Okay two things feed this. First is last week’s playtest of Soft Horizon, in which we experimented with a zero refresh for fate points and a central pool that you draw from when you narrate with a scope reference. So basically, when you play to the points you said were interesting about your character, you take a point. This unburdens the ref a bit — your character being your character is no longer my problem. When you do what you said you wanted to do, you pay yourself. I’ll make sure there are times to do that. If you are a HEARTLESS SON OF A BITCH then you can pay yourself when you act that way. I can concentrate on making the universe react amusingly (negatively perhaps) and you can take your chances by playing your character. That strikes me as a more interesting framing (at our table anyway) than the standing Fate compel system, which is unreliable in action (some tables report awesome, some report fizzle, and the causes are not well understood).

The second thing pouring in is Toph’s great actual plays from Hollowpoint with kids. Kids really dig playing the bad guys, and that shines through these crisp little reports. Anyway, what is doing the feeding here is the difficulty with the teamwork pool. And the difficulty is such that I’m thinking of throwing it away altogether. And so I sketched up an alternative.

Okay back to the first. During that Soft Horizon playtest someone produced an awesome little bit of narration and, in total violation of the rules, Bob (who shall not otherwise be named lest his true identity be revealed, which embarrasses him despite the fact that he plays games with AWARD WINNING AUTHORS AND PUBLISHERS) reached into the pool and handed the awesome guy a fate point.

That’s now a rule.

You could do this in Hollowpoint.

I re-invented fan mail. Prime Time Adventures is the most famous for this sort of mechanism and I’ve known about it for ages. But I had to see it happen spontaneously to really get it: players like rewarding each other. I think that as I prefer games with a referee there is a lot of residual baggage I have about who gets to do what, and rewards are traditionally bound to the ref. But there is really no good reason to avoid letting the players do this for each other (assuming you manage this mechanically somehow, and I’ll go there, but you could rely on trust, too, and that is a big deal for us — the Table is Trust).

So in Soft Horizon you can do what Bob did. If someone is awesome, anyone can pay them from the pool. This is self-regulating on a couple of points: there are only so many chips in the pool, and no one wants to look foolish at the table by offering rewards for stupid shit. There is too much trust and respect and naked fear of humiliation.

So maybe in Hollowpoint, teamwork isn’t nearly as important as being awesome. So instead of a convoluted system of ask and accept or reject and stuff, a fixed pool of dice goes in the middle of the table, and whenever someone narrates something awesome, any player can give that awesome player a die. You could get a die from everyone if you are truly amazing. And you can hoard those or spend them as you like (save your awesome for the final scene). Because of the way the dice stats in Hollowpoint work, this even has a nice richochet effect — if you roll a lot of dice, you increase the chance that you will get badly burned by your cockiness (hubris if you are using a serious tone): you will likely get a big fate set and go first, and then have nothing left to follow up with. This is the mechanism behind leaping out from behind cover, guns blazing, only to discover you are out of ammunition and standing alone by the pool, looking at a dozen bad guys with Uzis.

This all wanders around the fact that players get lazy and stop narrating their dice and their use of resources. Or the actual narration slacks a little. The ref can prod for it, but that gets old too, and often the dice game is still fun so it’s not really an issue. But those moments of great narration are the stories we tell about the game after, and the stories we tell after are how we generate enthusiasm in others and keep wanting to play. And get more players. So this fan mail, in two new forms, should serve to encourage sustained narrative input. When you burn a trait (shot in the Thin Black Jeans), if it’s awesome you get paid. And so, in theory, you have a little more motivation to be awesome, a motivation that balances against the inherent laziness we all bring to the table to some extent or another.

Some people say you shouldn’t bribe people to do what they already want to do. I disagree. A lot. Just because someone wants to do something doesn’t mean that they have sufficient motivation to actually do it. Adding further incentive can push them over the edge and turn “okay” to “awesome”. If all that costs is a nifty little player-managed resource juggling, fuck yes, count me in.

–BMurray

The cool thing about aspect-driven game designs (and normally I’d say Fate here, but the example I’m about to offer is in no way Fate) is this: the answer to, “Can I have a bazooka?” is, “Yes.”

Toph’s been doing something pretty cool — in an effort to better playtest Hollowpoint, he’s been playing it with his son and some of his friends. This is a powerful testing method because it seems to push on the teachability of the game to absolute neophytes, who are presumably the hardest to teach. Of course, we discover something we already knew: neophytes get role-playing games just fine. It’s actually gamers who have entrenched ideas about what gaming is that are hard to teach. Kids in particular just pounce on this stuff.

