So after a vacation, a bout of the creeping crud, and a few harrowing work weeks, I’m back. I’ve finished The E-Myth Revisited and would recommend it to other publishers out there for an exploration of the business growth and development.

At a certain point in the book, the focus shifts from diagnosing the problems of small businesses to the author’s solution—creating a franchise model out of your business. I was disheartened; an indie game designer and publisher can’t exactly step back and let his business run itself like a McDonalds. But then it hit me—each game we write can itself be a franchise.

The author notes six traits of a successful franchise that I see as equally applicable to successful games. First, a game has to provide consistent value to everyone who encounters it beyond what they expect. What that value is will vary from game to game, but a game must provide something that others do not and deliver on that promise consistently to find success.

Second, a game must be able to be operated by people with the lowest possible level of skill (i.e., the lowest skill level necessary to fulfill the functions of the game). So a game needs to be designed so anyone (or any roleplayer) can use its system and have a great time every time they open the book. If a game requires master roleplayers to shine, then it’s the people, not the game, that’s delivering the fun. And inevitably a game will produce inconsistent results if it is relying on exceptional people instead of an exceptional system.

Third, a game has to stand out as impeccably organized. Order (e.g., a table of contents, index, rules summaries, play aids, whatever) inspires confidence in your customer that you know what you’re doing and to trust in your system.

Fourth, all parts of the game have to be documented in the game text. Just like McDonalds has manuals detailing every aspect of restaurant operation, your text needs to detail every aspect of play. This provides clarity and structure so your customer isn’t flailing about but knows exactly what to do at each point.

Fifth, your game has to provide a predictable experience to your customer. Your system has to work in a unified and consistent manner so that gameplay delivers the fun that your customer expects from prior experience. A game system that generates wildly varying play experiences can leave customers confused and ultimately uninterested in further play.

Finally, your game should utilize uniform terminology, graphics, and organization. Discover what works best and stick to it so that your game forms a cohesive whole that leaves a particular impression on your customers.

While not everything is perfect fit for indie RPGs, the franchise model does hit pretty close to the mark. Many of the more successful games indeed seem to embody most of these principles. So, BS or useful insights—you make the call.

As I toil away on my second game, House of Cards, and work on revising the text for my first, The Committee, I’ve also been thinking about my game design as a business. To be frank, I’ve sucked at being a businessman in these first two years of Eric J. Boyd Designs. Yes, I’ve sold 290 copies of The Committee, but that’s mostly in spite of, not because of, my business efforts.

I’m reading a business book, The E-Myth Revisited, whose basic premise is that there are three aspects to a business and your own relation to your business—the Entrepreneur (the visionary and dreaming aspect), the Manager (the organizer), and the Technician (the doer and tinkerer). The author opines that a major cause of the high probability of a small business failing is that someone who likes doing Technician work strikes out on their own in a small business where all they do is loads of Technician work, neglecting the other necessary aspects of a business. The end result is that they fail.

This explanation for why restaurants, bakeries, etc. fail in huge numbers makes good sense. And I find it just as applicable to indie publishing. Game design is a lot of fun, but it is the Technician work. Loads of folks tinker with homebrews and all manner of projects and there’s nothing wrong with that. But becoming a game publisher is a business, so as publisher I can’t sit around just doing design and neglecting the Entrepreneur and Manager aspects. Luke Crane and Fred Hicks, to name two prominent examples, clearly have embraced all three roles, and their great success should come as no surprise.

Now the indie movement lets you define “success” however you like, and I applaud that. But whatever metric you choose, it seems to make sense to embrace all three aspects of what being a business means and using them to pursue it. Needless to say, I’ve resolved to do better at cultivating my business, not just designing my games.

Next up, another insight from E-Myth, or why your game is a like a business franchise. Stay tuned.

So I recently picked up the old TSR Adventures of Indiana Jones role-playing game boxed set at the Goodwill for the value price for 49 cents. I simply couldn't bear to leave it behind to the predations of the typical thrift store (unsupervised, destructive children, crushing under loads of other stuff, eventual culling to the dumpster, etc.). Since then, I've read the game, and it's left me wondering if we haven't been missing something in our licensed property games.

First off, there is no character creation. You can play Indiana Jones and his companions from the first two films. Each has their strengths and weaknesses, though Indy likely is more uniformly strong. That's because play by a GM and one player (Indy) is an intended, if not the primary, mode of play. This is cool. After all, what young player wants to spend a lot of time creating Idaho Brown or bullshit like that - they want to be Indy and get right into the action. Why don't other games for licensed properties simply cut to the chase and focus play on the primary characters in this fashion? Such an approach seems like it would be more likely to entice fans of a show or movie into playing a game than the typical RPG approach of creating side characters who start out way too weak to be the movers and shakers of a setting.

