A Role Playing Games Blog
Game Design
Dinner with Gamers
1January 16, 2012
Recently I sat down for dinner with friends at the Golden Place Buffet in Guaynabo. They happen to be gamers, most of them being the regular players in my campaign. There were a couple of other friends, the girlfriend of one of my player, another gamer friend, and the non-gamer looking flabbergasted at all this, my girlfriend.
See, I’ve had a couple of rough weeks and we had to cancel our weekly game twice (sacrilege I know!), so we planned this as a way to catch up, see each other and spend some quality time together. Needless to say at dinner with gamers I had to bring up the topic everyone’s been talking about in recent days D&D Next/5th edition…
I wanted to get their take on the news of the development of a fresh version of Dungeons & Dragons. Here in the blog we recently posted our thoughts, but we are bloggers, keep abreast of news and interact with a different community of gamers than some of the gamers I was sitting with. The reaction was interesting, mostly predictable if you know the group, but telling considering this quote from Monte Cook:
“I’m the lead designer of a project that will likely evolve into a new iteration of the Dungeons & Dragons ruleset. It’s meant to be a set of rules that unites all the previous editions, and the players of those editions. It’s a big project, and we plan on involving all comers to playtest and voice their opinions, because really, what’s the point of designing a game no one wants to play? And who knows better what D&D players want than, well, D&D players.”
(Thanks to EN World for collecting this and other quotes and information on the development in their D&D 5th edition info page!)
What did they say? Read on…
NaGa DeMon: I surrender!
2November 28, 2011
As I’ve written last week, I doubt I will get my NaGa DeMon project done. Today is November 28th and Astronauts is far from being playable. But since it’s a very interesting project I hope to finish it over the next months. I don’t play to hurry things but instead I want to work on it until I am happy with the result.
I also promised you a first look on what I’ve done so far. So here’s an excerpt from my manuscript:
Core Mechanic
Astronauts uses a simple dice pool mechanic to determine if actions attempted by characters are successful or not. Astronauts uses two kinds of six-sided dice: Skill dice (blue) and Complication dice (black). The blue dice represent the character’s skills and any favorable conditions that may help the character. Black dice represent anything that hinders success. Whenever it’s unsure whether a task at hand may fail or not, the dice pool is assembled. The pool starts with one Skill die. For each character trait helping in that situation another Skill die is added. The GM then may add additional Skill dice if there are favorable conditions making the task even easier. Then the Complication dice are added. Stress, unfavorable conditions, sometimes even trust issues between the characters can account for that.
The dice pool is then rolled. Each die that comes up 5 or 6 is counted as a success. Successes on black dice negate successes on blue dice. If no successes on Skill dice remain, the check failed. If only one success on a blue die remains, the check was partially successful. The task succeeded but just by a very small margin. At least two remaining successes on Skill dice are needed for a full success. Further successes imply that the task at hand was performed with superior skill or in less time than initially thought.
This core mechanic is actually pretty close to which I came up for another unfinished project, but I like it a lot, that’s why it makes a reappearance here. To put the mechanics into a bit more perspective, let me share another excerpt:
My NaGa DeMon diary #2
1November 14, 2011
My project is progressing much slower than I anticipated. But I actually made some progress and slowly, very slowly the crunch part of the game is coming together.
Astronauts will use a simple dice pool mechanic. For each task resolution the player rolls a number of six-sided dice. The number of dice rolled is determined by his character’s traits and possibly favorable conditions. If there are any factors hindering said action, dice of a different color are added (black or red for example). Each die that comes up with 5 or 6 is considered a success. Successes on the black dice negate regular successes. At least one regular success is needed for a partial success. Two successes are needed for a full success and so on.
My NaGa DeMon diary #1
8November 7, 2011
On Friday I announced my project for this year’s NaGa DeMon. It will be a near future hard science fiction roleplaying game called Astronauts. And after making that announcement I realized two things: a) a lot of people are quite excited about this and b) it’s going to be harder than I thought.
One major problem is that the way I imagined the game in the first place it’s extremely hard to actually run it. While being in space, exploring the surface the Mars etc. is extremely exciting a lot of the things astronauts do during those missions is terribly boring when played in a roleplaying game. As HyenaSpotz pointed out in a comment to my announcement post:
What sorts of conflicts would this game have? If there are no aliens, most of the immediate threat is environmental, the sweeping threats are politics back on Earth, and there’s always the “Why did you bring a gun into space?” scenario among the team…
I have been thinking about this over the weekend and I also checked out Paul Elliott’s game Mars which commenter rainswept recommended. And I realized that I can circumvent a lot of the major problems by moving the game from “First Mission to Mars” to the “First Colony on Mars” without having to abandon all of my initial ideas.
