Raptus Regaliter

My lovely wife has been conversing with a gentleman named David Hill, Jr. on Twitter for quite a while now. David, who’s written for White Wolf, Catalyst Game Labs and Microsoft Excel… er… EVE Online. If you didn’t get that joke, you should listen to Geek Nights.

Anyway, as a result of her making Internet friends with David, we got to sit down and make a couple of characters for his new RPG, Maschine Zeit. So far, it looks like it’s going to be a techno-thriller/horror-ish kind of game, along the lines of Event Horizon. I think. Kinda. There are apparently actual ghosts in the machines.

Anyway, the first thing that the game asks you to do is to decide what you’re group is doing up in the large abandoned space-hulks that float above the planet. Kristin and I decided that our characters were former corporate employees who have since gone freelance for their own reasons. I wanted to play a scientist, she decided to make a laborer.

Next up, we’ve got the character’s concept. I liked that the example text from the chapter gave a really clear indication of how the concept was intended to be constructed; basically, “A ______ who’s ______, and now ______.” Pretty straightforward stuff. I came up with Dr. Anish Joshi, a disgruntled scientist, who wants to strike out at his former employers.

Step three is figuring out why we’re on one of the abandoned space stations, and who’s paying for the expensive trip up there. We went with the idea that our characters were pulled together for our different areas of expertise by an independent businessman, Jurassic Park style, although our benefactor is secretly working for a major corporation. It was all we could do to not name him Mr. Johnson. This kind of merged a bit with the next step, where you figure out how you know each other and whatnot.

Next, we finally got to put numbers to paper and get down to the nitty-gritty of actual character creation. I’ve always viewed the character sheet as the player’s interface with the game world, so what’s on the sheet is pretty important to me. Of course, not having read through the actual mechanics, I don’t know what the numbers mean. But, the character creation chapter assures me that higher numbers are better.

The gist is this: you’ve got 150 points to break down amongst 9 individual stats, which are divided into 3-stat blocks. So, under the Soma Elements you’ve got Body, Mind and Persona. These basically break down to your level of ability on physical, mental or social tasks, respectively. After that, you have your Pneuma Elements, which represent the stuff you’ve learned. Knowledge is book-learnin’, Rote Skill is what you’ve learned through hands-on training, and Interaction is what you’ve learned through dealing with people. Lastly, there’s the Psyche Elements. Your Id represents your instincts, your Ego is your sense of self and pride, and your Superego is your “sense of self in relation to the outside world.”

The points themselves are split amongst these nine stats (the book suggests splitting them up into multiples of 5), to give you an array of values between (generally) 5 and 25. The higher the number, the better you are in that ability.

After you’ve distributed those, you get to move on the the Personal Elements. These are divided into Descriptor, Skill Set and Association Elements, and they’re open-ended, much like Traits from Dogs in the Vineyard. I copped out and just gave each of my Universal Elements a corresponding Personal Element, but I imagine that you could have as many Personal Elements as you have points for. Personally, I think this is where character creation for Maschine Zeit is going to shine, as this kind of open-ended character creation is where it’s at for me.

There are two other types of Elements on the sheet, Genotype and Dramatic. Genotype Elements are for what I can only assume to be the Kewel Powerz (TM) of the game. I’m not sure exactly what Dramatic Elements are, but they’re keyed to how many players there are in the group, so I’m guessing that they may be some way of mitigating the risk of not having as many PC’s around to help if you’ve got a small play group.

Here’s Dr. Joshi, all statted up:

Character Name: Dr. Anish Joshi

Concept: A disgruntled scientist, who wants to strike out at his former employers.

Trip Funded By: Corporate Interests, under the guise of Private Interests

Universal Elements

Soma Elements

Body: 10

Mind: 25

Persona: 15

Pneuma Elements

Knowledge: 25

Rote Skill: 15

Interaction: 10

Psyche Elements

Id: 10

Ego: 20

Superego: 20

Personal Elements

Descriptor Elements

Wiry: 10

Brilliant: 25

Cold: 10

Skill Set Elements

Scientist: 25

Analyst: 20

Debator: 10

Association Elements

Fringe Research: 15

Highly Credentialed: 15

Humanist: 20

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It’s not often that I go to the RPG.Net forums for inspiration, but I had this idea for tweaking the Virtue and Vice system in World of Darkness, and, fortunately, had the forethought to Google it first. The almighty Goog linked me to this thread, featuring a post by Evil Hat’s own Rob Donoghue. And here I was, thinking I was being original. Well, no matter. I’m going to cop out and post this anyway.