Second, while there's definitely some wonky mechanics here and there, it seems damn hard to actually die in this game. You need multiple serious wounds, each attack only creates a single wound, and you're more likely to simply pass out before you get enough to kill you. There's even some advice in the GM's section on fudging if someone does manage to accrue that many serious wounds so that they're only left for dead, not actually dead. This makes good sense since it's no fun killing Indy. Again, why do licensed games (at least those based on properties where the main characters don't die) feel the need to put death on the table at all? It's gamer BS that we need the risk of death to enjoy the game - we know Indy isn't going to die, but we still love his movies. It's putting him in pickles and seeing how he gets out because we know he will get out that's the center of fun.   

Third, the game book is divided into sections with a solo mini-adventure after each one where you get to take good ol' Indy and use the rules you just read. Yes, these mini-adventures are railroaded like crazy, but the concept is quite ingenious. Why doesn't Burning Wheel, for example, sit you down after each block of rules and have you play out a conflict with pre-gen characters to see everything in motion? Seems like a damn effective tool we could put to use in our texts.

Oh, did I mention that the game also has a slick chase system consisting primarily of a flow chart that presents the player with various navigational options, special hazards, etc.? Everything is kept abstract so it can be tailored to your paritcular chase, and your starting point on the flow chart is randomly determined by a die roll so you can get a different chase almost every time. Definitely some nice innovation here given its time.

I've got some other old games sitting on my shelves and in boxes that may need a re-read after my experience with Indy - who knows what manner of inspiration is buried within? Old-skewl renaissance I'm not, but clealry these designers had some great insights. Anything you've learned recently or been inspired by from an old game?

So I had a blast at GPNW – great people, great games, and a great city to experience both in. I got to crash with the generous and awesome Tony Dowler, whose Principia I am even more eagerly looking forward to after playing it during the con.

My playtest of House of Cards was both a highlight and a lowlight for me. A highlight because Dawn, Jason, Jeremy, and Jim are great players with bountiful patience and keen insight. A lowlight because the game blew up much worse than I was expecting. So here’s the post-mortem:

-I made partially-completed pre-gens to cut down on the prep time since my time slot was only three hours. The rest of recruiting the crew and devising the obstacles for the heist went very smoothly. Things were high energy and the ties between the characters looked to be primed for some hot play.

-After a promising start, though, the game totally began to crater. My v2.0 conflict resolution engine was simply too heavy and time-consuming to get the job done. Players seemed to get lost in the choices to be made, and the handling time was way too high for the quick and less formal social space I want this game to inhabit. So as much as my first conflict resolution system had no tactical depth, this one has swung too far the other way – epic fail.

-We accelerated the progression of play to have the getaway. This part of the game seemed to work much better – high energy again, cards flying around the table, and the Drives being revealed as part of bloody betrayals and double crosses. This exactly the kind of ending I want to see!

So basically the beginning and the end of the playtest were rocky, but showed promise, while the middle was a vast chasm of suck. The consensus is that there’s no need to have differing rules for the getaway; instead, take the getaway rules and make them work for the rest of the game. Also, to speed things up, make this a three act structure – planning, the heist, and the getaway. Previously, I had five acts, then four, so it doesn’t surprise me that this number keeps dropping. Since I want to enrich the content of each act by having an economy of different scene types (major conflict, minor conflict, address a rumor, and downtime), this three act business seems right on.

Other things I’m mulling on in the wake of the playtest:

-A couple conflict scenes devolved into uninteresting negotiations with NPCs over minor aspects of the heist plan. I need to loosen up my structure to permit quick one-card conflicts to get through such things quickly – leaving the major conflicts for the dramatic stuff (where it belongs).

-The time pressure and perhaps my own inadequate explanation resulted in rumors getting short shrift. Rumors and the underlying revelations about the characters need to be a focal point of play. My procedures need to change to make that happen.

-We also ended up without any downtime scenes. Again, these are supposed have a vital function – showing informal interactions between the characters and/or key NPCs. These scenes are key places to hint at your character’s Drive, as well as having the mechanical effect of refreshing resources. Without these, the fiction ended up feeling hollow. Hopefully, fixing conflict resolution will give these scenes space to be used to their full potential.

-Advantages generated from the early scenes to be used later aren’t really working. Maybe the focus should be on “attacking” the complications presented by the heist instead.

