I AM DOING SOMETHING HERE

A Note on Kids and PnP RPGs.

Feeling inspired today. Just finished a conversation with a friend about bringing his 11 year old son into some of our D&D4e games. He was hesitant, thinking that the group might not like bringing someone so young into the games (average age for the group is 30). I told him that he had nothing to worry about, the boy is bright and seems really interested in playing. Of course, those are the obvious reasons.

The not-so-obvious reasons are based in my own experiences of being a boy about that age and being invited to play D&D (2e, baby!) at my older brother’s friend’s house. I remember that game like it was last night. I was raised a young evangelical Christian, so I had seen the scary-as-hell tracts telling me about the evil powers of Dungeons and Dragons. Heck, I had even seen Tom Hanks take LARPing to a new level in Mazes & Monsters. So, maybe I was a little nervous. But that quickly evaporated when I saw the miniatures and character sheets my brother’s friend had prepared for us. They were awesome.

The night is ingrained in my memory. I remember the first frantic fight with the orcs in the entryway to the cave, the weird underground pond populated by carnivorous frogs, and a final that peaked when our Dwarf fighter yanked his spear back out of the hands of a troll. The classic troll: green, lanky, and hard as heck to kill. We all hooted with glee when the Dwarf got his spear back, you could feel the tension ratcheting up when the DM described the troll’s wounds healing as fast as we were making them. It was better than a movie, miles better than a video game.

It’s funny how these memories stayed with me so persistently, but I think it was the first time in my young life that I felt like I was a hero in the company of heroes. We knew it was game, but it was such an exciting game!

This only increased when I got to play with my older brother’s friend’s actual group. They were all older guys, but we were all on the same playing field, and you would have thought that I had entered the vaulted halls of the Justice League of America. This experience really shaped who I am today in a profound way. It really uncovered creative tendencies in my personality that I might not have recognized otherwise, and it turned me into a voracious reader. It was like someone flipped the switch and my imagination came to life in a way I hadn’t experienced before.

So, yeah. Bring your kids. They’ll have more fun than you could imagine.

I have done it.

Today = milestone in dev. The first table-top testing with actual demo cards. There were some exciting moments (like the thief taking down a troll by sneaking up on him while he stomped on the dead fighter’s corpse) and some not-so-exciting moments (like trudging through an initiative system that is awful and in need of serious work). But overall, I think we may actually have something workable here.

Going to go back to streamlining things and bringing more definition to the vague parts. Flanking/Stalking/Infiltration, I’m looking at you.

Edit: Streamlining. Huge chunks of fat coming right off the frame. This feels really good, as I have a set of definite goals to work toward as opposed to my typical sort of work where I try to herd a bajillion ideas onto one spreadsheet with no idea what I will do with them when they get there.

Simplified Initiative considerably and working on getting less monsters on the board at once. Its not interesting to fight with 6 goblins that cant hit the broad side of a barn, and it’s a beating to keep track of that many enemies. Being overwhelmed is overwhelming, and is only fun if someone else is running the bad guys.

Inspiration in Shackles.

Well, for the first time in my life, I have pulled an idea kicking and screaming to the workbench, and held it there until something concrete popped out. Today, I bought sticky labels to attack to playing cards so that I can start testing the system. I think the labels arent big enough, but its a start.

I’m putting myself on notice.

Listen, you. You’ve got good ideas, and you have a real desire to make some really neat looking cards. BUT YOU HAVEN’T LAID THE GENERIC GROUNDWORK. Do that first. Due diligence. Then you get to make all the fun flavor stuff. But it won’t work to do the neat stuff first, so stay on task.

Also, love you.

Abuzz.

Alright, so a little more specific info for my legions of followers. I am working on a board game. More specifically, the board game I have always wanted to play. Fantasy genre, card-driven, with a few twists to make it a little “more” than the masses of other games crowding the narrow paths to the plateau of success we all aspire to.

I would like to be more specific, but I don’t really know where the line between good ideas and execution of said ideas begins. I am too early in the process to show any details, but I hope to be able to give out tidbits as the game comes along.

My highly ambitious and unrealistic goal? To have something to demo at GenCon this year. Games take longer to make than that, but this is an idea I have been chewing on for years, so maybe it will gel faster than one might expect. I love you all!

My brain is an arena…

…where half-baked ideas battle not for glory, but for mere survival. Trying to deepen the strategy behind abilities stat lines by mixing and matching their effects on various primary combat stat lines. Unfortunately, I can’t tell the winners from the losers on paper.

The Emperor will not give a thumbs down until he sees an idea bleed out in practice. I wish he were a little more gratuitous, I need to shave this list of ideas down quickly.

Come on!

ADOBEEEEEE!

While laying out demo cards, I just suffered from the very rare Illustrator/Photoshop simulcrash. Lost about 3 hours of work. I know, I am stupid and I deserve my fate, but part of me is happy that a problem has arisen that does not involve my own procrastination.

That’s some sort of progress, right?

Update: Went back to redo the work I had lost. Turned out better than what I had before. Second drafts - The most underrated discipline in my process.

Combat is boring. Struggles are exciting.

I have made combat. A system for which to wage war. A system that actually seems to work. But it is boring. Now I must take the bones of my construct and craft something fluffy and exciting from it. I want it to feel like every turn is a struggle of epic proportions, and that is difficult to communicate when the main mechanic is rolling dice.

Oh. I am making a game.