What are Aspects?

First of all, when I talk about Aspects, I’m referring to the primary feature of awesomeness from Evil Hat’s FATE system, which powers their Spirit of the Century and Dresden Files RPGs. In short, Aspects are basically short phrases that describe something important about your character. In FATE, they’re generally used one of two ways; either you can invoke an Aspect to get a bonus on your die roll, or the GM can pay you, the player, a Fate Point (which are the FATE system’s form of player-input currency) in exchange for compelling you to act in a particular way based on one of your Aspects.

For example, let’s say you have an Aspect that says, “Sucker for a pretty face.” When you’re trying to convince an attractive young lady to give up some information on some Ancient Artifact you’re trying to keep out of Nazi hands, you shell out a Fate Point and tell the GM that you’re invoking your Aspect. You get a bonus on whatever die roll you use for sweet-talking info out of pretty young women. Later on, the same lass turns out to be secretly working for the Nazis, and slips the Ancient Artifact out of your pocket. The GM then gives you a Fate Point and compels you to let her go, citing the same Aspect.

Clear? Good. Indiana Jones reference too heavy handed? Eh. Sue me.

Aspects in the World of Darkness

Okay, so now that you are aware of what Aspects are and the basics of how they work, let’s look at a couple of ways that you could use them in a World of Darkness game. There are no guarantees that any of these suggestions will not break the game. However, they are also likely to lead to awesomeness that wasn’t there previously.

The WoD Problem

Okay, it’s not really a problem, in the strictest sense. I’ve just never cared for the Virtue/Vice setup.

First of all, in all of the ideas below, we’re going to use Willpower points as the player-input currency, and then tie WP spending and recovery to the Aspects.

Method #1: Virtue and Vice as Aspects

The simplest way of applying these mechanics is to straight-up use Virtue and Vice as Aspects. When you want to be able to spend a point of Willpower, you justify that through either your Virtue or Vice. You want three extra dice on that attack roll? “My Wrath overcomes me as I strike.” You want some WP back? The GM’s gonna make you go for that idea that’s full of Hope, but probably not very likely to happen.

The downside is that Virtue and Vice as written aren’t really meaningful. I think in practice, most people tend to take the seed of the Virtue or Vice and turn that into something a bit more specific, usually with one tied to the other. An ex-cop might have Justice as his Virtue and Wrath as a Vice, with the explanation that he’s got a tendency to let the ends justify the means while seeking justice. Fortunately, there are ways of tweaking this…

Method #2: The Two Aspect Character

In this method, we ignore the idea of Virtue and Vice per se, and instead give your character two aspects, one based on a Virtue, and the other on a Vice. This has the benefit of being, basically, what people do anyway, with the added bonus of actually having a concrete way of gaining back Willpower. Instead of having Justice and Wrath, you’d have a statement that’s a little more solid, like, “I am the law,” or, “I will make the wrongdoers pay!”

For a little exta fun, you could also make your character’s Concept or splat combination into Aspects as well.

Method #3: The Donoghue Method

In the post I linked to previously, Rob Donoghue made a brilliant suggestion of making each dot you have in Willpower an Aspect. Thus, a Willpower 4 character will have 4 aspects, chosen by the player. You’d create Aspects that apply to your character at character creation, and then, as you spend XP on raising your Willpower, you’d have to come up with Aspects that represent why you gained that dot. The nice part of this method is that you wind up with a character that has a ton of Aspects, and, once that happens, it’s really easy for the GM to get your character invested in the game. Also, in my experience, most WoD GM’s like to make players justify their XP expenditures. This makes you think long and hard about whether or not you have justification for spending those points on Willpower.

Next time, I’m going to address one of my pet-peeves in WoD – well, in a lot of RPG’s, really – the Extended Roll.

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As I mentioned before, I’m writing an RPG. I don’t plan on having it finished within 40 days, that would be crazy, but I think I can get a darn good start on a draft, at least. If nothing else, it’ll get the ball rolling.

The game I’m working on, tentatively titled Dystropolis, is a transhumanist-themed FATE game. The idea for it was inspired by this passage from Cory Doctorow’s Down and Out in the Magic Kingdom:

It was the second year of my undergrad, taking a double-major in not making trouble for my profs and keeping my mouth shut. It was the early days of Bitchun, and most of us were still a little unclear on the concept.