-As I mentioned, I removed failure as an option before the getaway. So coming up short let the GM go after your resources and such instead. I’m thinking of formalizing that with a list of “conditions” that characters get stuck with instead of failing. The fact that I played a rocking game of Jonathan Walton’s Geiger Counter during GPNW is not coincidental.

Since GPNW, I’ve been awash in work and family stuff that has kept me from the heavy lifting of revisions. Hopefully the next couple of weeks will have me back on the horse for House of Cards v.3.0.

 

pbeakley has been helping me poke at the game again as well. He’s put some very interesting thoughts on the table (e.g., resolution as actually building and collapsing houses of cards), which I'm filing away for the moment. I think I’m going to see if holding to my basic skeleton can get me where I want to be, but if 3.0 is still blowing up it may be time to kill some more sacred cows.

 

Thanks again to all of my GPNW playtesters and to the organizers - I plan to be back at GPNW next year.

(Cross-posted from the indie gaming forums in case anyone would rather discuss this here)

The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries, my game of pulp/Victorian adventure storytelling, has sold out its third printing. It's also been two years now since it was released.

So I ask you, the wonderful folks who have purchased and/or played the game - do you have suggestions for revisions to the text or rules?

Did you spot any errors or editing mistakes when reading the book? Did you not understand a particular passage when you read it? Is there something you wish the book discussed or explained that it doesn't?

Did you ever play the game? If not, did the text or rules create a barrier to play? Anything I could do to better help you sell the game to your group?

If you did play, was the text a useful reference during the game? Did things go smoothly? What problems did you encounter? Did any rules or elements of the game not deliver? Any other questions or concerns from your actual play?


I've already got some revisions in mind that you're welcome to weigh in on:

-Add a discussion on dice strategy and tips to make the learning curve easier.

-Add a more detailed discussion of timed narration, its pitfalls, and adaptations to better ease you into the game

-Make all group hazards untimed to focus on jockeying among the players

-Streamline the difficulty of group hazards to make the math easier

-Simplify and streamline use of the expedition log

-Simplify and streamline use of the beverages in play

-Call attention to the key rules in the text and revise the rules summaries to make them more user-friendly during play


That's my list - any other suggestions?

P.S. Anyone who currently owns the game in any form can get a free PDF of the revision once it's out. I'll also have a free PDF to summarize any rules changes.

So I'm laboring away on streamlining House of Cards in preparation for my next local playtest, as well as Go Play Northwest at the end of June. Another sacred cow of sorts was slaughtered over the weekend - failure during conflict scenes. Let me explain.

House of Cards is broken into five main parts. First, there's gathering up the crew and establishing the broad outlines of the heist. Next, there are three rounds of play - Casing the Joint, Making Preparations, and Getting the Goods. During each of these rounds of play, each character will have a conflict scene where they are in the spotlight accomplishing tasks related to the heist. There are also downtime scenes where the characters can interact with each other or with NPCs (criminal contacts and otherwise) to refresh their resources or plan betrayals of the other team members. Finally, there's the getaway, answering the question of what happens when the item is in hand.

So conflicts are centered on the card play I discussed last time - with the GM tossing down runs and sets of cards to be matched or beat by the player, with currency shifting around as things progress. At the beginning of a scene, the player declares what their character is looking to accomplish - no stakes or anything complicated, just what you're setting out to do. If the GM and player push or if the GM runs out of cards first, then character prevails in the task they set out for themselves, perhaps with some other complications arising. But what if the player runs out of cards first?

Well, my earlier drafts gave the GM a choice - have the character fail in a way that doesn't completely derail the heist, or let them barely succeed but at a steep cost (creating additional complications, losing character resources, etc.). Reflecting on past playtests has me thinking that the first option doesn't work well - it's less interesting in the fiction and it potentially derails the heist even if the GM thinks it doesn't. And, frankly, after watching several more heist movies over the last few weeks, it doesn't fit the genre I'm looking to emulate here. Sure, complications mount and the tension ratchets up, but the crew always gets its mitts on the loot for a moment, even if everything later gets shot all to hell (and it usually does).

The getaway kicks off immediately after the crew first grabs the loot - before anyone has a chance to get it to a safe place or catch their breath. And during the getaway the gloves come off - the GM plays the adversity to hunt, capture, and kill the thieves, and the crew can turn on each other with bloody betrayals driven by revenge or simple greed. Failure is writ large in the getaway - its the part of the game where everything is at stake, it's the part of a heist movie that we usually savor most of all.

