Archive for the 'Games in Progress' category
Fictional Consequences and Mechancial Bonuses (and my Dust Devils heartbreaker)
Friday, September 26th, 2008
Because yeah, I am working on a Dust Devils heartbreaker. Looking for a nice card-based pun for the title, but I may have to skip it. (I’m going off simple draw-poker, 3/5/7 card hands.)
Many games apply a mechanical bonus to incentivize the chararacter to some course of action. Sometimes you can get mileage from incentivizing [...]
frustration and hacking at games
Friday, August 22nd, 2008
I’m talking about the ways-of-interfacing-with-games (1, 2) because I have, on and off, been hacking many existing published storygames that I have enjoyed, but will not always work successfully for me, and sometimes won’t work at all for people I want to play with. This is frustrating because I remember the calls for truly “portable [...]
Dungeon Jam 8: The Dread Anvils of Moradin
Saturday, June 28th, 2008
Dungeon Jam continues.
Many adventurers will take the direct route through the barrows to the Royal Temple of Moradin, or at least close to it as they can manage. Or they may be forced to detour from that main path, but at many points throughout the Svartálfaheim, they will find temples to Moradin, long abandoned (and [...]
[Mage/Hack] Example of Play
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
Here’s a story / example of play from my Mage/Tarot hack. The story is a little dry here, but I’m mainly trying to demonstrate how a character would be defined, and what the mechanics would look like in practice. Note that there exists a mapping of Tarot Arcana to fictional elements in Mage. Also, the [...]
[Mage/Hack] Infused with Arcana
Saturday, April 5th, 2008
I’m working on a hack now that combines White Wolf’s Mage: the Awakening setting with a Tarot-driven set of mechanics, taking advantage of the Tarot imagery already built into the setting. I’m trying to maintain some mechanical similarities to the White Wolf system, while cutting out the bits I’m not as interested in (and of [...]
Modular Game Hacks
Wednesday, March 26th, 2008
A recent thing I’ve been hacking with is a rather modular game design. This seemed to emerge naturally out of having many desired projects with vaguely similar aesthetic desires on my part, and not wanting to reinvent my own wheels. The outcomes thus far a touch on the vanilla-side (by design) but cool so far. [...]
Update: New Draft of Dance/Dawn
Tuesday, March 4th, 2008
I put in my latest changes – ditching the attempt at a token economy, adding a new ritual (the duels) instead – and I’m really hoping that this can be my last functional draft. That this game, in fact, can work. (Whew.) I also made some functional (if not-yet-pretty) sheets to help put down characters [...]
SURVIVOR: RELAY (text messaging vs zombies)
Saturday, February 16th, 2008
A while ago, this idea formed between Elizabeth and I. Now it’s written up in its first draft: SURVIVOR: RELAY.
In summary: the game is an asynchronous play-by-text-message RP with a touch of ARG going on. The players portray solitary survivors of a zombie apocalypse, and stay sane by communicating with survivors through the relay. Their [...]
Choice of narratives for political stories
Tuesday, January 8th, 2008
I’ve added a brief stub to the sidebar, describing “Governor”, a possible future project. Here’s a sample story that I might like to see in come out of such a game:
Consul Esa was elected to her post at a young age, and was known for her focus on delivering greater prosperity to her province, so [...]