Not all of us, though: a group of campus shit-disturbers, grad students in the Sociology Department, were on the bleeding edge of the revolution, and they knew what they wanted: control of the Department, oustering of the tyrannical, stodgy profs, a bully pulpit from which to preach the Bitchun gospel to a generation of impressionable undergrads who were too cowed by their workloads to realize what a load of shit they were being fed by the University.

At least, that’s what the intense, heavyset woman who seized the mic at my Soc 200 course said, that sleepy morning mid-semester at Convocation Hall. Nineteen hundred students filled the hall, a capacity crowd of bleary, coffee-sipping time-markers, and they woke up in a hurry when the woman’s strident harangue burst over their heads.

I saw it happen from the very start. The prof was down there on the stage, a speck with a tie-mic, droning over his slides, and then there was a blur as half a dozen grad students rushed the stage. They were dressed in University poverty-chic, wrinkled slacks and tattered sports coats, and five of them formed a human wall in front of the prof while the sixth, the heavyset one with the dark hair and the prominent mole on her cheek, unclipped his mic and clipped it to her lapel.

“Wakey wakey!” she called, and the reality of the moment hit home for me: this wasn’t on the lesson-plan.

“Come on, heads up! This is not a drill. The University of Toronto Department of Sociology is under new management. If you’ll set your handhelds to ‘receive,’ we’ll be beaming out new lesson-plans momentarily. If you’ve forgotten your handhelds, you can download the plans later on. I’m going to run it down for you right now, anyway.

“Before I start though, I have a prepared statement for you. You’ll probably hear this a couple times more today, in your other classes. It’s worth repeating. Here goes:

“We reject the stodgy, tyrannical rule of the profs at this Department. We demand bully pulpits from which to preach the Bitchun gospel. Effective immediately, the University of Toronto Ad-Hoc Sociology Department is in charge. We promise high-relevance curriculum with an emphasis on reputation economies, post-scarcity social dynamics, and the social theory of infinite life-extension. No more Durkheim, kids, just deadheading! This will be fun.”

The world is changing, and you are one of the few people who understand why. You are a member of one of the many transhuman Tribes; ad-hoc meritocracies whose goals are to usher in a new world for Posthumanity. Through knowledge and hacking and black-market deals, you’ve managed to make yourself into something more than you were born to be.

The Powers that Be, though, have a vested interest in maintaining the status quo. Their business models are tied up in it. Their governments are constructed around it. They teach it in their schools. They view your kind as simple dissidents. They are no longer worthy of the power and control they possess.

It is up to you and your Tribemates to take the world from them. For the good of all.

That’s kind of a rough idea of the concept. It needs to be fleshed out and made, well, better.

So, what do you do in this game? The plan is to put the players on the other side of the world domination game. Usually, RPG plots center around people who are fighting against overwhelming odds to keep some monolithic evil from taking over the world. In this case, I wanted to explore the idea of having the players be proactive in taking the world away from those who have either misused it, or have simply ground progress down to a standstill. I thought it might be fun to have the players be the “bad guys,” in the sense that they are out for world domination, at least.

Mechanically, I plan on stealing liberally from most of the published FATE games, especially the Dresden Files RPG and Diaspora. My current thought is to give the Dystropolis campaign a framework based on Diaspora’s social conflict system. I’ll post more on that when I get a chance to playtest it.

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I’m not a fan of Lent. I guess that’s something that should be obvious from the giant scarlet A sitting over on the right side of the page. Because of that, it’s really tempting to just make fun of the idea that poeople should be sacrificing something for the next forty days, since, clearly, I see no practical value in it.

Fortunately, my wife made a Twitter post that really made me reexamine my attitude toward Lent, although not in the way I really expected. So, instead of advocating or celebrating people sacrificing things that they either like or should be giving up anyway, I’m trying to start something new. I’m hoping that it’ll catch on.

For the next 40 days, I’m asking people to pick up a project and wor on it every day. In my case, it’s a FATE game that’s been rolling around in my head for a month or two. Other people on Twitter have expressed interest in writing projects, playing musical instruments, writing code. All sorts of stuff. You could spend the next 40 days volunteering for some organization. Even just cleaning the house.

The point is, don’t celebrate not doing something. Celebrate doing something awesome! And, if you pick a 40 Day Project and finish it, awesome! You haven’t just worked on something; you’ve accomplished it!

So, here are the official rules for the 40 Day Project:

1. Pick a project. Any project is good. Write, play, work out. Doesn’t matter what the project is.
2. Work on that project every day until either Easter or the project is finished, whichever comes first.
3. Post updates on Twitter using the tag #40DayProject, or leave a comment here about how it’s going.