The getaway and its nasty, inevitable, game-ending failures are intended to be a powerful part of play. So maybe I don't need failure at all during the prior three rounds. After all, any such early failure would really only be a complication lacking the finality of failures during the getaway. So why not just make them complications and painful resource penalties in the first place?

I guess I will.

So my local crew helped me take the latest version of House of Cards out for a spin. It was something of a shakedown cruise since my resolution mechanics have been completely redone. Initially, you simply played cards from your preferred suit, which varied depending on your character's role in the crew. Rank of cards was irrelevant - it came down to who had the most cards of that suit, you or the GM. This was simple but ultimately pretty boring.

The new resolution system has you playing runs and sets of cards using your preferred suit and some wild cards. There's also a central "river" of cards in the middle of the table that both the players and GM get to take cards from as they call upon various resources. Add in some narration tricks and the result is both more tactical and capable of generating tension and risk-taking. Our playtest showed that the basic concepts here are solid, though, as always, there are tweaks to be made around the edges.

Role assignment and character creation as the recruitment of the crew also worked well. The flow was effective and the pace was much improved. There's still room for improvement, though. Since the playtest, I've integrated the initial facts known about the heist into this process. So now the leader and each other role in turn names an obstacle they know will have to be overcome to carry off the heist (e.g., crack a vault, hack a secured network, lay out elite guards, etc.). From this obstacle flows their designation of the next role needed on the crew to help handle that obstacle (e.g., an infiltration expert, a tech guy, a muscle guy, etc.) and how they know just the person for that role. By the end of the recruitment sequence you now have the entire crew assembled, the characters made, and the broad outlines of the obstacles to be overcome (hopefully in no more than 30 minutes).

Some of the best feedback came a day or two after the playtest. As pbeakley and I discussed his scenes and how they seemed to pop and crackle with awesome, we found the main distinguishing factor to be his use of cinematic transitions and camera work as part of his descriptions. Something just clicked between the genre exploration and the explict use of cinematography techniques as a means to establish the SIS. This has had me reading up on this stuff so I can more fully integrate it into gameplay, even if only on the fictional level. I was already working to structure play to produce an experience like a collaboratively generated heist movie, so it's not a stretch to fully embrace emulation of heist movies in description and color as a part of the game.

So I've been working on a new draft that brings all this together, and I look forward to playtesting it again soon with these new bits in place. I'll be at Randomcon this weekend in Phoenix running a couple games of The Committee and a playtest of House of Cards. Of course, this is a brand new con in the city where the RPGA rules role-playing, but I'll keep my fingers crossed and hope for a couple of my games to go off. After that, it's back to pestering my stalwart band of locals to hammer at the game again to see what parts fall off.

You know what they say about plans, and it is always true with game design. I'm getting ready for my next playtest of House of Cards and I had a long discussion with pbeakley about the game's overall structure, target and character creation in particular. He talked about how cool it would be to start the role-playing right out of the gate with the recruitment of the members of the crew, with the leader picking the first necessary role and assigning it to another player, with everyone creating that character on the spot, and then that new character deciding on the next necessary role and choosing a player for it, and so on. Jason Morningstar proposed a very similar procedure when he looked over an earlier version of the game.

Now, I weigh every piece of feedback I receive very carefully, but I do reject some ideas along the way when they don't fit my vision for a game, either in terms of concept or mechanics. But a rule I used when developing The Committee is that when I hear the same piece of feedback twice, well, then it is time to stop everything and go back to first principles. I put aside thoughts of how to tweak this or that piece and go back to making every piece justify its existence in light of that feedback. And every time I did this with The Committee I ended up discovering that  feedback was touching on something vital that would improve the game once I shot some of my personal sacred cows and incorporated that feedback into the design.

So here I am with House of Cards, and Paul and Jason are absolutely right. As much as I like my use of questions grounded in the real world to assign the fictional character roles, making the recruitment of the crew part of the role-playing is much more powerful. And the great part is that since the game's character creation doesn't involve assigning points, balancing attributes, etc., it can be fully incorporated into the role-playing as well.

So, um, that last post I wrote about clever questions, assigning the leader last, and such . . . scratch that, toss it out, put it out of mind. Ah, the humility of game design.

House of Cards is intended to get out of the blocks fast like a racehorse and with no preparation beforehand. You've got a GM and 3 to 5 other players. I keep things simple with roles--the key people that usually show up as part of a crew in a heist movie. Each player has a character who fills one of these roles during the game. There's always a leader of the crew, and then the players collectively decide which of the other roles will be used during that game from among the wheelman/muscle, the tech guy, the face man, the infiltration expert, and the inside man.