So when one of Toph’s charges is building his character (with KILL 5) and asks, “Can I have a bazooka?” or “How about I have twin Uzis? Is that two aspects?” the answer is, delightfully, “Yes” and “No, just one”. Because an aspect (a trait, really, in Hollowpoint, because they behave differently than a Fate aspect but share the same basic idea: use it at some cost for a fixed benefit in play) has the same effect mechanically regardless of what it is called, the answer is only “No” if there’s a narrative mismatch that the table wants to control. “Can I have a pet dragon?” might be a no, for example, though we’ve pushed this game into places where it might as easily be yes.

It also means that your bazooka and your skateboard are mechanically similar, differing only in narrative application. This jars with an entrenched gamer used to systems that simulate physics (a bazooka IS NOT A SKATEBOARD) but with the kids it’s not even an eye-blink.  They both let you succeed better, the difference is just how you have to tell your story of success. Odds are your skateboard will not be described as penetrating tank armour, killing the crew.

This is a common complaint with Fate-like games: what if the player offers a ridiculous narrative for his aspect (or whatever)? Well, we find with kids that this doesn’t happen much. And when it does, they sell the story on it. It’s not an attempt to abuse the system for advantage, but rather it’s an attempt to tell a story about being awesome with a skateboard. It’s earnest. So the answer to this complaint is: don’t game with dicks. Seriously, this is why we hammer on the “table” entity in Diaspora and elsewhere. The peer pressure of every player at the table should be deployed — reflexively — to shut down behaviour that is abusive for the sake of being abusive. This is where you say no. I suspect this is one of the reasons (and there are many!) that the GM-as-absolute-authority meme is popular and effective: it requires less investment for one person imbued with authority as an axiom of the system to say NO than for the whole table of notional equals to shut down crappy behaviour.

Anyway, kids seem to want to have fun within the context of the rules. They (or these ones anyway) get the boundaries and enjoy playing inside them. They grab at narrative authority and flex it and have a great time with it. And the results are just as compelling and elaborate as when adults play.

The big difference seems to be that they are not allowed to say, “Fuck that!”

–BMurray

Emergency edit: character sheets.

I have some great news but I can’t tell you about it yet.

There comes a time — usually several times — during the design of each game I’m involved in at which I hate the game. Sometimes just a piece of it, sometimes huge swaths of it, and sometimes the whole bloody thing. I only have one published significant work (and it works) — Diaspora — and so I can’t yet say that I know everything will be alright, but I do know that I hated Diaspora several times during its construction, so I suspect all is cool.

In Hollowpoint right now I hate the teamwork pool but I also love it. It creates an essential tension — a resource that depletes over the course of play and that becomes essential in the endgame, so managing it between all players is a necessary part of succeeding at a mission. I don’t want to drop it because that bit gets hammered all the time in play. But a lot of the play that surrounds the teamwork pool smells a little funky and I don’t have a good solution yet to the imperfectly understood problem it represents. Because I tend to feel either neutral or extremes and nothing in between (the Fudge dice curve is no good for pegging my emotions), this imperfection means I hate the game.

Now, understand, this is an awesome game. It delivers very cool action scenes with a lot of player participation in the details. It creates a high-pressure story arc that makes the endgame tense and uncertain. It establishes a a context in which bad play means someone usually has to die in order to succeed in the mission — by three-quarters through play, it becomes clear that the only way to get enough dice to beat the enemy is to replenish the teamwork pool, and that means someone has to die. In our last playtest we had one player tactically trying to get killed so that we could beat the mission, and that’s pretty cool.

But something still itches and I don’t feel I have the perspective to address it. Fortunately, I have collaborators. Specifically, on this project, C.W. Marshall (sometimes Toph) is energetically proposing changes and fixes and generally sees the same faults that I do but from a different angle. This happened on Diaspora as well (though there I had three gung-ho collaborators with competing interests, so something different happened there) and was the reason the game went where it did. If I’d followed my original ideas through it would have been just another fan hack to do Traveller a slightly different way. My collaborators had different ideas about what made Fate fun and even what Traveller is, and so something exciting happened that I didn’t expect or intend.

So right now I’m trying not to think too hard about Hollowpoint (which is why I am writing a thousand words or so about it, right?) until there’s more external action on it. I don’t want to throw my darlings away (like the teamwork pool) but I also need to step back and let my partner do what he needs to do rather than defend something while I don’t like the game. That usually makes for a bad defense and, worse, reinforces the idea that I don’t like the game and I do. I do like it. I love it in fact, but loving something is more complex than just a shouted hurrah. It’s a dynamic thing that jerks you around all over the place. That’s just how that works.

So I’m not going to second-guess myself right now on that game.

Soft Horizon, on the other hand, I don’t hate. Reviewing the design notes, which I’ve been away from for quite a while, is funny because my ideas about how games can work have developed a great deal over the last year  and so a lot of the game seems dated — quaint even — now. It looks like something I wrote when I was a kid. A kid of 43. That’s part of why I started playing around with a different probability curve for it, really — it’s an attempt to re-energize the game and bring in a new idea that might force us to re-think other parts and consequently differentiate the game well from other games. And it did that and now it needs a lot of play and I don’t hate it. I just need to play it a lot. Not write it.

