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Not a Resolution, A Mission.

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. Please leave any comments there.

Resolutions or not, here’s your mission in 2011:

Play More. Run More. Share More.

Sounds simple, and it is simple, but just because something is simple does not mean it’s easy.

Play More because playing more makes you happy, and your happiness is important. Own that, make time for it, make it a priority, and engage the people who are a part of your life in this mission. Be honest that it’s about your happiness, and ask them how you can help them with THEIR happiness by finding ways so that they can Play More too.

Run More because the biggest enemy of Play More is inertia, and everyone is looking for the guy to run the game they want to play as the way to beat that inertia. If you’re looking for that guy too and nobody’s stepping up, you’re that guy. And other people will be that guy, too, but you’ve gotta get the ball rolling. Do it.

Share More because our hobby is social, and is only improved by putting more energy into the social side of it. If you love a game, show other people why. Organize an event at your local game store. And importantly, play with people you don’t play with right now.

That last bit, in a lot of ways, has been the lynchpin in my recent revitalization of my own gaming. It might be in yours. It was a big block: I had a lot of time going on where gaming wasn’t happening and, yes, some of it was because I was “busy” (I had to make time for it), and some of it was because I was waiting for that guy to run it (I was that guy), but more than anything I was wanting gaming to happen with the same people that it’s always happened with … and the reality was that within that small circle our schedules were just not working out. Breaking past that sacred-cow barrier in my thinking about my own gaming is what limbered up the rest.

Your situation might be different. You might have a different sacred-cow barrier. Be merciless in identifying that cow and shipping it off to the meat plant. It’s standing between you and your happiness, your deeper satisfaction with your hobby, and through you it’s shaving off just a little of the vitality of your hobby itself. The solution is simple, but that simple solution is going to take a little work. Identify that work. Comment below and tell me what that work will be for you.

Then get off the damn computer and do the damn work.

Your year will look all the brighter for it.

Filed Under: gaming Tagged With: , , ,

Not a Resolution, A Mission.

Resolutions or not, here’s your mission in 2011:

Play More. Run More. Share More.

Sounds simple, and it is simple, but just because something is simple does not mean it’s easy.

Play More because playing more makes you happy, and your happiness is important. Own that, make time for it, make it a priority, and engage the people who are a part of your life in this mission. Be honest that it’s about your happiness, and ask them how you can help them with THEIR happiness by finding ways so that they can Play More too.

Run More because the biggest enemy of Play More is inertia, and everyone is looking for the guy to run the game they want to play as the way to beat that inertia. If you’re looking for that guy too and nobody’s stepping up, you’re that guy. And other people will be that guy, too, but you’ve gotta get the ball rolling. Do it.

Share More because our hobby is social, and is only improved by putting more energy into the social side of it. If you love a game, show other people why. Organize an event at your local game store. And importantly, play with people you don’t play with right now.

That last bit, in a lot of ways, has been the lynchpin in my recent revitalization of my own gaming. It might be in yours. It was a big block: I had a lot of time going on where gaming wasn’t happening and, yes, some of it was because I was “busy” (I had to make time for it), and some of it was because I was waiting for that guy to run it (I was that guy), but more than anything I was wanting gaming to happen with the same people that it’s always happened with … and the reality was that within that small circle our schedules were just not working out. Breaking past that sacred-cow barrier in my thinking about my own gaming is what limbered up the rest.

Your situation might be different. You might have a different sacred-cow barrier. Be merciless in identifying that cow and shipping it off to the meat plant. It’s standing between you and your happiness, your deeper satisfaction with your hobby, and through you it’s shaving off just a little of the vitality of your hobby itself. The solution is simple, but that simple solution is going to take a little work. Identify that work. Comment below and tell me what that work will be for you.

Then get off the damn computer and do the damn work.

Your year will look all the brighter for it.

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The Red Box isn’t *just* cashing in on nostalgia…

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Hack Type: Opinion (gasp)
System: Dungeons and Dragons v4.X

I'm not saying the Red Box isn't cashing in on nostalgia at all. But, look:

1.) The basic premise of  Dungeons and Dragons has always been extremely accessible - explore this cool place, kill the evil bad guys who are in it, find cool things. Now that we have mainstream media accepting the color more readily, it's even more accessible.