But you don't just choose a role for yourself, oh no. The roles are assigned to the players in the following order (omitting any role you're not using) based on answering a set of questions:

• Which player bought or sold a car most recently? Your character will be the wheelman and muscle, dynamic and powerful whether peeling out or thrashing foes.
• Of the unassigned players remaining, who most recently downloaded something? Your character will be the tech guy, able to jury rig gear or hack a system.
• Of the unassigned players remaining, who most recently spent a night alone? Your character will be the face man, a social chameleon and manipulator.
• Of the unassigned players remaining, who's wearing the most jewelry? Your character will be the infiltration expert, skilled in the hands-on breaching of security systems and breaking and entering.
• Of the unassigned players remaining, who last changed jobs? Your character will be the inside man, someone in a position of trust close to the target.
• There should be one remaining player. Your character will be the leader of the crew of thieves, well connected and broadly skilled.

Yes, the leader is determined last - I was inpsired by vague memories of an old Paranoia services test that left team leader for last. The point of this process is two fold. First, every member of the team is awesome, so you'll have fun no matter who you play. Second, we've got to keep the game moving quickly if we're gonna play out a heist in one short session, so grab a character and go!

Each role comes with a preferred suit of cards that count toward success when played, a set of wild cards to increase your ability to play sets and runs of cards in your preferred suit, and a special ability that lets you manipulate the cards held by you and others. The aim is to give each role a slightly different feel in keeping with the genre.

Role in hand, you give your character a name and say who he or she would be played by in a movie (thanks macklinr !), maybe with a twist if you want to (e.g., Steve Buscemi but Asian). You also give your character one noteworthy behavioral characteristic to help everyone at the table visualize their appearance and mannerisms.

Then, it's time to subject your guy to his peers--the criminal underworld in which he or she has found a home. What kind of reputation does your character have? What do other criminals think about them? Hmm, let's ask the other members of your crew!

That's right, each other player, including the GM, gets to spread a rumor about your character by completing the phrase "Rumor has it that [character's name] . . ." This rumor can be any one of the following:

• A past action
• A past or present affiliation
• A weakness or character flaw
• A present problem related to an NPC
• A renowned prowess unrelated to their criminal specialty

You're encouraged to aim these rumors at the other characters in the crew to complicate relationships before things even begin. During play, you'll have the opportunity to confirm or deny these rumors by introducing story elements, NPCs, flashbacks, etc. related to them and reaping the resulting mechanical bennies for doing so. So, yes, your guy has had everyone else's grubby mitts all over their background, but it is still entrely up to you how much of this is true and what actually happened.

The playtests have produced some great rumors, which I fully intend on including in the final text to provide examplesand provide fodder for anyone who gets stuck. Some of my favorites:

Rumor has it she's pregnant.
Rumor has it he's really a snitch for the Feds.
Rumor has it his father is a Columbian drug kingpin.
Rumor has it he's being cuckolded by his wife.
Rumor has it that he doesn't have the stones to kill anyone.
Rumor has it that she was the only survivor on her last two jobs.

That's character creation. Done. Over. No traits or attributes, no hit points or equipment purchases. Just your role, a quick snapshot of your character, and some sense of their history and potential capacities with the real story meat to be actively revealed in play.

So we're gaining momentum now - characters done - and now it's time to establish some situation and create the outlines of our heist.

Thoughts, comments, objections - what do you think? Could you create your favorite character from a heist movie or TV show?

It's April and spring has sprung, though since I'm in Arizona we've already pushed 90 degrees a few times over the last few weeks. My son Nate turned one at the end of March and is growing like a weed. He's already wearing clothes for 24 month olds (yeah, I'm 6'4" so it's not completely unexpected). Life is good.

So is gaming. House of Cards, my no-prep, quick-play heist game is taking shape. I had a productive playtest at OrcCon in LA that showed me some gaps in the system and where things weren't generating the fictional character development I want. macklinr was a great help in identifying some key issues in structuring the heist and potential options for jazzing up the mechanics. Mulling that over with several members of my local crew, particularlypbeakley , revealed deeper issues with the resolution mechanics - they were, to put it nicely, a bit boring for the kind of tension and action I want in my game.

So I've been back at the drawing board and have revamped the mechanics by stealing from the best, among them Burning Empires (from which I draw the idea of a scene economy) and Ticket to Ride (adding cards from a central face up pool to your individual hands). I'm itching to playtest the resulting House of Cards v.2.3 in the next couple of weeks.

