Golden Arrows of Inspiration

So I’ve played a lot of World of Darkness over the years; and I love the setting. That’s oWoD for the afficionadoes, but for most of that time it was just WoD. The system, however, leaves a lot to be desired. I had a decent idea for a campaign. So I bodged together a version of FATE, for which I do like the system. I’ve been running weekly since October, and have obtained my players permission to use their characters to explain how I went about such a mashup.

What does the old system have that I don’t like?.

WOD relies on buckets of dice and a long skill list. But it can be problematic to model advancement – learn a new skill and suddenly you’re actually worse than not bothering. Plus there’s the whole ‘more dice = more chances to botch’

Combat is basically down to number of moves – if you don’t have Rage or Celerity, and your opponent does, you almost always lose. Oh and death spiral is a thing some people like and I don’t. Hollywood heros fight on with feet full of glass and a bullet in the shoulder – why shouldn’t mine!

What does the new system have that I like?

Aspects. I love the descriptive part “Son of a Gun” “I Got A Plan for That” or even “Too Good at Being Bad”. High Concept and Trouble stay as usual (See FATE Core), and two personal aspects customise; but a second trouble adds the Clan Flaw in a new way.

In this game I have three Brujah. VTM gives the all Bru a +2 to frenzy difficulty. For my game we got three different takes on the clan of rebels and revolutionaries – the Punk, the Pirate, and the Paladin.

Doc is a Rebel With A Clue by Four. He likes to fight, particularly against oppressive authority figures (one of his personal aspects is Bash the Fash) His Clan Flaw is expressed as Sees the Oppression – he can’t help himself, siding with the underdog.

Carabo is a Somali Pirate. She used to captain her own ship – until she was turned. But even in death she hasn’t quite managed to shed the stigma of being both black and female (and also Illiterate) she’s Frustrated by Inequality

Robert is an Ex Military Policeman. Taken by the Brujah for standing up to one of them, he’s not so much a footsoldier in the Jyhad as a reluctant officer. His Clan Flaw is Shield of the Vulnerable – taking the police motto ‘Serve and Protect’ to another level.

I decided on six aspects over the usual five, because I wanted to include something I learned from a one off – the Hook. So at the end of chr gen you ask – how do characters know each other? So you get family (Eve is Lucian’s ward; Assistant Lasombra) affiliates (Rob is Doc’s clanmate; Brother in the Cause) and even rivalry (William doesn’t like Carabo; Keep your Friends Close)

What does the origInal do that I want to keep / need to remodel?

The Humanity / Beast / Path & Virtues system. Being wicked should have a cost – the whole “Beast I am lest Beast I become” thing.

It comes down to ‘how much in control am I’ and so I chose to model it like damage. Hungry or angry – the Beast gaining control is modelled by the Beast Track. Our Ventrue couldn’t find her favored food, and was subsisting on the bread-and-water diet of blood bags. She could still animate herself, but she suffered the Consequence of “Perpetual Hunger” until she finally managed to find a blood source she could utilize for her Disciplines. Turned out another party member suited; she had the angst of ‘drink now and retain some control, or keep looking and risk draining him dry’.

Disciplines and Backgrounds through Stunts

Why are some people chosen for the Embrace and some passed by? Mortal Stunts. Lucien is a CEO and is Wealthy; +2 to any skill check where he can directly bring wealth to bear (remember Wheaton’s Law here) On the other hand, Doc is expert at making do, and can Jerry Rig; for a Fate point, use Crafts without proper tool or parts

The vampires Cool Magic Powers – turning into bats, mesmerising prey and hiding in plain sight – become more interesting when modelled through Stunts. I decide that there is no real reason why one needs to preserve the hierarchy of powers presented in VTM and instead went with basic, intermediate and advanced. Party members could only have basic level at start. But the Lasombra and the Ventrue took a Dominate power – but flavored differently

Eve is a Victorian young lady. Her power is an immediate response, for a Fate Point “Stop. Lie down. Freeze” described as Though She Be But Little, She Is Fierce

Lucian’s use is more subtle – “wouldn’t now be a good time for a teabreak?” Mind over Matter still costs a Fate point  (we rejected These Aren’t the Droids). He’s since picked up Master of the Manor which duplicates Eve’s power

Robert and William’s powers diverge from classical Celerity. Robert has Take a Bullet – interpose himself to take an attack for someone else. William, as a Toreador thief, has Hand is Quicker than the Eye, allowing him to use his supernatural speed to avoid notice.

Experimentation showed that it’s massively easier to make all the Discipline Stunts work off Fate points, freeing you from the need to track blood exactly.

Neither does this system thing great, so which is easier to integrate?

Skills stayed pretty unchanged from Fate Core, except for splitting Knowledge into mundane Knowledge and Arcane (all kinds of supernatural). Oh and we renamed Larceny to Nefarius; and it now covers all kinds of crime; from theft to jumping trams without a ticket to credit card fraud. Will becomes much more key as it not only is it the key roll to power and resist Dominate, but is need to resit Beast Damage.

Combat is a weak point for Fate, but it is mitigated by the ability to create Advantages, meaning it is actually worth it to set ambushes, taunt opponents or discover weaknesses.

So there you have it. It might sound pretty clunky, but it works. And my players nearly all came back for Season 2, and Season 3, and were bugging me for a Season 4.

April 12-15 this year we were in Glasgow for the Student Nationals or NSGRC¹⁾National Student Gaming and Roleplaying Championships 2019 where we had a great time despite some unfortunate setbacks.