That’s it. Nothing more to it. Don’t make it too complicated, and don’t set any goal beyond working on your project for the next 40 days.

Life is something to be experienced. Don’t waste the next 40 days worrying about how you’ll live without whatever you’ve given up. Instead, spend it doing something makes you happy for 40 days.

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I don’t intend to make a habit of posting press releases, but this is too awesome:

(Atlanta, GA) – DriveThruRPG, an online marketplace for traditional dice-and-paper roleplaying games, recently conducted a fund-raising program in the wake of the devastating earthquake that affected Haiti. The effort resulted in an amount of $178,900.00 being wired to the international relief organization, Doctors Without Borders.

“Nothing like this has ever happened in our community,” said Sean Patrick Fannon, Marketing Manager for DriveThruRPG. “The response of the publishers and the gaming community has been nothing short of miraculous. I am extremely proud of what we’ve all done here. It can’t take away the misery and tragedy faced by the people of Haiti, but we are hopeful that our efforts can bring some relief and recovery to them.”

DriveThruRPG chose Doctors Without Borders because of their flawless reputation for bringing medical and humanitarian aid to those in need without any partisan or philosophical agenda attached. Already on the ground when the earthquake struck, Doctors Without Borders is perfectly positioned to make immediate and efficient use of the funds collected.

“We are extremely grateful to DriveThruRPG and the roleplaying game community for choosing to contribute to Doctors Without Borders. Their generosity will help provide lifesaving and urgently needed humanitarian assistance to the victims of the recent earthquake in Haiti,” said Jennifer Tierney, Director of Development for Doctors Without Borders-USA. “As Doctors Without Borders provides surgery for victims of the earthquake, as well as post-operative care, mental health support, and other medical care, this contribution will make a real difference in Haiti.”

Reports from Doctors Without Borders indicate that over 11,000 have been treated by them, with over 1,300 surgeries performed (most of them major). The money donated by DriveThruRPG will go directly to helping rebuild their supplies and expanding their operations during the recovery of the Haitian nation.

“This is just the beginning,” said Steve Wieck, CEOof DriveThruRPG. “We’ve tapped into a real power for positive social change and charitable good here, and we’re looking ahead to future opportunities to use our technology to help game publishers and game fans network to provide assistance to those in need.”

DriveThruRPG.com is the world’s largest source of roleplaying game products available for download. It is an industry leader in modern business and technology developments for the tabletop gaming fan. For more information, contact Sean Patrick Fannon (sean@onebookshelf.com, 614-946-9371).

Doctors Without Borders/Médecins Sans Frontières (MSF) is an international medical humanitarian organization working in nearly 70 countries to assist people whose survival is threatened by violence, neglect, or catastrophe. For more information, contact Emily Linendoll, Press Officer (emily.linendoll@newyork.msf.org, 212-763-5764).

I’m super proud to be both a member of the RPG community and a contributor to the money that DTRPG donated to Doctors Without Borders. Everyone who donated is, in this, at least, an awesome person who deserves all kinds of credit.

I’d also like to take the time to acknowledge some of the contributors to the bundle, especially Duane O’Brien and David Hill, who are beyond awesome.

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I’ve been thinking of ways to revitalize my blogging. Usually, I find myself unable to keep myself interested in whatever it is that I happen to be doing, hence the lack of updates. Fortunately, I had some ideas that might just make me keep this thing up to date. At least for a while.

One of these ideas is the WoD Mod series; a bunch of random, unplaytested hacks for White Wolf’s World of Darkness line of games. Very few of these are written with the intension of saying, “This was bad game design. Here’s how to fix it.” There might be a couple of posts like that, but for the most part, these are about trying to get the game to give you a different feel. Also,  as I said above, nothing in here is playtested, and it’s entirely possible that I won’t get a chance to test them ever, so, I’m relying on you kind WoD players to try these out in your own games, then come back and let me know how they work, or if the idea was completely retarded. Which is possible because, hey, I don’t write games for a living.

Let’s talk about the Morality track in WoD, shall we?

Basically, as written, the Morality attribute is intended to measure how in touch your character is with whatever his nature happens to be. For mortal characters, this is basically a question of adhering to general Western moral ideals. For all the supernatural critters, it’s  a measure of  consonance or dissonance with one’s nature. How close are you to the monster inside you? Or, something like that, anyway. In practice, all it really does is disincentivise people from playing either retardedly moral or retardedly amoral characters. It’s really really hard to get to Morality 10, and pretty much impossible to stay there. You also have to be really really bad to drill down to Morality 1. Generally, you have to engage in every activity that makes GMs, and probably every other player at the table, roll their eyes as you describe how you mutilate kittens in gory detail. In practice, there’s generally this sweet-spot between Morality 5 and 7 where most characters reach a kind of stasis, and manage to stick around that range. If you play any World of Darkness game, you probably know all this already.