In the meantime, I want to share a little bit of what's under the hood in House of Cards. I know a lot of folks (like me) love the heist and caper genres. Sure, we've been able to play a heist game using existing systems and a creative GM, often enjoying the result, but there haven't really been games that were specifically designed from the ground up to deliver these kinds of stories using the structure and pacing that you see in the great heist movies. That's what I'm trying to achieve in House of Cards.

I want a game that provides a strong focus on the actual planning and execution of a heist or caper - casing the target, making preparations, and then finally executing the plan. I considered approaches that made the angst of the characters the primary focus, with the success of the heist being almost a foregone conclusion - only the price the characters pay to achieve being the key of play. But that doesn't get to what I enjoy about the lighter end of the heist/caper spectrum - movies like Ocean's Eleven and TV like Hustle where the execution of the heist or caper is the fun.

That said, I do want some opportunity for character exploration and development, though this is inherently limited by choosing a short-form design model. On this end of the spectrum I find Heat and its ilk, where the heist often goes spectacularly wrong and the characters' demons play a key role in their destruction. 

So I'm trying to straddle the middle and embrace both ends of the spectrum, providing structural tools to shape the story in either direction depending upon the mood of the individual play group.

I fully realize that this is a lofty goal and that my resulting game design will inevitably disappoint at least some fans of the genre. There are so many different tropes and twists within heist and caper movies that it would be almost impossible to design a system capable of reproducing the best bits from all of them. But I figure I increase my chances of pleasing more people by designing more openly and embracing the feedback of the wider gaming community as I move forward.

Up Next: Character creation in House of Cards, or they've been saying WHAT about my guy?

So there I was toiling with my prison escape game Break Out when some of the discarded mechanics morphed themselves into a game structure for another of my favorite genres - a heist game. The result is House of Cards, a short form no-prep storytelling game in the tradition of Ocean's Eleven and Ronin. The alpha came together lightning quick, we had a first playtest that showed the idea has legs, and now I'm putting together a second draft that incorporates those comments. I've also recently got myself all set to attend OrcCon in LA over President's Day weekend, so I'll be running playtests of House of Cards during the con to get my mechanics math and procedures ironed out.

I'm excited by how fast the initial structures came together - it reminded me of Game Chef or a similar compressed writing schedule. Now the hard part begins - choosing among the the many great ideas my playtesters have put on the table to hone the game and keep it moving in the direction I want it to go.

P.S. The Committee got a shout out from the guys over at The Epic Default podcast. Sounds like someone grabbed the game by the horns and told a rollicking tale - Nazis riding dinosaurs in Central America = Rock on! Thanks for mentioning my game guys.

I always love to hear about actual play of my game. There's nothing quite like knowing something I created is out in the world being used and enjoyed by other folks.

Tim Koppang, the creator of Hero's Banner, ran a session of The Committee at ENWorld Chicago Gameday over the weekend. From the after-action report, it sounds like the expedition was a success. I'd love to hear more juicy details of play, but hearing fun was had is awesome.

Buzz over at ENWorld took a photo of the stalwart Commitee members as they told their tales - an august company indeed!

Thanks Tim for facilitating the game!

So Break Out, my prison escape design, is moving forward in fits and starts. Work has been a bear this month, leaving me with less free time in the evenings than usual--apparently the HOA business is recession-proof (knock on wood).

I've also been tinkering with a side project, an espionage hack for The Committee that takes things in a different direction from the superspy option advice currently in the book. The premise is that your op has gone horribly wrong and now everyone is gathered before Control and being debriefed. One of you is a mole, a traitor to the bureau, and this debriefing is going to uncover who that is. I'm tentatively calling it Sigma Section Debrief.

Although much will remain the same, this shift in focus is going to involve some fundamental tweaks to the design. First off, rather than accruing Acclaim, you gain Suspicion--evidence that points to you being the traitor. So every scene may net you some Suspicion depending upon the number of dice you use to resolve the hazard. And dice tricks and such you previously spent Acclaim for now generally cause you to gain additional Suspicion instead. You keep your Suspicion total secret, and at the end of the game the player with the highest Suspicion is taken into custody as the traitor (this may be too simple and need some further twisting).

There are going to be ways to challenge a player's tale during a scene, adapting some of the optional rules presented in the book. And the rotating GM role will be beefed up a bit to drive the story harder. Throughout play, the players will be dropping hints about just what went wrong with the op, and we'll play out that failure at the end before the epilogues. Ultimately, I expect it to take the tools in The Committee in a non-gonzo action direction--something I've been interested in seeing for a while.

