Brent P. Newhall's Blog
Role-playing – Aug 2009

27 Aug 09 – On Developing a Tabletop Game Openly

This is a tough one to explain.

A few days ago, the Chatty DM tweeted about the need for a revival of Car Wars. If you're not familiar with it, Car Wars is a tabletop car duelling game from the 1980's, in which you drive a gun-laden car around a post-apocalyptic arena or road, blowing up other cars. It's Mad Max as a free-form board game.

I thoroughly agreed with him; as it happened, the same thought had crossed my mind a few days earlier, but I'd never gotten around to tweeting about it. Car Wars was a fun, gritty, action-oriented game with an easy-to-grasp world. You get to play a smelly, unkempt survivor in a post-apocalyptic world, driving around a turbocharged Camaro with a built-in flamethrower. What could be more fun than that?

So, yes, this struck me as a fun game to revive. Turns out Car Wars was developed by Steve Jackson Games, and the last revision was released 7 years ago to mediocre reviews.

Time for a revival. What next, then? I was tempted to write a blog post about how cool Car Wars is. I was tempted to write Steve Jackson Games and suggest an update.

Then I realized: Why not do it myself?

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So I created a wiki page called AutoWar, and wrote up a simple game system.

You choose your car's frame, armor, tires, weapons, etc. During each turn, everyone moves simultaneously, then everyone fires their weapons. The game uses standard 6-sided dice for its mechanics, so to attack you roll 3 dice and subtract distance and relative speed, hoping to roll higher than 3.

Then I tweeted about it. Within a day, several folks had jumped in and fleshed out several sections of the page.

Which inspired me to create graphics, and playtest the system. I worked up a simple scenario: one basic car versus two light cars on a highway. However, this step worried me. I threw the system together on a whim; would it work at all? I'm no experienced game designer.

To my great relief, I had a lot of fun playtesting it. The mechanics needed quite a bit of work, but the action moved quickly and felt exciting.

So I updated the page again. The game's improving. It's fun. It works. Now it needs some playtesting.

The most interesting thing about this game is that I'm leaving it open. Anyone can change it. I've posted it under a Creative Commons Attributeion ShareAlike license, so anyone can publish it. It's a bit scary, but feels right somehow.

Check it out, fix whatever needs fixing, and try it out. Heck, tell me what you'd want available so you can playtest it.

Please! Play my game! :-)

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20 Aug 09 – Weaselly Role-Playing

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So, a while ago, I noticed a Twitter RPG design competition. You had to pitch and describe a tabletop RPG system in 140 characters or less. A fun little challenge. I'd just been reading the Mouse Guard RPG system, where the main villains are tricky weasels, and they struck me as interesting characters. So, an RPG about weasels.

I've also been toying on-and-off with a dead simple RPG system, designed for play with non-RPG friends. It uses a straightforward roll-under D6 mechanic; if you're attempting a dangerous vehicular stunt and have a Driving skill of 4, you roll a six-sided die and succeed if you roll 1, 2, 3, or 4.

So, weasels. Needed a few basic attributes for weasels. Standard role-playing attributes are mind-related (intelligence, wisdom), body-related (strength, constitution, dexterity), and social (charisma), plus hit points and such. But since I had very little space for flavor, these had to be very weaselly attributes. So I settled on Sneaky (mind), Vicious (body), Persuade (social), and Health.

Since I was using a six-sided die, each trait had to have only a few points, balanced in some way. This took a bit of fiddling; you want characters with at least one good skill that doesn't make them useless in everything else. I ended up with requiring a total of 13 in all 4 traits.

How to handle combat? Simple: all hits do 1 point of damage, subtracted from Health. When you run out of Health, you fall unconscious or die or whatever makes sense for the situation.

Which lead to the following tweet:

Play intelligent weasels with other beasts in forest. 13 points in Sneaky, Vicious, Persuade, Health. Beat 1d6 to succeed; 1 damage per hit

Today, I discovered that it won the competition. Wow!

