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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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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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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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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Of course, we’re in the midst of a wicked recession (in case you ain’t heard), and it wasn’t just me, so there’s really no hard feelings. Fortunately for me, my wife owns her own company, and she’s offered to let me help her out, so I won’t be entirely useless. Still, I find myself with some excess free time.

One of the things that I said I’d do was to post more. Obviously, I’ve failed to do that. However, I’ve had a couple of ideas for games that I need to get written down, and, well, there’s not much better places to do that than the blog that I’ve set up for exactly that purpose.

In any case, the beginning of those posts should start on Monday. Hopefully.

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Information on this particular title has been sketchy at best, but there are some really interesting things about it that Luke revealed during the interview. We know, from the website, that this is a sci-fi game, but beyond that, it’s proven to be quite the mystery. Some of the new info sounds incredibly promising, though.

The setting and the rules are supposedly more than tightly integrated. They are, in fact, the same thing. This makes things interesting because it means that there is no such thing as metagaming in the Project Donut system. I find this to be a fascinating concept, especially after having run Burning Wheel, where gaming the system is somewhat expected (see Practice in BWR). I’m used to hearing things like “i need 100 more XP to make it to the next level,” but the idea that you can talk about the game mechanics at the table and still remain 100% in the game is, well, amazing to me.

Perhaps the most fascinating idea is that the game setting is one where there is a disctinct lack of both scarcity and death. This, of course, means that there’s no money, and no life-or-death struggles. The economy of the game is based on the idea of your social currency – how many friends, fans, and followers you have – and how much you can give away. At least, that’s how I understand it.

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Choosing a city – we started with a list of about a dozen candidates, purposely avoiding cities that other groups were doing – took us maybe a half hour. A couple of players weren’t jazzed about Portland at first, but once we got to sketching it up, the city started to take on a life of its own, and everyone started getting really excited. We found the Wikipedia article on Portland incredibly handy, and we had one player at the table on her laptop pretty much the entire time, looking up information as we needed it. Once we figured out the themes we were playing with, translating them into Aspects was a snap.

Creating locations was absolutely the most enjoyable segment of city creation. So enjoyable, in fact, that we went completely overboard, creating nine locations between four players (including myself as the GM). This is probably the root of our troubles during the second session. Still, this is what the players latched onto. They came up with locations, Aspects, and Faces almost faster than I could write them down.We also took some liberties with the city, creating one or two locations that don’t actually exist, such as the neighborhood known as The Woods, but were interesting in light of the setting. In any event, as I said, we wound up with nine locations all told. This process took the most time.

We hit the Touch of Magic section next, and found that, in our discussions of the locations, we’d already started addressing this point. This is about the time that the redundancy issues started manifesting. When we were coming up with locations, we basically asked ourselves, “Is this magical? If so, how?” for each location and character associated with it. So we found ourselves hitting this all in one fell swoop. So when we got to this question, we sort of went “Oh, this is already done,” and moved on.

The same issues occurred as we continued down the list of questions. The creation of locations and personalities gave rise to the answers to the last few questions organically, to the point where we were asking ourselves, “Why are we going over this again?” Again, it could be that we were just overzealous during the early parts of city creation, but the remaining questions just seemed redundant – they were the questions we were already asking ourselves as we created the locations.

One interesting thing to note is that we used index cards to create the city. Each location had it’s own card, so we were able to sort of map out the city physically as we worked, which gave us a visual aid to work with. Again, this could have contributed to the last questions seeming redundant. By giving ourselves a visual map, of sorts, we were able to see what the relationships between the locations, factions and faces of Portland were, which already put us in the mindset of creating conflicts and alliances and motivations. On the other hand, it could also have been the fact that three of the five players that were involved were also playing in a Burning Wheel game that we had just created the setting for, so we had an idea of what to expect.

Overall, the process worked well. One suggestion that we thought might help would be a step-by-step example of how city creation worked. Alternately, since the city is basically a character, itself, it might work to break it down into distinct Phases, similar to character creation. An example city sheet would be helpful as well.

Aside from that, though, everything seemed to turn out well. Despite the fact that we managed to answer several questions ahead of time, everybody at the table was stoked to create characters and get to exploring a Dresdenified Portland.

We plan on running through character creation in the coming week. All of us have read at least one or two of the novels by now, so we have a somewhat better idea of how the Dresdenverse works, and what characters should be occupying it.

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Anyway, on to the meat of this post.

I’ve wanted to be a role-playing game designer since I was eight years old. My dream was to grow up and go to work for TSR so that I could write D&D books for the rest of my life. Until recently, I’d pretty much given up on designing my own game .

Fortunately, people like Clyde Roher, Ryan Macklin, Sam Chupp, Mick Bradley, and a whole slew of other folks have re-inspired me to try designing my own game. With that in mind, I figured that I’d start a design diary here on Raptus Regaliter, so that I can get some feedback on where the game is at.

I’m going to keep this particular post somewhat brief, since I’m still working on specific details. I’m just going to outline some of the specific design decisions that I’ve made so far.

• This will be a short-form story game. I was directly inspired to write this kind of game after having played John Wick’s Wilderness of Mirrors. I really find this style of game to be both fun and useful. They tend to be either somewhat lighthearted or very intense, and they’re great for just killing time, or for when a player doesn’t show up for your regular game.
• All the prep work will be done at the table. I want to design something that can be just pulled out and played. So, everything from character creation to creating the main conflict to playing out the scenario will be handled right then and there. Therefore, all the character creation rules need to be simple. Hell, all of the rules will need to be simple. If it’s made to be played at the drop of a hat, it should be able to be taught to new players easily.
• I’d like heavy player authorship. I see the role of the GM in this game as something of a moderator, more than a storyteller. Perhaps his primary role will be to start things off and nothing more.

Finally, there is the actual concept of the game, the answer to the question “What is your game about?”. So the concept is this: all the players have just died, and are waiting to pass on to the afterlife, but first, they have to come to terms with their deaths. So, who’s fault was it that you died, and can you forgive them?.

So far, that’s what I’ve got. Beyond that, everything is simply a nebulous collection of ideas. But, at least I have a starting point now, and can finally move on to some of the more important aspects of designing.

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