Since I'm working with a skeleton I know so well, I'm hoping to have something to playtest soon. At the very least, it gives me something to play with when I'm mulling over an issue for Break Out.

So the first project I'm picking back up is the roughed-out prison escape game I tinkered with late last year. This game would operate squarely in the space occupied by Prison Break and Escape from Alcatraz - concerning itself with the nuts and bolts of accomplishing the task with some emo moments regarding the characters' ties to the outside world thrown in for good measure.

I had taken pieces from a prison drama game I had been working on and combined it with elements of John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors. Revisiting things has me seeing that the touchy-feely aspects of the resolution taken from my prison drama have got to go - cut them out wholesale and start the resolution system over from scratch. Yes, I'm a bit of a gamist when it comes to design it seems, but I just can't help it.

The new direction is inspired by Burning Empires and Spycraft 2.0. I'm seeing a sequence of objectives that the prisoners have to achieve to have a shot at escaping. Each objective is kind of like a maneuver in BE - achieving it will feature build-up scenes with simple resolution (likely one roll) and then one big knock-down conflict where it all comes together. I'd like these conflicts to involve some chewy tactics - maybe some generalized moves or actions in the manner of Spycraft's chase and infiltration mechanics (there's some cool stuff here to be mined).

I'm currently toying with pools of d6s, where the GM succeeds on a 4-6 and the player succeeds on a 5 or 6. But the player also can turn 4s and 3s into successes by allocating the nasty currency that results. For each 4 or 3 that is converted into a success (and it's an all or nothing proposition - you can't just claim one 4 as a success where you've got more), the player has the option of generating Tension or Betrayal.

Tension becomes points the GM can use against the players in future scenes - adding dice to roll against them, tweaking objectives, and just making the difficulty of escape flat out harder. Tension is also a clock for the game - once it hits a certain level, the escape must be attempted NOW even if some objectives haven't been acheived yet.

Betrayal, on the other hand, has to affect one of your fellow characters. You can name a character and make their next scene harder, or you can keep the character's identity secret and add to the difficulty of their ultimate escape.  I'm hoping the balancing of these two resources and the ways they can be used will make for some tough player decisions and produce those endings where some escape and others are left behind or where the whole thing just goes kaput.

Now I just have to start hammering on things until I have enough of a frame to playstorm.

Yikes, it's been a looooong while since I've been around these parts. My excuse - my son Nathaniel arrived in March. Between a new baby and a big sister who's also still under 2 years old, I've been B - U - S - Y. Not to mention sleep-deprived. Add in a family wedding and vacation, and here we are in September.

So here I am back again with a solid sleep schedule and free time in the evenings. The new hawtness from Gen Con (which I missed due to that family wedding) is winging its way to me. The file folders with annotated drafts are coming out of the closet. iTunes is cued with Thievery Corporation's mellow groove. It's time to clear out the tumbleweeds and cobwebs and get back to some serious game design work.

Back at you soon . . .

A belated Happy New Year to everyone! Arizona is locked deep in its version of winter (temps in the 50s and 60s, occasional rain), but all has been well for me and mine other than a cold that has moved from me to my daughter and now my wife. My local group is playing some Lacuna and enjoying it as a Matrix-esque romp with a bit more paranoia.

The end of the year brought some much-appreciated kudos to The Committee. Both Fred Hicks and Paul Tevis singled it out as one of their favorites of the year. I couldn't be more appreciative of the support both have given to my game throughout its short life thus far. Indie gaming truly is a community of like-minded folks whose generosity and enthusiasm for great play is an inspiration. Here's hoping for an even better 2008.

As I noted over on Story Games, I'm not planning on having a new design completed in 2008. With a second child on the way in April, there will be way too many balls in the air already. That said, I'm hoping to make significant advances on In Frankenstein's Wake and maybe a few other projects. An ashcan of something by the end of the year certainly isn't out of the question, either.

Last week my notes for a prison drama game, The Big House, combined with an evening left to my own devices and exploded into a rough alpha of a prison escape game I'm tentatively calling Breakout. It takes the best parts of John Wick's Wilderness of Mirrors (group planning as a means of generating the outlines of play and some currency for use during it) and combines them with The Big House's dice pool mechanics and some tricks from My Life With Master. The premise is basically to try and accomplish as many of the components of your plan as possible (maybe even all if you're lucky) before so much Tension is generated that you have to try and escape immediately. Along the way there is ample opportunity for betrayals between the players and throw downs with rival gangs. Once I neaten things up a bit, I'll throw the alpha up on my Web site and see about a local playtest. Escaping from prison seems to be an untapped niche in the current landscape, and I'd really like to try designing a project more openly. So we'll see how it goes . . .