This was so cool that I opened up NeoOffice and typed up a one-page combined system explanation and character sheet. This led to an expansion of the system: for example, if you don't make your die roll, you still succeed, but with a complication of your choice. I then created a quick page for the game on my Musaeum of Fantastic Wonders.

So, you can now download Weasels! as a one-page PDF, which contains a description of the weasels' world, the mechanics of the system, and space for your weasel's traits and attributes. Enjoy!

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17 Aug 09 – DM Imagination: Lacking

(Note: I haven't forgotten about my previous plan to post about my finances and books! I'm just having trouble collecting the data. Should have something up here in a day or two. Meanwhile....)

While I was at GenCon, I went to a panel on higher-level adventure design. I noticed a disturbing trend: The DMs asking questions lacked a certain imagination.

They had great adventures. Neat stories. But they played the game completely by the book. If the book said that a good challenge for a party of X adventurers was Y monsters at Z level, they'd throw exactly Y monsters at exactly Z level at their players.

One person complained that one of his players claimed some way to defeat the most powerful creature in D&D 4th Edition, Orcus, with a 21st-level wizard (out of 30 levels) using a certain combination of abilities. And the D&D designers running the panel paused for a moment, then replied that the players aren't going to face a demigod as a lone opponent in an empty room. Orcus will make sure they slog through half a dozen other tough enemies first, then halfway through the battle will teleport out for a bit, rest, and come back recharged with a new weapon.

The DMs in the audience spoke as though adding an extra monster halfway through a battle was an indication that the system was inadequate. Like a role-playing system has to spit out a precise number—size of enemy group, type of monster, whatever—for any given situation.

And, granted, there was a lot of self-selection going on there; confident DMs with no problems improvising a high-level situation probably didn't attend that panel in the first place. But it was sad to see, in a fantasy game where everything's made up anyway, people running it as though the rules are legally binding.

If the game's not working, change it.

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12 Aug 09 – The Perfect Light RPG? Dread.

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Role-playing games exist in a problematic black hole. Existing role-players play RPGs, but the hobby isn't attracting a lot of new players (though D&D 4th Edition appears to be changing that somewhat).

So how to attract new players to the hobby?

Well, last Sunday, I had the chance to run a game of Dread, and it was a revelatory experience. It might be the answer, or at least point the way towards the answer.

Dread contains a very simple system: each player gets a sheet filled with about 9 probing questions about the person they're going to play in that evening's entertainment. These questions are usually intrusive, like "Who forgave you just before he died?" and "What childhood toy do you still carry with you, and why?"

While the players are answering their questionnaires, the host (who runs the game) explains the situation in which the characters will be involved, and sets up a JengaTM tower. (For those unfamiliar, Jenga is a tower of wooden blocks, three blocks per level.) In our case, the characters were college students in the middle of a wilderness adventure in the Grand Canyon.

Once the players have filled out their questionnaires, they should have a good feel for the character they're going to play, and the game begins. The host reveals the initial scene. In our case, the characters woke up in the middle of the night to the screams of their guide, and found him hauled several yards from his shredded tent, badly wounded and delirious.

The players then act out their characters. And here's where the incredibly simple but remarkably effective system comes in. Whenever a character attempts something difficult--anything from leaping across joists in a burning building to staying calm in the face of a serial killer—the character must make a "pull," by removing a block from the Jenga tower and placing it on the top of the tower. If a player knocks over the tower, then that player's character dies.

As you can imagine, characters die a lot in this game.

After a character's death, the tower is set back up, and three blocks are immediately pulled for every dead character. And the game continues.

So, it's a game of psychological stress and horror. The three sample stories included in the book cover a werewolf attack during a camping trip (the one we played on Sunday), space marines exploring an alien-infested starship hulk, and a horny-teen slasher film, all perfect for this system.

The Jenga mechanic provides several interesting advantages:

I've never had as much fun as I did hosting that game. Everyone enjoyed themselves.

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