All this probably means I should play around with layout ideas for Hollowpoint, because that almost always jazzes me on the game again. Whenever a piece of the project seems intractable I go to a totally different part of the project and tinker with that, even if it’s too early (or late) to be productive. This lets me channel the game through different parts of my brain, and that tends to jog loose good ideas. It also does something essential to collaboration — it gives me time and space to detach a little from my little obsessions. There are things in each design that I will cling to because … well for no good reason other than that I invented them. Stepping back and looking at something slightly different, or from a new angle, sometimes allows me to let these go and it’s only then that I really hear my collaborators’ voices on the subject.

So there I am. A little depressed about some things, elated about others, and looking for a path through all that which leads to the release of a great game. So I’ll sit down and have a drink and let Toph blaze the trail a bit.

–BMurray

So now that we have Hollowpoint all set up for playtesting, I’ll reveal what I’m thinking about for managing this beast. This does not contain things you need to do — this is just how I will be handling what I hope is a decent flow of information about the game. In keeping with the rest of my brain, this process will be evidence-based. I think the time for speculation about how the game might succeed or fail is past.

Another principle that will be followed is that the game is not intended to please everyone. It’s not a universal system and it uses methods to deal with topics that aren’t going to make everyone happy. I’ve talked about this before — it’s okay to not like the game on principle. That won’t change what we’re doing. If the game just isn’t fun even though it sounds like a good time, that’s more interesting.

So as reports trickle in I’ll be filing them in three categories.

Textual. These will come from anyone, but will be about the only thing that people reading and not playing can offer. Textual reports are about the structure of the document and the language — can you understand how to play the game from the text? Is it organized logically? Is the “voice” functional? Are you aggravated by it and if so why? That kind of thing. Anyone should be able to comment credibly on the text by reading it.

Textual reports we can react to pretty fast and usually get them addressed (either incorporated or discarded) within one release cycle.

Mechanical. Here’s the meat. Mechanical reports are about how the game plays — whether the mechanisms of the game work and how they fail when they fail. I expect a fair number of mechanical reports that don’t include examples from real play, and I’ll have to discard these unless they are very compelling: mechanical reports need supporting evidence because reading the game is not the same as operating the game with multiple people with different expectations. Game mechanisms for Hollowpoint have been developed during actual play so I expect them to exhibit non-obvious behaviour in play. So as a playtester, it’s worth your time (and mine too!) to look at your reports and, if they are mechanical, include actual play that suggests the problem.

Now if you have only read the text and suspect a mechanical problem, you can still participate here: fake some actual play. Just write a dialogue of fictional people playing the game in a way that exposes the defect. This has less weight than real evidence, but it helps everyone (including yourself!) think about the mechanism in more practical terms, and stands a better chance of exposing a real weakness.

There’s a gray area here that I’m going to keep in this category: textual mechanisms. I’m thinking here mostly about whether or not the text enables an owner to teach the game to the rest of the table (because I assume that the usual model at the table is one eager early-adopter buys the game and wants to play and so teaches it to everyone else). This is commentary on the text but, again, requires evidence from actual play to be useful.

Discard. This category is where everything we can’t use goes.

Done. This category is where our solved problems go.

So for every report I get I’ll break it down into specific issues and file these under one of these three categories. Toph and I will then analyze them (including a playtest if necessary) and decide how to act on each. Either the text will change and the report filed under “done” or the report will go under “discard” because it doesn’t need to be addressed.

I expose this information because I think understanding my process might help playtesters file better reports but also so it’s clear why some things get discarded — one of the risks at this stage is that enthusiasm from outside sources can steer the game into a place it wasn’t intended. Now, if that’s awesome, then that’s where we’re going, but right now the game has a pretty tight objective and I want to stick to that if possible. Certainly if you read the text and can’t figure out what that objective is, then that’s a textual problem needing attention!

Oh yeah, credit. At the end of the day we’ll credit everyone who sent in a useful report in the book, and make sure there’s a comped digital version of Hollowpoint (at least — I’m still thinking about this end of things) for them as well. Your name in lights! It’s not much but it’s within budget, and with luck you’ll have a good time playing this game before anyone else gets their hands on it, too. That’s been worth something to me, so far.

–BMurray

So, this week I’ll be pulling together the stuff in the skunkworks wiki for Hollowpoint and making a nice little linear document intended as a first draft and usable for playtesting. This is a fun stage in a project and also a little nerve-wracking because it’s the part where the game goes from a fun idea to a project, and all that “project” entails.