One of the things that I always want World of Darkness games to be about is being forced to make the hard choices – do you give in to the nature of what you are, in order to accomplish what you need to do. To that end, here’s the hack I propose for making the WoD just a little more Faustian.

Instead of using the normal power currency for the activation of Disciplines, Gifts or Spells, turn Morality (whatever it happens to be in the game line you’re using) into a spendable pool of points, like how Willpower works, and spend those points to fuel your abilities. Keep the original power currency, but use it to fuel the “mundane” stuff – healing, buffing your stats, or whatever. The real point is to make it so that using your awesomeness costs you something real. So, when a vamp decides he wants to be superhumanly strong, instead of using Vitae to do it, you tap into the Beast – you give it control for just a little bit. Of course, if you give an inch, it takes a mile.

If you ever drop to 0 points, the Beast or the Rage or the Geist takes over and does things with your body while your conscious mind goes and hides for a while. Your Morality score automatically drops by one, you get to check for derangement, and the GM gets to put you in a shitty situation. Shitty situations are awesome, by the way.

Also, the original Morality degeneration rules still apply. Yup, you now have two ways to turn into a monster. If you do bad things, you degenerate, Gollum-like, into a subhuman – and possibly insane – creature. If you give in to the darker urges inside of you too often, same thing.

So, why do this? Really, it’s a way of making the rules affect the fiction in a cool manner. It’s also a good way of addressing one of the main themes of the game in a mechanical way. As it stands, you make Morality degeneration rolls when the GM decides that you’ve done something that warrants it, which isn’t a problem in and of itself, but, in my experience, WoD GM’s rarely actually call for degeneration rolls unless you do something blatantly evil, like murdering a busfull of schoolchildren with some vulgar magic, or wolfing out on your wife during an argument over taking out the trash.

In any case, that’s pretty much it. Give it a shot, let me know how it goes, or doesn’t!

Next week: Virtue and Vice as Aspects!

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Cartoonist Don Addis lost his battle with lung cancer a few days ago. I didn’t really know who this guy was, until I saw his cartoons. I’ve caught a lot of them in the blog posts of skeptics and atheists, and it’s really a shame that there won’t be any more of these:

Hemant Mehta, fromThe Friendly Atheist blog has some more images from Mr. Addis on his site.

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This post made me start thinking, despite not having created a complete game, much less published one, about how the business of the RPG industry should be approached.

I haven’t really gotten to play Diaspora yet, but the decision by the creators to not publish a PDF until they can present the file as a product in itself, rather than just a dump of the book layout, seems like a pretty cool idea to me. It could just be that weird holdover from reading The Fountainhead, but there’s a large part of me that thinks that is of the opinion that a person’s product is his or her own to do with as they please. I also think that, while it may not be a profit-driven decision now, it could be a really good way of looking at PDF releases in the future.

A lot of folks have said that they have problems reading electronic copies of books on a computer screen, and I wonder how much that can be mitigated by creating PDF’s that were designed for digital distribution from the ground up. Also, this could start the trend toward gaming material that could be more easily ported to an ebook reader. I know that White Wolf has also made some statements about moving in that direction, which is awesome.

Brad Murray, one of Diaspora’s creators, has a very astute blog entry about how information is presented and correlated between physical books and electronic documents. Reading it made me realize that these issues haven’t at all been addressed in most available PDF game documents. I very much think that they should, not just because it’s interesting, but because I think that electronic distribution with an option of a print-on-demand physical book is likely the future of the entire industry, especially as the cost of the reader technology drops.

This is one of those weird situations where the niche hobbyist is really going to do something innovative that will ultimately inform, at least in some small way, how some of the bigger players in the industry will offer their products in the future.

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This is just a test of the new version of the iPhone WordPress app. Feel free to ignore it.

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Since TMD is on hiatus until things get settled, I’ve decided I’m going to try and go back to updating this blog. I’ve got a couple of projects that I’ve been toying with, and some thoughts on games that I’ve been playing that are floating around unarticulated in my head. So, since I have the capability of keeping this thing up to date on the road, and I’m still paying for the hosting, I figure I may as well get back to putting some thoughts down for the Internets to check out.

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