Student Nationals always has problems – it’s a convention that moves every year and is always organised by students who’ve never organised a convention before. If it went perfectly I’d get a little bit scared.

So the problems we saw at this particular nationals:

• The roads around the buildings being used were under massive amounts of roadworks. This wasn’t the organiser’s fault – they had no forewarning of the works – but it did cause some transport issues.
• The board-game groups didn’t have the staff, or indeed the games, that were expected. The organisers had given the wrong date to the Board-game Cafe that had agreed to help, and the Cafe had ended up double booked.
• The tea-selling stall wasn’t allowed to sell hot water, despite having been told in advance that they would be; which caused them quite some consternation.
• There was a significant shortage of dice available, as all the traders had expected there to be a specialist in dice present, and there wasn’t. In future this could be avoided by contacting the local store-based traders and informing them that such stock will be in demand – if no specialist is interested.

And what they did particularly well:

• The traders closed at an appropriate time – if we’re next to the bar, we can close late, but we weren’t so a closing time of 6:30 was just about perfect.
• The trade hall was in an active building with multiple things going on – including the closing ceremony at the end of the event.
• The lunch breaks of the games were allowed to be whenever appropriate, rather than enforcing a specific time, meaning that people trickled to the trade hall over the course of several hours, rather than it being jam-packed for half an hour and dead for the rest of the day.
• The Artist’s Alley had a good set of artists who could do character portraits for players; providing an extra draw to the trade hall, and an extra service for the gamers.
• The shortage of dice sellers likely made our time a bit more profitable, by freeing up the con-goers funds.

Today’s blog is inspired by the fact my mother’s been visiting me this weekend – which is also the reason why it’s late.

When roleplaying, and in genre fiction in general, there’s a strong tendency to ignore the question of character’s parentage – it’s something of a stereotype that every main character is an orphan, and not without cause; it provides an easy source of pathos and gives the character an easier time abandoning their mundane life.

But as seen in Superhero comics being an orphan doesn’t really preclude a character having parents – Spiderman has Uncle Ben and Aunt May, Superman has the Kents and Batman has Alfred.

The parental role is a lot more than just blood – I have one grandparent left among the living and she’s completely unrelated to me by blood, but she raised my mother and has always been there for me.

I made card in honour of my nanna, Jane Baker – I originally wanted to include references to both her maiden name (Smith) and her current surname (Broadbent) but unfortunately they didn’t fit in the format. Still, the card made her smile so I consider that a job well done!

Often people assume that parentage only matters if it’s innately significant to the plot – in my main weekly campaign we have one character with such a parentage, The Minotaur, child of The Elf Queen.

But while there’s no inherent plot significance to them two other player characters have had interactions with their parents – a noble high elf was encouraged to defend his parents estate on the back of a great beast (a Koru Behemoth for those familiar with 13th age – a walking mountain for those who aren’t) while our wood elf ranger often spends time with his parents between adventures, two high elves and two gnolls.

In prose fiction there’s a principle of conservation of detail – don’t mention anything unless it matters – but said principle is flexible in terms of what “matters” means, and parents have a large influence on a character’s motivations. In RPGs that principle shouldn’t be applied on such a large scope anyway – never assume that just because parent’s are mentioned they need to be directly threatened with disaster – that kind of “attack-the-backstory” attitude results in shallower characters with less connections outside the party.

What do your characters parent’s do? How did they influence your characters?

Welcome to the second monthly playtest report. Due to the levels of concentration we’ve been putting into Shards, and its kickstarter, we didn’t do much playtesting of our own games. Instead at the monthly Playtest Northwest meet I was playtesting an in-development computer game.

The game, created by Luke Perkins, is as yet untitled. So, for the purposes of simplicity I’ll call it LupeLang.

In LupeLang you play a scientist who has just been cryogenically frozen until the 35th century – at which time she is aware there is some sort of time anomaly, having received a message sent back through time. Unfortunately the message was written in a language unknown in the present day, and thus her assignment is to learn the future language and then send a translated message through the anomaly; and return through it herself if possible.

You awaken in a museum that has been laid out with exhibits of images from the 20th century and earlier, each of which is marked with a description in the future language – a form of pictographic representation. For instance:  △ might mean “mountain”, and thereby also “stone” and “huge”, while ∪ means “artificial container” including buildings as well as pots.

As the game progresses you learn more about the language and solve puzzles involving locked doors that can only be opened by placing the correct symbols beneath a picture.

There were various issues with the control set up which I won’t go into here because I’m not massively interested in that side of video game design, but we also spent a lot of time discussing the worldbuilding aspects of the game.

In essence with a game with such a strange setup (you’re in a museum where every door is locked by code-locks with the password being pictured directly above them) you have two options:

1. Ignore it. Just plain never explain why the museum is set up like that, let people just suspend their disbelief and not care. This is the easy option, you won’t get praised for the plotting, but people can simply enjoy the gameplay.
2. Explain it. Why on Earth is the place using code-locks like that? Why has the language become pictograms? What sort of place is this museum of 20th century images? This is hard – the premise of the game is one that seems innately ludicrous.

Fortunately that sort of worldbuilding is exactly what we do at Artemis Games, so I was well set up to help with it. Ultimately we discussed it, and came up with a potentially quite compelling explanation; but one that Luke wants to keep as a slow-release mystery for the first stages of LupeLang. Still, all told while we weren’t playtesting anything of our own it was definitely a productive event.

Be Well

-Ste