2.) It has always been highly recognizable as a game, the way the term is used when we think about board games and strategy games - there is a element of competition, of mastery, of learning a skill set, etc etc Raph Koster ad nauseum. This may not matter to the hardcore rolegamer, but it sure as hell matters to that mom or dad wondering what to get his or her brainy son or daughter for Christmas or a birthday.

3.) Having all the components in one box to provide a single, yet repeatable complete experience makes it aesthetically similar to a board game and allows it to be sold in a lot of the same places. My old Red Box came from a place that primarily sold board games.

4.) As an orthogonal bonus, a self-contained game like that is among the best entry points into the hobby for someone who doesn't know what roleplaying games are. As another bonus, it does not require further interest in other roleplaying games to develop for it to continue to sell.

Accessibility, familiarity, completeness - the Red Box is, and has always been, good product design. There are good reasons to stick with the format that have nothing to do with the nostalgia factor. Just sayin'.
Filed Under: evilhat Tagged With: ,

Quick Taste of Gamma World Round-Up

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. Please leave any comments there.

So we had A Taste Of Gamma World this weekend at Labyrinth in DC (just off of the East Market metro stop) and I gotta say it turned out swimmingly. 4 tables of 4 players each (16 out of our 18 sign-ups — the two who didn’t make it had unavoidable complications), all of them hoppin’. We framed the whole thing as four teams sent to find the Our Guide, rumored to be stashed in the fabled Mith Son Muse Castle…

The Mith Son Muse questers were split into four teams, each tasked to follow a different color path into the bowels of the ancient ME-TRO. The table I ran was the Green Line team, and I set up three scenes (two of them full on encounters) on their path:

  • The Devil-Cow of Green Bel
  • The Format Ki of Fort Ott
  • The Ultimate Battle Against the Guardians of Mith Son Station

The Ultimate Battle scene was the same for all four teams, so each of us came up with the challenges along the way. Dave took the Red Line, Tom took the Orange (I think), and Bob the Blue (I think). I’m curious to get a recounting of what their points along the way were since I missed out what was going on at my table.

Setting this up was fun. The Devil-Cow encounter was based around the idea of a bunch of mutated farm animals, so there was a Devil Cow, a Hell Pig, a Big Damn Bug, and a Glowing Chicken, all reskins of one form or another. The chicken (a reskinned blood bird) turned out to be the highlight of that one. I challenge anyone to say that reskinning a blood bird as a radioactive chicken isn’t a move for the better — the high comedy of one of our guys, the Empath/Mindbreaker, having a glowing green chicken latching on to his head and trying to peck him to death while radiating his allies was fun while it lasted. (The other members of the party were a Yeti/Gravity Controller, a Plant/Felinoid, and a Plant/Mindbreaker — the level of overlap was more than I expected.)

They recovered the key hanging around the neck of the Devil-Cow, used it to enter Green Bel, and found an ancient train which took them to FORT (t)OTT(en) where a rumored FORMAT KEY could tell them how to find Mith Son Station. The Format Ki was an artificially intelligent InFORMATion KIosk in the middle of Fort Totten Park, which had convinced all of the semi-sentient plantlife in the park that it was their god.  I purposely designed this part of the plot to be “soft” in terms of its time footprint, the sort of thing that could drag out into a bigger deal, or be resolved in a few quick skill rolls. That said, I wanted to make the “skill encounter” reinforce the potential lethality of Gamma World, so I set things up such that if they failed skill rolls, the Format Ki would become displeased and would encourage its herbaceous minions to retaliate. The player’s speaker goofed once, triggering the wrath of the SCREAMING TREES, hitting 3 of the 4 PCs with a little sonic damage that they carried forward into the final encounter. That said, they managed to milk out the maximum information from the Format Ki:  “THE MUSE lies between THE ENIGMATIC TRIANGLE and CHIVEY PENN. To reach THE MUSE, you must continue on the GREEN LINE until you reach FANT PLAZZ. Another train awaits you there bound for VEENAFAX. Board, and you shall reach MITHSON. Beware the guards of MITHSON STATION. They are skilled in the ancient art of ninjaness and have a love for consuming plants.”

