the mechanics would obviously need to be adapted a little. And, of course, the fast-paced, glamorous, brilliant setting of Faerie Fire would make it a perfect fit for one of my favourite impromptu systems: All Outta Bubblegum.

How did you choose artists for the project to capture the aesthetic you were looking for? What was your search like?

I come from a comics background, and for five years I ran a curated comics festival called VanCAF that put me in touch with a large network of artists, so I quickly compiled a shortlist of talent that I thought would be a great fit for the project. We had an open submissions process, as well, where artists could pitch monster ideas for us to collaborate on–but in the end we only selected a handful of artists that way.

The vision was for Faerie Fire to be vivid and stylish and bold and glamourous, but I also wanted it to be non-binary and queer. It seemed to me that if we approached it as an art book as well as a supplemental, then it might provide an opportunity for people who have otherwise felt excluded from gaming to discover how incredible these worlds could be. To that end, we wanted to collaborate with diverse creators. My own connections were very LGTBQ+ representative, and feeds like @sffpocartists on Twitter and the #drawingwhileblack and #latinxartists hashtags provided a bounty of skill & talent that made it incredibly easy to discover new names I might not have been introduced to otherwise.

Tell me a little about the design process. How did you flesh out the creatures? What did you do to make sure everything was consistent thematically and mechanically?

The design process was a little bit different from artist to artist–some artists preferred to be assigned a creature, in which case they’d give us some requests (flowers! or feathers!) and tell us what they hated to draw, and we’d build them a custom creature that played to their strengths. Other artists had their own idea for a creature, so we’d get them to run it by us and then cross-reference it to all the other monsters going into the book to make sure that it was unique. We’d send back design notes, if necessary, but otherwise we wanted to give the artists as much autonomy as possible.

Making sure that each monster is unique involves, basically, a lot of spreadsheets. We have cross-references for creature type, whether they’re humanoid or not, sentient or not–whether they have damage resistances or vulnerabilities, whether they can be used as a familiar or a mount. The book runs the whole gamut. Dillon and Malcolm design the stat blocks between the two of them and each of them reviews the other’s work–I come in at the last to give the final review, whip up the lore, and make sure everything looks hunky dory from there. As the art comes in we review it and, if there’s anything that doesn’t quite sync up with the lore & stats we’ve developed, or if the artist has surprised us with something we weren’t quite expecting, we’ll tweak the written content one last time to make sure it gets the most out of the art and doesn’t introduce any confusing inconsistencies.

The book is designed around the a chaotic Fairy plane, home of the fey. While not all the creatures originated there, they’ve all been affected by it, and that shapes their powers and design. We’ve also introduced the Plane of the Living Light, a neon-inspired plane that kind of bumps up against the Wilds–those with special sensitivities can see into it, and certain creatures can channel its living energy through them. Everything in the book, therefore, has been touched by one of these two things: either chaotic fey magics, or the pulsing, energizing Living Light.

Because the aesthetic ranges from the cyberpunky Neon Noir to the fun colours and friendly animals of certain beloved 90s stationery, there’s a wide range of creatures: some are monstrous, some are sexy, some are friendly–some are just plain weird. Each and every one of them is an original creation.

To finish off, what are a few of your favorite items and creatures in the text, and why?

My favourite probably comes down to two or three different creatures: there’s the Kapny (which is going to be drawn by Jemma Salume), dryad-like creatures that live in the husks of trees burned by wildfire; I’m also a huge fan of the Cawillopard (drawn by Desirae Salmark), a tall, giraffe-like creature whose head can’t be seen for the weeping willow branches that trail down its neck; it has a symbiotic relationship with glittering spiders that live in its branches. When you’re under its expansive canopy, the spiders make it look like the night sky shining above you. Pretty! But also creepy, depending on your particular phobia. And, lastly, I’m a big fan of our “cover girl”, Sepal: she’s the warden of the fey prison, where all the prisoners are transformed into flowers and shrubs for the duration of their imprisonment. She keeps a disciplined, well-manicured garden, and she’s a fierce and cunning member of the fairy nobility; though she mostly prefers to stay out of the various squabbles and underhanded politics of the court, it’d be pretty stupid to underestimate her–she literally grows her own army. Yuko Ota drew Sepal for the cover of the book and the interior illustration of her, as well.

Jesse Turner is drawing all our items as we speak and each time he turns in a new one, it’s even more fantastic than the last. I’m most looking forward to seeing the finished art for the Comet’s Tail: a magical flail that looks something like a glowing comet, and allows the wielder to cast Minute Meteor.

The Wayfarer by Jesse Turner

—

Thanks so much to Shannon for the interview! I hope you all enjoyed it and will check out Faerie Fire, a 5e supplemental on Kickstarter – don’t miss out, the Kickstarter ends February 7!

This post was supported by the community on patreon.com/briecs. Tell your friends!

To leave some cash in the tip jar, go to http://paypal.me/thoughty.

If you’d like to be interviewed for Thoughty, or have a project featured, email contactbriecs@gmail.com.

Tag: tabletop

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