Diary of a Failed Game Designer

Source: Eve Online There is an old saying that "If you haven't touched it in a year, it's probably safe to get rid of it." Ok I'm not sure how old of a saying it is but I have definitely heard it before. For the  people (person?) who read this blog that would probably  mean throwing away a painstakingly curated, thirty year old, attic full of gaming material. With that in mind I'm not going to suggest applying this concept to real life. However in Playtesting it holds a bit more water. We playtested (albeit super briefly) my shoot and loot style game Loot Box A-Go-Go last night. The game is an unapologetic homage to Star Frontiers, Borderlands, and perhaps even Halo / Doom. As you might expect there should be a fair amount of combat so for the  playtest we had one small encounter. Our heroes vs a small security bot. In the course of the fight I noticed a few things. Just like in Star Frontiers, a percentage system with combat modifiers leads to the game slowi

I hate apes and monkeys, they creep me out. I'm not sure why, but I don't find them cute or funny. I find them oddly disturbing. Let's take this Phobia head on with what might be the most esoteric and useless charts I have ever written. Chart 1: Body / fur / Face /Tail. Roll four times on this chart. The  first result is the  body, the second result is the fur, the third result is the  tail, and the fourth result is the Face. ROLL 4d10 : Spider monkey like / Matted Brown / Sloth like / Bushy Prehensile Large, 200lb chimp / Sleek and long / deep set eyes, huge brow / Slim, prehensile, long Tiny and marmoset like / Short Course / Almost feline cat like eyes in a small skull / Droopy Baboon / flowing yellow with red tips, looks like fire / Flat wide face / Sweeping long haired Capuchin / Mottled spots / Mandril like / Tiny stub tail 300 lb gorilla / Thick dark fur / Proboscis monkey like / no tail Howler monkey / Tufted with  large golden mane / Howler monkey like / Naked preh

This will come as no surprise to anyone who knows me. One of my secret loves in life is pro wrestling. I'm admittedly not a "fan" like I was when I was a kid. I mean I don't watch as much as I used to. My watching had degenerated into that kind of smarky thing where I search out "good matches" on the internet, and bitch about the WWE. Recently however, playing The World Wide Wrestling  RPG lead to an uptick in my wrestling watching, because of that I have started thinking about it again. I see similarities between  Wrestling and RPGs. In fact I think of Wrestling  in terms of a giant on going LARP. Any how, this being a quick post I should get to the damn point. The stories in wrestling work best when they are honest and  have some degree of  logical consistency. Bad guys and  good guys should have realistic goals, and motivations. For example: In wrestling there is alway  a championship, and  if the  main players are all competing for the  championship then

Meet Tot, He's Dead, Tots been Dead a long time. If Anyone who ever gets their hands on my Loot Box a-go-go game has even passing knowledge of Star Frontiers, that person will see the obvious influence the former had on my game. I don't deny it. In fact the whole thing could almost be looked at as a hack of Star frontiers. (Hak is more trendy right?) I have basically  taken the  old star frontiers game and trimmed the character generation down and  moved that complexity over to  the concept of Burn Chains. I touched on those in the last post. Some things like the d100, roll under a target, and good things happen if you roll doubles resolution system, just work. It is simple to use. Can cover many situation without a lot of tinkering. Has enough  numeric"space" to  allow for a myriad of modifiers. Basicly I want a die system that is simple enough that I can just run the game and make this happen. Clyde Caldwell( source )  Because that level of Crazy kind of has to be

My experience with Science fiction is  limited, but not completely  nonexistent. I'm familiar with the big two, Star Trek and  Star Wars. On the Star Trek side I am mostly familiar via osmosis and playing Star fleet battles back in J.r. high. Star Wars on the other hand I have seen the movies and simply don't care that much about them, just not to my taste. Other than that, I was a huge fan of Robotech and Battletech when I was younger. Battletech in particular has had a grip on me over the years. I still harbor a glimmering fantasy that someday I will run a game where the players pilot giant robots and  beat up aliens.  Lately we have been playing a Sci - Fi Rpg of "Stars Without Number" which truth be told I haven't  read up on the rules beyond making my character Luckily  the GM has been kind enough to say things like "Just roll and add 5, tell me what you get" and nursed me along a bit. I have been having fun with the  game even if my mastery of the