That last piece of information, achieved thanks to a DC17 Interaction roll, had my half-vegetal party on edge as they followed the directions and rolled on in aboard a ME-TRO TRAIN at MITH SON STATION. Speaking of the station:

That’s the map I cooked up for the encounter, had copies printed out for each GM. Worked pretty well. The real killer — which ended up being a hazard mainly to the bad guys — was the glowing/interdimensionally charged THIRD RAIL going down the center:

Third Rail – Level 3 Hazard (XP 150)
Detect - Perception DC 15                           Initiative —
Immune attacks
Triggered Actions
Attack (special) • At-Will
Trigger: A creature enters or ends its turn in a square containing the third rail.
Attack (Free Action): Melee 1 (triggering creature); +6 vs. Reflex
Hit: Roll 1d6:
1 = Photonic! 2d6 laser damage and the target is blinded until end of its next turn
2 = Atomic! 2d6 fire damage and ongoing 5 radiation damage (save ends)
3 = Electrical! 2d6 electricity damage and target is dazed until end of its next turn
4 = Psychic! 2d6 psychic damage and target is slowed (save ends)
5 = Hyperkinetic! 2d6 physical damage, target is pushed 5 squares in a random direction
(roll 1d8), and knocked prone
6 = Wormhole! Target winks out of existence until the end of its next turn, when it
reappears in any square to either side of the third rail
Miss: Target is pushed up to 3 squares left or right along the rail.

… but I also filled the encounter with two Hoop Ninjas, a Hoop Battlemaster, and a Hoop Sharpshooter. Further, the train was on the fritz, so every round I randomized which doors were open and which were closed, at one point cutting the PCs off from exiting the train unless they wanted to chance the Third Rail (they did not). The original plan had been to kick the PCs into the Third Rail occasionally, but the rolls did not work out that way. Instead, as an opening move, one of the hoop ninjas on the opposite platform bounced across the tracks and… stepped onto the rail. Got hit with some straight up electrical, but made it into the car and made an attack. But, dazed, it just sort of sat there in a stupor afterwards. That’s when the Battlemaster with a grenade launcher popped in at the opposite end of the car and launched a grenade at the group. Two took cover, but our already-injured Yeti went down hard (he didn’t die, thanks to some very solid death saves, and was back on his feet, barely, a few rounds later). But of course, the dazed ninja was also hit, and blown back out of the train; he landed on the third rail again, which this time inflicted its atomic mode, and the ninja went up in a cloud of fire/radiation damaged smoke. The party made short work of the rest, with the plant guys really showing these plant-eating rabbits who was boss. The food chain is forever broken!

The epilogue involved recovery of a BRO CHURR from the hoops that told how to find Mithson Muse Castle. Armed with this map, the PCs had to make a mad dash across the radioactive wastes of ASHINGTON DEECE to reach the castle. Again, this was a “it’ll hurt ya” skill thing, but even more brisk: PCs got to choose one of three skills to roll, and had to accumulate 3 successes before their hitpoints ran out. Everyone made it, though the Empath/Mindbreaker did so only barely (of the three options for skills he had, all of them sucked). And so they claimed the Our Guide… and now faced the problem of figuring out how to get back home with it. Curtains.

A player at my table had some embarrasingly hyperbolic things to say about my game, so I suppose I acquitted myself well.

Filed Under: gaming Tagged With: , , ,

Quick Taste of Gamma World Round-Up

So we had A Taste Of Gamma World this weekend at Labyrinth in DC (just off of the East Market metro stop) and I gotta say it turned out swimmingly. 4 tables of 4 players each (16 out of our 18 sign-ups — the two who didn’t make it had unavoidable complications), all of them hoppin’. We framed the whole thing as four teams sent to find the Our Guide, rumored to be stashed in the fabled Mith Son Muse Castle…

The Mith Son Muse questers were split into four teams, each tasked to follow a different color path into the bowels of the ancient ME-TRO. The table I ran was the Green Line team, and I set up three scenes (two of them full on encounters) on their path:

  • The Devil-Cow of Green Bel
  • The Format Ki of Fort Ott
  • The Ultimate Battle Against the Guardians of Mith Son Station

The Ultimate Battle scene was the same for all four teams, so each of us came up with the challenges along the way. Dave took the Red Line, Tom took the Orange (I think), and Bob the Blue (I think). I’m curious to get a recounting of what their points along the way were since I missed out what was going on at my table.