I've only met Jonathan once (at Gen Con this year), but his work on Geiger Counter has started me looking at several of his other designs. There's a lot of food for thought in his repeated use of maps as a means to mechanically structure scene framing and give a sense of space to play. Whether it's an established set of locations or nodes or locations developed in play like in Transantiago, I'm seeing a tool that I could adapt to relieve some of my frustration with IFW without making it any less of an RPG. In fact, using locations in this manner could actually enhance the role-playing if I can manage to do it right.

As a side note, I'm also blown away by what Jonathan is doing with designs that do not feature conflict resolution at all. I'm going to be pouring through 1001 over the next week trying to take all this in and let it percolate. A lot of the ideas are totally contrary to my natural design inclinations (which are heavily gamist, crunchy, and conflict-centered), but I really like what I'm reading and would like to try some of these games asap. So thanks Jonathan for showing me a different perspective on game design and making me feel more optimistic about my design conundrums with IFW.

One of the games I'm currently working on is In Frankenstein's Wake, whose premise is that you're the students of the now-missing Dr. Frankenstein competing to create life through an experiment of your own. I'm looking to combine board game and RPG elements (I'm a big Eurogame fan) into a game that you pick up and play without any prep in a single sitting.

So I sat down recently with my gaming buddies and gave things a spin, playing through one entire game turn. SIS-wise, we had pickpocketing to obtain research funds, graverobbing, and the use of illicit substances to inspire experimental insights. There's definitely some fun to be had like I was hoping.

The big disappointment - there doesn't seem to be any motivation to actually role-play the lightly customized pregen characters. Instead, folks adopted more of a detached narrative approach that was more like telling a story in the third person as various mechanical bits were utilized. The core mechanics seem to work, although the guys had numerous suggestions to streamline them and encourage more player interaction. Some key suggestions were making use of a board with preset locations and such to ground the setting, and utilizing a central sheet of story elements much like the expedition log in The Committee to aid in the storytelling.

The take away is that I've got a lot of thinking to do - do I let the game move in the direction of detached storytelling or do I radically redesign to move things back toward true role-playing? Do I move closer to board games with an elaborate board, or do I back off of that. One point made by Paul is that in a board game every mechanic has to be useful for winning the game, leaving color and narrative considerations largely irrelevant unless they have a concrete effect. With The Committee, I was able to backpedal a bit from hardcore competition due to the free-flowing manner of play and the thrill of the storytelling. Currently IFW seems much more deliberate in play and it's incorporation of multiple interlocking currencies means that you can't have wasted motion or inefficiency if you hope to be effective.

So I may put IFW back on the shelf for a while as I mull things over. I'm thinking about giving Utopolis: Policing the Retrofuture another hard look over the next few weeks. It has been quite a while since I looked over that design, and now there are a couple more games (like Dirty Secrets) that I can look to for inspiration. Of course, there's that pesky issue of the ad for IFW that I've put in the back of my printed copies of The Committee. But I suppose I wouldn't be the first designer to have a delayed project or piece of vaporware. Live and learn.

I'm happy to announce that the second printing of The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries is now available for purchase at Lulu. Copies should be wending their way to IPR shortly as well - hopefully in time for all your gift-giving needs. Thanks again to Paul Bourne for his great work designing the new cover; the new look suits the game perfectly. Now to bed in preparation for Thanksgiving travels. Happy holidays!

Episode 13 of IPR's Voice of the Revolution Podcast features a review of The Committee for the Exploration of Mysteries by Paul Tevis and Brennan Taylor. They provide a great summary of what the game is all about and how it feels in play. To answer Paul's question about why a player would ask another one for help in a game knowing that the helper will receive Acclaim as a result, I see the purpose of asking for help as two-fold.

First, yes it costs one Acclaim to ask for help and lets another character potentially gain two Acclaim, but it also preserves your ability to net some reward from the hazard (both characters receive the same reward), and, assuming your helper saves your bacon, gives you the chance to earn another Acclaim through your reflective narration at the end of the scene. If you just fail, you get no Acclaim at all. Second, if your dice are really terrible, calling for help avoids stymieing the expedition, with the loss of Gear or Associations dice that comes with it. So there are definitely times when calling for help is the best move.

A big thanks to Paul and Brennan for the review. The second printing is on its way so hopefully more sales will follow right after.