This will be the first project for which we are actively interested in third party playtesting, so the playtest document probably won’t be explicitly public, but neither will we be releasing it with an NDA or anything. Toph’s writing up a statement now that makes our interests clear and also that playtesters will be bound only by copyright law and their own conscience in agreeing to help us out and have a good time. We’re not paying anyone (though we happily credit anyone who contributes useful stuff, of course) so we’re not making any outrageous demands. Read it, play it, comment usefully.

So this sort of demands that I talk about what I expect from playtesters. That means drawing a map of what’s up for debate and what’s not, so that playtesters don’t spend a ton of energy trying to find ways to make the game something it’s not and instead focus on helping us make the text deliver the game that we intend as well as ensure it’s a fun game to play. That’s actually pretty fuzzy. I’m not going to promise you’ll get more clarity by the end of this, but there will certainly be more words.

The core premise of the game is not up for debate. There are lots of people that won’t like a game about bad people doing bad things for bad reasons (while swearing) and that’s cool, but that is the game we’re testing. So interested playtesters should be onside with this. If you saw Heat or La Femme Nikita or read 100 Bullets or liked the current highly sociopathic James Bond, you’re probably in the right head-space for this game.

The game is aimed at fast, furious action. It supports a lot of player generated narrative and hands authorial rights around willy-nilly. It’s going to do that no matter what, so if that sort of thing isn’t your bag, this won’t be either, so playtest commentary about how to change those things is probably not what we’re looking for. Ways to improve it or make it more fun or better describe how to do it are all things that we will certainly want to know about.

Hollowpoint is intended as a pick-up serial. That is, you could get going in about thirty minutes from a blank slate (I hope) and finish the same night, but still pick up those character and Agency sheets a week or six from now and play another session with those same elements and have fun with both the session itself and the continuity. So ideas that run contrary to that are not useful but ideas that reinforce it certainly are.

The document layout is not up for comment — it won’t be related to the published layout. The text is, however, part of what we want examined, including the organization. Font, page size, columns, margins — no. Chapter structure, grammar, order, tone, consistency, tense, voice, pronouns — yes.

Perhaps most importantly, we’re not really looking for ideas about mechanism. The mechanism is pretty much in place. If it doesn’t work for you in play, there’s no question that we want to hear about how it didn’t work (with examples of the failure) and what sorts of things might fix it for you, but we’re not looking for new dice types or different ways or numbers to roll them now. Refine, yes. Rebuild, probably not. That’s to say that the design work is done — we’re testing now.

So let’s say that “this sucks” or even “this is awesome” is not helpful in this context. “This bit here is unclear and needs a better explanation, maybe an example” is good. “This mechanism works nicely but has this side-effect I don’t like” is fine — we can decide if the side-effect was intentional and then worry about its unlikeability. “This would be cooler with Fudge dice” is right out. “There are too many dice here — it’s cumbersome at the table and my cat is disproportionately interested in it all” is pretty good. “We had a good time with this and not with that” is great. “We had a good time” not so much. Is there clarity up there? People say examples help but now I’m not so sure.

I’m piling up a lot of negative shit there and it’s not really what I wanted to do, but there’s a suspicion I have that for the most part playtesting will not reveal a lot mostly because the bulk of the people that grab the playtest document will not actually playtest it or (maybe worse) will read it and say, “I don’t like this.” And that’s not all that helpful — a lot of people won’t like this game, but the objective is not to please everyone (or even a lot of people, for that matter). So maybe the negativity is a deliberate barrier to the frivolous? Anyway, if you want to scan the game and see if it’s nifty, the wiki is the place to look and has been for many months. The playtest document is something else and for something else, so maybe that’s what I really want to get across.

This is exciting (and terrifying) for me, which might also explain all the barriers I’m putting up — this will be the first time we’ve actually solicited playtesting from third parties and honestly releasing ideas like this early into the wild is scary as hell. It’s less scary since we had such great responses to Diaspora, but this game is not like Diaspora in any interesting sense, so it’s new ground and probably new people. We know we can write stuff that’s fun to read and to play now, so that particular self-doubt is mitigated a little, but you’re all still a giant audience and this is still a stage and so it’s daunting.

So if you got here and you’re still interested, let me know and I’ll put you on a mailing list (Google groups, probably) to keep you updated regarding playtesting. We’ll probably release it using Dropbox to interested parties, so you’ll need that to play along. Again, there’ll be no NDA or anything, but rather just a clear copyright statement and a request that you play nice. We’re all (notional) adults here.

–BMurray

So we are getting close to closing out another quarter (our financial year at the VSCA is a little wacky and one day I may clean that up, but also maybe not) and the last three months will probably our best yet. No one is close to quitting any day jobs — we’re still looking at maybe a week’s worth of regular work pay in three month’s time, but not bad for not doing any new work at all. Anyway, that’s slowing down a lot now: I expect the upcoming quarter will be our weakest though I hope to see some rebound after Evil Hat’s spotlight time moves on (Dresden Files is doing amazingly well — kudos to Fred and the team!)