Setting this up was fun. The Devil-Cow encounter was based around the idea of a bunch of mutated farm animals, so there was a Devil Cow, a Hell Pig, a Big Damn Bug, and a Glowing Chicken, all reskins of one form or another. The chicken (a reskinned blood bird) turned out to be the highlight of that one. I challenge anyone to say that reskinning a blood bird as a radioactive chicken isn’t a move for the better — the high comedy of one of our guys, the Empath/Mindbreaker, having a glowing green chicken latching on to his head and trying to peck him to death while radiating his allies was fun while it lasted. (The other members of the party were a Yeti/Gravity Controller, a Plant/Felinoid, and a Plant/Mindbreaker — the level of overlap was more than I expected.)

They recovered the key hanging around the neck of the Devil-Cow, used it to enter Green Bel, and found an ancient train which took them to FORT (t)OTT(en) where a rumored FORMAT KEY could tell them how to find Mith Son Station. The Format Ki was an artificially intelligent InFORMATion KIosk in the middle of Fort Totten Park, which had convinced all of the semi-sentient plantlife in the park that it was their god.  I purposely designed this part of the plot to be “soft” in terms of its time footprint, the sort of thing that could drag out into a bigger deal, or be resolved in a few quick skill rolls. That said, I wanted to make the “skill encounter” reinforce the potential lethality of Gamma World, so I set things up such that if they failed skill rolls, the Format Ki would become displeased and would encourage its herbaceous minions to retaliate. The player’s speaker goofed once, triggering the wrath of the SCREAMING TREES, hitting 3 of the 4 PCs with a little sonic damage that they carried forward into the final encounter. That said, they managed to milk out the maximum information from the Format Ki:  “THE MUSE lies between THE ENIGMATIC TRIANGLE and CHIVEY PENN. To reach THE MUSE, you must continue on the GREEN LINE until you reach FANT PLAZZ. Another train awaits you there bound for VEENAFAX. Board, and you shall reach MITHSON. Beware the guards of MITHSON STATION. They are skilled in the ancient art of ninjaness and have a love for consuming plants.”

That last piece of information, achieved thanks to a DC17 Interaction roll, had my half-vegetal party on edge as they followed the directions and rolled on in aboard a ME-TRO TRAIN at MITH SON STATION. Speaking of the station:

That’s the map I cooked up for the encounter, had copies printed out for each GM. Worked pretty well. The real killer — which ended up being a hazard mainly to the bad guys — was the glowing/interdimensionally charged THIRD RAIL going down the center:

Third Rail – Level 3 Hazard (XP 150)
Detect - Perception DC 15                           Initiative —
Immune attacks
Triggered Actions
Attack (special) • At-Will
Trigger: A creature enters or ends its turn in a square containing the third rail.
Attack (Free Action): Melee 1 (triggering creature); +6 vs. Reflex
Hit: Roll 1d6:
1 = Photonic! 2d6 laser damage and the target is blinded until end of its next turn
2 = Atomic! 2d6 fire damage and ongoing 5 radiation damage (save ends)
3 = Electrical! 2d6 electricity damage and target is dazed until end of its next turn
4 = Psychic! 2d6 psychic damage and target is slowed (save ends)
5 = Hyperkinetic! 2d6 physical damage, target is pushed 5 squares in a random direction
(roll 1d8), and knocked prone
6 = Wormhole! Target winks out of existence until the end of its next turn, when it
reappears in any square to either side of the third rail
Miss: Target is pushed up to 3 squares left or right along the rail.

… but I also filled the encounter with two Hoop Ninjas, a Hoop Battlemaster, and a Hoop Sharpshooter. Further, the train was on the fritz, so every round I randomized which doors were open and which were closed, at one point cutting the PCs off from exiting the train unless they wanted to chance the Third Rail (they did not). The original plan had been to kick the PCs into the Third Rail occasionally, but the rolls did not work out that way. Instead, as an opening move, one of the hoop ninjas on the opposite platform bounced across the tracks and… stepped onto the rail. Got hit with some straight up electrical, but made it into the car and made an attack. But, dazed, it just sort of sat there in a stupor afterwards. That’s when the Battlemaster with a grenade launcher popped in at the opposite end of the car and launched a grenade at the group. Two took cover, but our already-injured Yeti went down hard (he didn’t die, thanks to some very solid death saves, and was back on his feet, barely, a few rounds later). But of course, the dazed ninja was also hit, and blown back out of the train; he landed on the third rail again, which this time inflicted its atomic mode, and the ninja went up in a cloud of fire/radiation damaged smoke. The party made short work of the rest, with the plant guys really showing these plant-eating rabbits who was boss. The food chain is forever broken!