Last year I entered a game into the 200 word game contest found here. This year I got lazy and missed the deadline. I had the  game written , I just never did anything to format it and never sent  it in. Que Sera, Sera. So here it is the contest  entry that never was. Thanks for reading. -Mark Tracy’s last ride: Tracy is dead. You are on the way to the funeral. Play this game in a car, on a trip. Turn on the radio. The next song reminds you all of Tracy, a favorite song. The driver starts, look around at the traffic.  Say something about Tracy based on the cars you see. Oncoming cars are negative, Cars in you lane are positive. The Person speaking must pick a car then tell. Cars Oncoming / Same lane Red car: A time you angered Tracy / Tracy angered you. Yellow Car: Something Tracy loved / something you loved about Tracy Black Car: Something bad Tracy did / something bad you did to Tracy. White Car: A memory you made with Tracy Positive / negative Green Car: A Trait Tracy had you admire

Are we there yet? I am very bad at some aspects of Game mastering. I am horrible at horror. I don't like horror movies and the like to begin with. I think because I have not exposed myself to horror the methods and subject matter I would need to master to instill a sense of dread in players are pretty foreign to me. That's just one example. There is something I find even harder to instill in players. Awe. How do you describe it when a group of players round a bend and the  great salt tower, gleaming, crystalline,  massive, and,  solitary in the center of a now dry lake bed? This is one of the wonders of your  world, There is quite literally nothing else like it. A spire of carved salt that rises into the clouds. People go on pilgrimages to see it , and stories are told about it around camp fires all over the known world.  So the players write it down and decide their next move.  Describing awe is one thing, you can say  "You are all overwhelmed by the solitary beauty of th

I'm just going to throw a whole bunch of stuff against the internet wall. Just ideas of  games I would like to run, but am never going to be able to find the  time for. Perhaps one of the folks I game with will see one and say, "YASSS ... WE HAVE TO DO THAT!" Or another reader will see something and think. "Hey that's not bad. I can take that and run with it." Here is a list in no  order. Physical Intervention: Fighting game characters exist in the  real world, AKA somewhere there is a guy like Ryu who can fight and shoot Hadouken spirit balls at mutant dudes like blanka. Somewhere there is a huge pro wrestler like Wolf Hawkfield who can toss people around like sacks of potatoes. The players are  a group of these kind of super humans. they  enter tournaments and  such to investigate the bad guys of the world. Kind of like a low level super power, spy, kungfu mash up. SYSTEM: Phase Abandon, or perhaps I would buy the game FIGHT , if I Really wanted to get nit

If there is one thing the  internet is suited for its reinventing the wheel. The  web retains ideas, and  any of those ideas can be pulled out of the freezer, thawed and , chewed on  over and over again. Often times nothing new comes of it, other times someone finds a new way to look at an old idea, regardless we are reinventing the wheel. I give you, The most METAL wheel ever reinvented! Now rejoice! When I start to think about the uses or non-use of  classes in an RPG I always get that feeling of "here we go again." Every  iteration of class , meta-class, non-class, template, archetypes, or, whatever classity-class-class combination has already been done.  So with that said in my last post I naturally go and rewrite a class. For this post I'm just going to propose one very old school solution to classes. Imagination. When I look at older games, (and for now I'm going to ignore the  class Vs race dynamic of demi-humans.) I see this : Fighter Thief Wizard Cleric. What

The traveling Druid. Part 2 of “playing the warrior druid.” A while back I wrote a post about druids. In particular I had a guest poster and player from the games I run, Russ write about druids. Russ plays druids and he knows more about druids while he is sleeping than I know about them while I am awake. My contention is this. An actual druid has no reason to leave the grove and the lands that he or she is protecting. I can’t see any reason why a druid in the traditional sense would ever wonder away from the grove and go delving into a tomb with a bunch of adventurer types. In my own game I had to go back into the archives of what has happened over the years in my campaign and give the druid a quest to reestablish lay lines all over the place. In effect he has to move around to get this done. The 2 nd edition druid had that whole, you have to challenge a higher level druid to go up levels aspect. This is a good way to get the upstart druid out of the grove and into the world, which is