Anyway, thanks to everyone who lobbied for us to produce a PDF. That turned out to be profitable as well as a useful education, and I’ll say it clearly to anyone who’s still holding their breath: you were right.

I was right too, which makes that easier to say of course.

The past is fun, but the future (especially for someone with a reputation for science-fictional interests) is more fun. And so, here’s what’s coming. I can’t announce dates yet.

Diaspora. Yes we are still doing stuff with Diaspora, though not creating new content. Sometime in the next few months we’ll be getting Diaspora printed through a cheaper printing service so that we can supply it in bulk to IPR and consequently get in more physical stores. This has never been a huge priority for us, but the cash flow is sufficient now that it doesn’t actually burden us much to do it — and keeping this thing fun and riskless has always been a priority. We are doing this for a good time and cheap whiskey and not much else. It’s also a low priority because I don’t want to get stepped on by the giant releases in the FATE and FATE-ish world around now — Dresden Files from the aforementioned Evil Hat and ICONS from Adamant Entertainment. I don’t want to step on their toes either, but it would be a little egotistical of me to claim that was likely — these guys are selling the hell out of great products.

Hollowpoint. This is a strange beast that burst into my head just about whole after spending a weekend re-reading 100 Bullets and then chatting with JB about dice systems for Chimaera. Basically we worked out a cool system for his game and then while he was thinking about it I went away and wrote Hollowpoint to use it. I stole his toys. I am a bad man.

This is okay, because Hollowpoint is about bad men. It’s about a crew (and this is essential — this is not a game about a group of individual heroes) or maybe even more about a mission (the crew can be secondary as you’ll discover). The crew is super-competent, very cool, not necessarily all that smart, and they love their violent, dirty, underhanded, evil work. They love the noise and the smell of a gunfight. They do not argue but rather they act.

So this game is very much crafted around the idea of a mission and will include tools to build that at least as carefully (okay probably more carefully) as the characters are crafted. This game is not an opportunity to create a deep understanding of a single character (though that could happen) and in that sense it owes a debt to 3:16 (Gregor Hutton’s game over at Box Ninja) I suppose. Certainly it arrived in my head after playing a bunch of 3:16. It is an opportunity to sit down with a minimum of preliminary fuss and run an exciting and twisty heist or investigation-turned-sour or extended chase or double-cross. Or really anything with guns and shouting.

It will contain swearing and you will probably want to swear while playing it. In tests it runs about 2-3 hours a session, so it’s fast. You will be encouraged to let your character die in order to get two cool scenes all to yourself — one where you die, and one where you play the replacement berating the team for getting a valuable member killed. ¹ It’s fast, unusual, and a lot of fun. You can run a campaign, but in doing so the running constant is really the organization that employs the characters — that’s what you’ll come to love and elaborate, because the characters will come and go.

Hollowpoint is basically done as far as design and development goes. This week I’ll box it all up and start writing it as a flat document (which means no one else can directly modify it) and we’ll start editing and playtesting from this document. So you will stop seeing the current rev at the skunkworks and we’ll start making a real artifact. It’s a short game (Toph says around 20K words) so I bet we can have this laid out and read for sale in the fall. But I am not committing to that.

Soft Horizon. This game is suddenly interesting me a lot after a bunch of time on the shelf. It’s getting a lot of fairly deep revision now in the skunkworks and so it’s not coming out any time soon. It needs a lot of playtesting too.

This is a game about fantastic heroes like Elric or Conan or Den. It’s Heavy Metal and it’s stream-of-consciousness (a la Mobius). If you read The Airtight Garage of Jerry Cornelius or Arzach and loved it, you’ll hit your stride playing Soft Horizon. Heroes in this game are individual wonders that you will want to explore over the course of a campaign and hopefully the environment is too. The setting is, like Diaspora, loosely defined through the game mechanisms and largely developed during a first session of cluster generation. This cluster, however, is a group of planes that are of interest to some pantheon of deities and the characters are people who can act across planes and have an interest in opposing or siding with these gods. These are big characters. We don’t care about their farm-boy period. They have already had adventures and already bear scars. Now they are icons of their specific competences — a Soft Horizon character whose best skill is Sorcery is the sorceror in the cluster and not a sorceror. An advancement system will not be necessary, but some system for change will be.

The actual mechanisms under the covers in this game are actually still in flux. It was originally intended as a FATE game but we are still thinking (as anyone following this blog has already seen). New dice are implying new resources and, well, everything is moving. So I don’t see this getting out of the skunkworks soon but if the enthusiasm remains high it could. A lot of new text has gone in over the past few days and it’s feasible this could see print by the end of the year.