The epilogue involved recovery of a BRO CHURR from the hoops that told how to find Mithson Muse Castle. Armed with this map, the PCs had to make a mad dash across the radioactive wastes of ASHINGTON DEECE to reach the castle. Again, this was a “it’ll hurt ya” skill thing, but even more brisk: PCs got to choose one of three skills to roll, and had to accumulate 3 successes before their hitpoints ran out. Everyone made it, though the Empath/Mindbreaker did so only barely (of the three options for skills he had, all of them sucked). And so they claimed the Our Guide… and now faced the problem of figuring out how to get back home with it. Curtains.

A player at my table had some embarrasingly hyperbolic things to say about my game, so I suppose I acquitted myself well.

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Confessional

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. Please leave any comments there.

This is not blame; this is me talking about how I feel about these things. I need to get them off my chest in order to get past them.

When it comes to the Fate side of things, I’m leaning towards getting really frustrated that Evil Hat is so small, and populated by people who are very good but very busy. It’s taking 100+% and then some of our collective attention span to focus on doing the next (and possibly only) Dresden Files supplement, and to do that we’ve had to put off working on Core Fate entirely, especially once we started to get a grasp of the magnitude of our ambitions with Core.

As a result I’m left feeling — irrationally, probably — like the Fate boat is sailing onward and we failed to board it. This is the hazard of publishing an open system, really — people get impatient when you are slow, and they run on forward without you.

Not that I’m feeling like we’d run to the same places. A lot of the third party Fate stuff out there is recognizably good, but also recognizable as not my bag. Diaspora remains one of the exceptions, there: lots of innovation, divergences in its genre, all that. Multiple “generic” implementations are out there now, too, often making choices that go too light or too traditional. The market is in the process of confusing itself, and in so doing makes for an almost alien (to me) landscape to be sending Fate Core out into in the year or more it’s going to take us to do that. Oh, you like Fate? Which branch, though? Evil Hat’s? SBA/LOA? AA? Diaspora? Strands? (I’m thrilled to see Fate influenced stuff that is distinctly not Fate, that said: Houses of the Blooded, Chronica Feudalis, ICONS, etc.)

Finishing up the launch of Dresden meant we finally closed out phase one of Evil Hat. Phase two is going to be a “short” one, really, in terms of intended products — the third DF book, and Core Fate.

Once that second phase is finished, though, at least for my part in things, I’ll be ready to be done with Fate. Comes a time in any open system where its earlier originators have to recognize that they no longer own it in any meaningful way, and if the third parties out there decide they want versions that cut out and alter the parts you want left in there, well, good on ‘em, because you had your time with it already.

For me, phase three (likely to overlap phase two) is going to be more about putting out some new stuff in new systems, I think. To an extent this will also be a return to smaller projects & teams — lean, focused, and hopefully faster to market too. I don’t think I’ll be doing another open system, at least not in the producing-more-than-one-book sense. (Open or not, I’d want people to see something they like and then go off and do their own, new thing with that inspiration, rather than take part in an extension parade.)

Then again all of this could be bunk. How much of this is just my personal weariness with Fate and the Open License thing? Will that weariness go away and get replaced by some fresh energy and new intentions for the oldest dog in my arsenal, Fate?

I have no fricking clue.

But in the meantime, I’m gonna play the shit out of Gamma World.

Filed Under: publishing Tagged With: , ,

Confessional

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

This is not blame; this is me talking about how I feel about these things. I need to get them off my chest in order to get past them.

When it comes to the Fate side of things, I’m leaning towards getting really frustrated that Evil Hat is so small, and populated by people who are very good but very busy. It’s taking 100+% and then some of our collective attention span to focus on doing the next (and possibly only) Dresden Files supplement, and to do that we’ve had to put off working on Core Fate entirely, especially once we started to get a grasp of the magnitude of our ambitions with Core.