I already started working on a future history which spans from the early to mid 21st century. In my version of the future a new space race starts in the 2020s with a international mission to Mars led by the USA against a Chinese Mars project. The game will probably be set into the 2050s or later when a permanent research colony on Mars has been established and when private companies start looking into exploiting the natural resources of Moon, Mars and other celestial bodies.
When it comes to game rules I am currently torn between a dice pool mechanic and a 3d6-roll-under mechanic. But in either case I intend to use a system light on rules. The focus of the game should be the story, the characters and not the rules. Since I am still in an early design phase I am of still open to your ideas. What are your thoughts on the whole project? Please share your thoughts below.
Astronauts
6November 4, 2011
I finally had an idea for what I want to work on for NaGa DeMon! Astronauts will be a hard sf roleplaying game set into a near future which focuses on human space exploration. It’s not about humans meeting aliens, shooting laser guns and flying through ridiculously dense asteroid fields, but it’s about astronauts doing research on Mars or establishing a base on the moon.
At this moment I am still in the early planning phases, but I thought I start by creating a cover, so that I have something to motivate and inspire me during the coming weeks!
I hope you like it!
If everything goes as planned I will post semi-regular updates on my progress. As with all my other games it will probably be freely available under a Creative Commons license. If you have any more questions about this game, feel free to post in the comments below.
NaGa DeMon, NaNoWriMo and Scrivener
4October 26, 2011
No, we’re not talking about demonic snake-like people from Indian mythology here. Nathan Russel, the guy who created the awesome FU RPG among other things, had a great idea. Why not take the idea from the National Novel Writing Month (aka NaNoWriMo) an bring it to the game table? So this year he challenges all of us to design a game in one month. This November will not just be NaNoWriMo but also Naga DeMon! And of course, the latter sounds much cooler! 
Of course there are a few rules (it wouldn’t be fun without those!):
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Create the game in November
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Finish the game in November
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Play the game in November
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Talk about your experience
By the way, the NaGa DeMon is not just about pen & paper RPGs. If you want to create a boardgame, wargame, cardgame or even a computer game, you can do so and it’s still part of the official NaGa DeMon! I am basically working on some game design project all the time, but perhaps I will use this event to see a project through next month!
And there’s one more thing. For a while I have followed the development of the Windows version of Scrivener. Scrivener is software that was initially developed for Mac only that was meant as a tool for writers. I think explaining all the features of this software would definitely be beyond the scope of this post, so it’s perhaps best you check out the official website for more details. What I have been wondering for a while now was if you could use Scrivener to help you in game design, too. And November may actually be my chance to do so!
You can get a special NaNoWriMo Trial Edition of Scrivener for free that you can use until December 7th. And if you are among the NaNoWriMo winners you’ll get a 50% discount on the full version of Scrivener. And even if you don’t manage to churn out a novel of 50,000 words next month, you still get a 20% discount by entering “NANOWRIMO” as coupon code at the purchase! 
But there’s more. I actually found a very interesting blog post on “Population: One” today, that shows how you can use Scrivener for RPG Writing. If you are interested in using Scrivener for NaGa DeMon, you definitely should check the article out.
The woes of the amateur game designer
7October 25, 2011
I am sure a lot of you have found my blog for the first time after they heard about one of my game designs. Especially Warrior, Rogue & Mage has been pretty popular and I am also quite happy with how Arcane Heroes turned out. Aside from those two games I’ve designed a few others that were interesting enough to be posted at my Stargazer Games site. But there’s a whole library of unfinished ideas, games that never really worked or that I abandoned to work on something else.
My archenemy is surely what I call “game designer attention deficit disorder”. It usually sets in after I’ve started on a new project. And suddenly something else attracts my attention. “What’s this? A new game? An interesting new concept to borrow? How could I make this work with my system? Ohhh, shiny…” Usually my project comes to a sudden halt at that moment. I stumble upon a game that I like and at once my brain starts to salvage that game for ideas. The attempt to incorporate these ideas into what I am working on right now usually fails and I get frustrated. This frustration often makes me abandon the project and move on. Until I find the next distraction. Rinse and repeat.
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