The other two games, Chimaera and Soulscape, do not show signs of being released this year so I won’t talk about them in detail. They both remain interesting and are both getting work, but the former needs some time alone with itself and the latter needs a champion to drag it out and wonder what it is out loud at the table.

Oh Jack just told me the Lulu cheque came in. It’s a little lower than last quarter but this time around we get to add two deposits from RPGNow. The total is about 35% over last quarter’s profits per author. So we will look back, I think, on this as a peak period for Diaspora and the start of some great new things. I hope you all are open to new ideas, heartless violence, some cussing, poetic tales of strange people in strange places, the motives of gods, and a little risk.

I’m in, at any rate.

–BMurray

What is the FATE system?

This is getting asked all over the place, though most vocally over at RPG.net and on the FATE mailing list. It’s interesting because the current incarnation of FATE is basically a list of exemplar works that declare themselves to be FATE. This is not actually all that helpful because each tries to bring some new ideas to bear (it’s not fun just applying paint to an old game and calling it new — you want to improve it) and file off stuff from other exemplars that doesn’t work for you. And so the resulting definition of FATE is the intersection of all these exemplars and the intersection is both small and shrinking.

So my declaration is this (and it’s typical B.Murray vaguery): until there’s an official document declaring what FATE v3 is, no one knows what FATE v3 is.

Okay, so now I can tell you what I think it is.

First, FATE v3 is a core resolution mechanism that is not unique to it: fixed measure of competence + fortune + narrative benefit versus target value or opposed roll. The common expression of this, or rather the canonical one as in Spirit of the Century, is Skill + Fudge dice + Aspect invoke/tag. I think it’s fair to say that a game that doesn’t do some variation of this is probably not FATE v3. But lots of games do pretty much this and are certainly not FATE games.

So FATE v3 is also characters with Aspects. And so we need to define Aspects. Characters have Aspects if they have one or more descriptive phrases that can confer mechanical benefit (see “narrative benefit” above) at the cost of a narrative currency: the fate point. And so here I will say that the fate point and therefore the existence of a fate point economy (which at a minimum is used for mechanical benefit) is a FATE v3 requirement. I think that we also need to include the Compel as essential: there has to be a way to get as well as spend fate points.

I think that’s it. Everything else can come and go. Consequences are special Aspects. Stress tracks are completely detachable. Stunts are wildly malleable (as we’ve seen) and don’t need to exist at all. But a game where you roll dice and add skills, then narrate in your features and pay for the result is FATE. A game where you are shilling around for more of these points is also FATE.

Well that means that a good canonical statement of what is necessary to be FATE v3 shouldn’t take more than a half-dozen pages or so. And then six hundred pages of stuff you can glue onto it.

The end result of this is that I don’t know if any of the upcoming VSCA games are going to be FATE games now. Let’s look.

Hollowpoint. Dice pools that owe more to ORE than anything else and no points economy at all. Aspects are their own economy, burned when used. Certainly not FATE.

Soft Horizon. Tricky one because we’re just now thinking hard about changes. Certainly it’s FATE-like — the resolution is skill + dice + aspects, but the dice are in flux (could be |d6 – d6| — see the skunkworks). So far it retains a fate point economy as well, so I’ll call this one FATE on my own terms, but it could be debated.

Soulscape. I don’t know. We need to revisit this design before we know what it is. It is imagined as a pretty straightforward FATE v3 game but that was a long time ago and I think it could benefit from something more deliberately addressing its premises.

Chimaera. This game is, unsurprisingly, the most chimaeric. It uses a cool dice pool mechanism that’s distinctly unFATElike, and uses an Aspects-as-economy system not unlike Hollowpoint rather than a strict fate point economy. It also has some very cool dice-as-record-keeping tools that are fun to manipulate and also very much not FATE. I think we’ll call this “partially inspired by” but to be honest it’s more inspired by the play we got from FATE games than by the games themselves.

I guess that as players and designers we are continuously evolving our games and we don’t feel any particular attachment to whatever the core of FATE is, partially because it hasn’t been clearly stated. And I think that, even if it was, now we’d be as happy to say “it’s not FATE really” as “it’s another FATE game!” I mean, I get that there is a kind of built-in audience for FATE games just as with any other generic identity because there’s a community associated with it even though the definition is nebulous.

Maybe that’s at the heart of it — I would like for FATE to remain poorly defined exactly so that the community remains diverse and open to experiments and hacks. Hacking on it is what got me into design in the first place. It made the VSCA exist. I’d hate to lose that spirit in that community and a rich and rigid definition would risk killing it.

So here’s to FATE: skill + dice + aspects to resolve, and a fate point economy in action all through play. Hah, six pages indeed.

–BMurray

I know I started something yesterday and it’s frustrating to interrupt it, but I’m reading Herman Melville at the moment, so I’m in the mood for ten thousand word parentheticals.