As a result I’m left feeling — irrationally, probably — like the Fate boat is sailing onward and we failed to board it. This is the hazard of publishing an open system, really — people get impatient when you are slow, and they run on forward without you.

Not that I’m feeling like we’d run to the same places. A lot of the third party Fate stuff out there is recognizably good, but also recognizable as not my bag. Diaspora remains one of the exceptions, there: lots of innovation, divergences in its genre, all that. Multiple “generic” implementations are out there now, too, often making choices that go too light or too traditional. The market is in the process of confusing itself, and in so doing makes for an almost alien (to me) landscape to be sending Fate Core out into in the year or more it’s going to take us to do that. Oh, you like Fate? Which branch, though? Evil Hat’s? SBA/LOA? AA? Diaspora? Strands? (I’m thrilled to see Fate influenced stuff that is distinctly not Fate, that said: Houses of the Blooded, Chronica Feudalis, ICONS, etc.)

Finishing up the launch of Dresden meant we finally closed out phase one of Evil Hat. Phase two is going to be a “short” one, really, in terms of intended products — the third DF book, and Core Fate.

Once that second phase is finished, though, at least for my part in things, I’ll be ready to be done with Fate. Comes a time in any open system where its earlier originators have to recognize that they no longer own it in any meaningful way, and if the third parties out there decide they want versions that cut out and alter the parts you want left in there, well, good on ‘em, because you had your time with it already.

For me, phase three (likely to overlap phase two) is going to be more about putting out some new stuff in new systems, I think. To an extent this will also be a return to smaller projects & teams — lean, focused, and hopefully faster to market too. I don’t think I’ll be doing another open system, at least not in the producing-more-than-one-book sense. (Open or not, I’d want people to see something they like and then go off and do their own, new thing with that inspiration, rather than take part in an extension parade.)

Then again all of this could be bunk. How much of this is just my personal weariness with Fate and the Open License thing? Will that weariness go away and get replaced by some fresh energy and new intentions for the oldest dog in my arsenal, Fate?

I have no fricking clue.

But in the meantime, I’m gonna play the shit out of Gamma World.

Filed Under: publishing Tagged With: , ,

Confessional

This is not blame; this is me talking about how I feel about these things. I need to get them off my chest in order to get past them.

When it comes to the Fate side of things, I’m leaning towards getting really frustrated that Evil Hat is so small, and populated by people who are very good but very busy. It’s taking 100+% and then some of our collective attention span to focus on doing the next (and possibly only) Dresden Files supplement, and to do that we’ve had to put off working on Core Fate entirely, especially once we started to get a grasp of the magnitude of our ambitions with Core.

As a result I’m left feeling — irrationally, probably — like the Fate boat is sailing onward and we failed to board it. This is the hazard of publishing an open system, really — people get impatient when you are slow, and they run on forward without you.

Not that I’m feeling like we’d run to the same places. A lot of the third party Fate stuff out there is recognizably good, but also recognizable as not my bag. Diaspora remains one of the exceptions, there: lots of innovation, divergences in its genre, all that. Multiple “generic” implementations are out there now, too, often making choices that go too light or too traditional. The market is in the process of confusing itself, and in so doing makes for an almost alien (to me) landscape to be sending Fate Core out into in the year or more it’s going to take us to do that. Oh, you like Fate? Which branch, though? Evil Hat’s? SBA/LOA? AA? Diaspora? Strands? (I’m thrilled to see Fate influenced stuff that is distinctly not Fate, that said: Houses of the Blooded, Chronica Feudalis, ICONS, etc.)

Finishing up the launch of Dresden meant we finally closed out phase one of Evil Hat. Phase two is going to be a “short” one, really, in terms of intended products — the third DF book, and Core Fate.

Once that second phase is finished, though, at least for my part in things, I’ll be ready to be done with Fate. Comes a time in any open system where its earlier originators have to recognize that they no longer own it in any meaningful way, and if the third parties out there decide they want versions that cut out and alter the parts you want left in there, well, good on ‘em, because you had your time with it already.

For me, phase three (likely to overlap phase two) is going to be more about putting out some new stuff in new systems, I think. To an extent this will also be a return to smaller projects & teams — lean, focused, and hopefully faster to market too. I don’t think I’ll be doing another open system, at least not in the producing-more-than-one-book sense. (Open or not, I’d want people to see something they like and then go off and do their own, new thing with that inspiration, rather than take part in an extension parade.)