I got an email the other day and I wanted to react to it in depth and publicly because it probably voices the sentiment of a lot of Diaspora players and so the default audience for anything new that VSCA will produce. I won’t reproduce the email (it was sent as private communication after all) but here’s the gist: Hollowpoint seems like a cool place to play (modern action) but the system is alien and not to my taste — please please do it differently.

From the general, abstract place in my head: Hollowpoint is an experiment and experiments need the freedom to fail. One of the things it experiments with is a kind of objective that is common in action scenes and badly modeled (sometimes impossible to model) in what I will call “guy versus guy” systems. So I’m going to try something very different (though not unrecognizable: leaf through your copy of Reign) to get at what I want to get it. I am certain that this divergence will be unappealing to a lot of people. That’s cool — that’s data. It’s also really appealing to at least one person so I hope there will be others. If you’re on the fence (and as the game does not yet exist, that might be a good place to be), hear me out. If you’re committed to disliking the very idea, move on — there will be other VSCA games and if you love Diaspora, you can already get that.

So I was watching Heat the other night — a Michael Mann movie with some very smart action scenes — and noticed how well Hollowpoint maps into it, and that’s exciting, because that film is very much in the target zone for the game. By way of example is the famous bank robbery scene: the crew has executed a bank robbery without violence and in the course of exiting they are bounced by the police. The crew has automatic weapons, great training, and willingness to cause harm and hurt but they are also professionals: their objective is to escape with the money.

No in guy vs. guy gaming, this is really, really hard most of the time. Because the system will focus on which cop your character is trying to kill each time-slice, you the player are focused on the wrong thing with distinctly uncomfortable (to me, and in this genre) effects.

First, I (the player) have to plan how to most effectively kill police officers because what the system primarily lets me do with my assault rifle is kill people. I am not enjoying that in this context.

Second I (the character) am not explicitly interested in killing police officers. I am interested in escaping with the money and don’t care if I kill police officers. But the system models me defeating police officers with my rifle.

Finally I (both player and character) have sophisticated, staged objectives that involve violence against a large opposing force with full knowledge that I cannot just kill all of them (and here’s a place where some guy vs. guy games really drop the ball for me — I can kill all of them. Seriously, I can kill the entire LAPD to solve a problem, just by looting corpses for ammunition.)

The scenario is a classic “breakout”. The police are technically a defensive surrounding force and the robbers objective is to create a weak point in their line, penetrate it, defend their egress, and escape. People are going to get killed, but the solution is not about killing people. You don’t create a weak point in a defensive line by killing everyone — you create it by making a zone where no defender is willing to oppose you effectively. If they are all dead, that’s certainly one solution, but you, with the objective of breaking, don’t actually care. And if you’re a pro you also know it’s not a feasible step in your plan anyway.

A breakout is achieved by aggression. The unit under siege identifies a point of egress and advances on it, concentrating fire. Flanks are protected to avoid being enveloped but the focus of fire is the point of egress. And you advance constantly and aggressively. Go watch Heat and come back.

Okay see that? That’s what you want. And when the line folds, you exit, secure transportation, and depart. The criminals are using several important tools in this process: they are making people feel too afraid to be effective by shooting the shit out of them. Terror is the tool there. They are identifying and neutralizing core sources of resistance (vehicles, commanders). Killing is the tool there. They are leveraging the fact that they do not care about innocent bystanders and the police do, giving them vastly more free mobility and fields of fire. Again, this is mostly about Terror.

But the bulk of it is not about a series of guy vs. guy incidents. It’s about effective use of ammunition, mobility, aggression, planning, knowledge of the space, sustaining fire (rapid reload!), and effective fire (shooting at the target — a notoriously hard thing for non-sociopaths to do). So a system that gives you a tool for defeating one other person by intimidating or killing her is not giving you enough to work with. The richness of this scene — and all of its energy — would be missed by focusing on who shot who. Watch that scene again and listen to it. This is one of a very few films that use accurate sounds of gunfire. Turn the volume up. Listen to the difference between the light assault rifles of the crew and the boom of Pacino’s heavier rifle. Listen to the echoes off the buildings. The chief issue resolving this scene is how afraid everyone and how willing they are to do harm. The ability to accurately hit a target is a tertiary factor at best.

So Hollowpoint, being interested in this sort of scene, does not do guy vs. guy action except as an exception. Instead it’s about the individuals in the crew and their contribution to an action against an opposing force with a common objective. An assassination, for example, is not “killing a guy”. An assassination is a sophisticated preparation of a space in which an effective killing blow can be struck while allowing the assassin to escape. An ambush is not “killing six guys”. It’s again a preparation of space in order to destroy a unit of men (as a unit, not each man) and then exit the location safely (or otherwise manage the objective: you ambushed them for a reason).

Now I am not slagging guy vs. guy gaming. Diaspora is very much a guy vs. guy design and I love it. But the model doesn’t do everything well and it doesn’t do what I want here. So far, in play, Hollowpoint certainly does meet my needs. I know every roll that Val Kilmer’s character made in every scene. I know what choices he made with the dice he got.

Interestingly, the most disappointing part of that movie for me is the last half hour or so. I think it’s obvious why, in light of this discussion. It forgets what it’s really about. Or it doesn’t detect what I think it’s about.

It’s cool to dislike some or all of my games. Vive la différence.

–BMurray

Okay, first an explanation.

Yes, there’s not been much here over the past couple of weeks but that’s not because I’ve stopped writing. I had a bout of sinusitis a couple of weeks ago that was crippling. In fact it was painful enough that I started researching the nature of Purgatory through the testimony of Saints. Anyway, this post isn’t going to be about pain or Purgatory or religion. In fact I just started writing so I’m not entirely sure what it’s about yet.

Last week I finally registered VSCA Publishing as a real company. I’d been dreading that almost as much as I was dreading doing taxes (which I left until the eve of April 30th) because I am really not interested in business. It’s a fun kind of game, but I’m just not a business guy. I don’t care if I make money and that seems to offend a lot of people, especially the government. Well maybe not especially the government, but especially the Chamber of Commerce and other similar entities where I might go for help. It’s like explaining calculus to a dog — I just want to make cool stuff and sell it for some money. I want lots of people to see it and I don’t want it to be a burden on the rest of my life to do it. If the net at the end of the day is zero (after buying all the cool tools I need to do the deed), I am so very happy. What you get is a look like a fish watching a shiny thing. Buh? Sha-wuh?

Anyway, what I finally did was go to a web site that does business registration in BC (recommend recommend recommend) and did the whole thing with a very friendly click-click-click process that led me through a questionnaire that hooked me up with all the forms I needed to fill out, guided me regarding the contents, charged me a reasonable fee, and spat out all the registration numbers I need. Done. Holy crap that was easy and I didn’t have to justify my choices to anyone.

So now VSCA Publishing is the real deal — a sole proprietorship owned by me and licensed for import and export and all that good stuff. Most of the acronyms on my new tax forms make sense to me now, so next year I won’t have to guess what numbers to put in them. I may even hire someone to guess for me.

With VSCA Publishing now an honest-to-God registered capitalist Entity, a de jure cog in the great engine, I will disclose the status of current projects.

Chimaera is front and center right now. JB Bell is the primary author on it and it needs some authoring done, but it’s had some great iterative play tests and the rules are coming together solidly. I’ve been doing cover art experiments and layout tests and am confident we have a path to tread here that will be exciting and fun and worth your money. I don’t know how long it will take because the real work is still ahead and while everyone loves to wonder out loud about game design and to test shit, real work is hard. We’ll see.

Soft Horizon is on the back burner because it needs a lot of play to get it to a place where I can confidently talk about producing it. It has a cover and a solid layout design ready, and there’s a lot of text in place. It could go to press in a month or two if not for the fact that it just hasn’t been played enough for me to be confident of its quality. And because Chimaera is our current focus, we won’t see a lot of play time for this for a while. That’s okay — I know from experience that taking a break from a project is a tool.

Hollowpoint is kind of ready and kind of not. It’s a weird game because it’s a major departure from more traditional structures — it’s more akin to Gregor Hutton’s 3:16 than Evil Hat’s Spirit of the Century. It’s a great energetic one-shot and it has good linkages for campaigns and I kind of adore it, but something nags me about it. I’m thinking I should just write it and get it out there for other people to judge. It’s weird and so I don’t want to show it, like a baby with a tail. But having a tail would be really cool. It has a cover and a layout design. I should sit down, gate it, and write it.

Soulscape is in a weird place. It’s Toph Marshall’s baby and I don’t know what I think about it. It’s like one of those cool looking toy puzzles that you just can’t figure out how to play with. It’s cool. It’s elegantly crafted. But what does it do? Is it fun? Is it art? Can I explain it to someone else? I’m not excited about this project but I am intrigued by it. It’s a game you might tag on to another game — you might play it to make sense of a D&D TPK. That’s a mighty narrow niche, but also kind of awesome. In fact, I may have to engineer a TPK in an upcoming game in order to playtest Soulscape. So I can’t say where this game is on the timeline yet because I don’t really know what it is yet. It is something though.

Finally, I am sad because my telescope is rotting in storage. Living in the city is great for so very many things, but not for being an amateur astronomer. The beast is a headache to get outside and I don’t drive so I’m not taking it further than the building courtyard and the light pollution is just too severe. I’ve seen all I can see with it in this space and so it’s in storage. My experience with storage is that it’s just a step en route to the garbage and that makes me unhappy. I can recover my costs by reselling the optics — that’s not an issue. I just wish I could live the life I want in a place where I can see the night sky.

–BMurray