Then again all of this could be bunk. How much of this is just my personal weariness with Fate and the Open License thing? Will that weariness go away and get replaced by some fresh energy and new intentions for the oldest dog in my arsenal, Fate?

I have no fricking clue.

But in the meantime, I’m gonna play the shit out of Gamma World.

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Dresden Files RPG on Ogrecave’s Christmas List

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The Dresden Files RPG made it onto Ogrecave’s 12 RPGs of Christmas list. We’ve got some great company there, all well worth checking out.

Drop on by and have a look!

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Gamma World: Vehicle House Rules Rough Draft

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Originally published at Deadly Fredly. You can comment here or there.

So, vehicles. They exist in Gamma World, but they’re poorly supported. Here’s a very rough sketch of how I might handle them in mine, if it came up:

- Vehicles have hit points (a given) and sometimes a resistance to physical damage. Size the hitpoints about how you might a monster of a level on par with the PCs current level. Resistances should be minor, and might convey onto the occupants (but not stack). Occupants of vehicles will in general have basic cover. A “bloodied” vehicle will need minor repairs after the encounter in order to function again. A vehicle reduced to zero hit points will immediately cease functioning and, if in motion at the time, crash. It may be totaled (reduced to negative bloodied value) or it may simply need major repairs to function again.

- Vehicles have a size, similar in intention and implementation to monster sizes, but might be narrower than they are wide. Size should refer to its longest dimension, so a 3-square-long (15′) vehicle would be Huge, etc.

- Vehicles act as mobile platforms that one or more creatures can occupy. They’re treated as difficult terrain in terms of moving onto them from the surrounding area, but movement inside in general should be treated as unimpeded (unless there are a lot of obstacles — seats, cargo, etc).

- Vehicles have a speed.

- One time this speed is considered “cruising”; two times this speed is “racing”.

- For a minor action on part of the driver, Speed can be temporarily boosted by a successful skill roll (Mechanics?) against a moderate target, adding two squares to the base speed of the vehicle for that round. Failing this roll reduces the base speed by two squares. (The increase/reduction reverses if the driver is trying to wrestle with the controls of an out-of-control speeding vehicle.)

- For a move action on the part of the driver, the driver can:
+ Increase the current speed from “stopped” to “cruising”
+ Increase the current speed from “cruising” to “racing”
+ Decrease the current speed from “cruising” to “stopped”
+ Decrease the current speed from “racing” to “cruising”
+ Turn the vehicle up to 90 degrees. (45 degrees — going from a perpendicular to diagonal direction or vice-versa — is also possible)
+ Make a (Mechanics?) roll to turn the vehicle more than 90 degrees. This is Moderate if the vehicle is currently cruising, Hard if the vehicle is currently racing.
+ Make a (Mechanics?) roll to take the vehicle from racing to stopped or vice-versa. Moderate difficulty.
+ If either roll is failed when attempted, the vehicle gains the Out Of Control condition (see below).

- Vehicles move a number of squares equal to their current speed at the end of the driver’s turn (or, if there’s no driver, at the end of the round).

- Crashes should be rated as doing damage as is level-appropriate for a low medium or high limited damage expression, with low/medium/high determined based on speed. Occupants that are not restrained will be pushed from the vehicle in a random (1d8 determines) direction equal to half the vehicle’s speed immediately prior to the crash. The vehicle takes damage from the crash as well.

OUT OF CONTROL (Condition)
- The vehicle can’t go slower than cruising
- All driver actions require a (Mechanics?) roll to succeed. Actions which would already require a roll are made at -2.
- If the driver makes a (Mechanics?) roll to control the vehicle, roll a d20. On a 10 or better, the vehicle loses the Out of Control condition.
- If the driver fails a (Mechanics?) roll to control the vehicle, roll 1d6:
1: The vehicle turns 45 degrees to the left
2: The vehicle turns 90 degrees to the left
3: The vehicle turns 45 degrees to the right
4: The vehicle turns 90 degrees to the right
5: The vehicle speed increases to racing if it isn’t already. If it is, the vehicle crashes.
6: The vehicle crashes.

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