Dice Poker

I play a fair few CRPGs. Given how little gaming I got in my time at uni, it was a way of plugging the gap.

One thing that's always bothered me about CRPGS (yes Bioware, I'm talking about you) is the paucity of decent in-game gambling.

Take, say, Bioware for example. Roam the Old Republic playing Pazaak! Or, as I call it, Pontoon - a game I stopped playing after about age 11 because it wasn't very good.

Then Mass Effect came along with its much better gameplay. Play Quasar, while roaming the galaxy! A game suspiciously like...Pontoon.

Meh.

I recently completed The Witcher (on only my second playthrough. What a game...but back to the point).

In The Witcher, you play a game called Dice Poker. You and your opponent have 5D6 each and try to score rolls similar to card poker - multiples of the same number, straights (1-5 or 2-6).

It's really simple, but it's also addictive. I'd actually boot up the game just to play dice poker.

And it wasn't !"£$%^&* pontoon!

As such, I think that I'd introduce this game into the Fading Suns universe. After all, it's simple to play, easy to play anywhere with a flat surface and is pretty damn fast.

Here are the rules on The Witcher Wiki. Enjoy.

Couple of LARP thoughts

A couple of thoughts:

FS needs a 'pulling rank' mechanic. There is one in the contracts subsystem, but it would be nice to see something more general to allow high-ranking characters to use their rank - for persuasion or coersion, as they will.

The character system is too complicated. Blessings and Curses need to go - I'm thinking of either a limited amount of bennefits/negatives to stats at chargen, or keyword-based traits, much like the system in the Vampire MET rules.

New Prop: personal advisor

Lidl is selling sudoku machines for a tenner. They're perfect for futuristic, Blackberry-style cogitators. Just look at it- once painted it will look just right...

New LARP Rules?

A recent Redbrick blogpost revealed details of the VP3 system.

It's pretty awesome. Here's the best bit:

We chose 6 attributes: 2 physical (Dexterity & Vigor), 2 mental (Wits & Will), and 2 social (Intuition & Presence). These are rated on the standard 1 to 10 scale, but may exceed these limits with racial modifiers, cybernetics, or theurgic influences, etc.

We also expanded the Vitality health track, dividing it into Vitality, Resolve, and Reputation, and essentially providing 'hit points' for the areas of physical, mental and social conflict. In addition, these health tracks are considered 'ablative' or non-life threatening -- only when the track is completely depleted do characters suffer real injuries and risk death.

When a character takes an injury that depletes his Vitality he suffers a Wound. A wound can be almost any type of permanent damage... perhaps losing an arm or an eye. Of course, with cybernetics and wonder medications like Elixir, even these can be restored, but they don't grow back without help. Resolve, when depleted, leaves mental scars, derangements, etc. Reputation leaves the character marred by social embarrassments or a bad reputation that just will not go away.

Finally, there is a new system of 'pool attributes'. Pool attributes accumulate or diminish over time. Every character has a Faith Pool to start with, but characters with occult abilities also have a pool related to the dark side of that ability... a Hubris pool or an Urge pool, for example. Pool attributes have two tracks: a permanent score and a temporary score. All goal rolls using the attribute work from the permanent score. As characters progress through their adventures, their temporary scores will fluctuate. If they increase their temporary score to 10 they immediately gain a permanent point, but if they lose all their temporary points they lose a permanent point.

I haven't really said it before, because working a new LARP system from base sounded like too much work, but...the original rules sucked balls.

You know it's true, I know it's true. There are too many sub-stats and skills, with some serious complications. It's not a good LARP ruleset.

This, though...this I can work with.

Here's hoping I'll have the time. A couple of mates were saying that they would travel down the entire country to play if I run - how can I say no to that?

FS space combat game from Mongoose

Well, it looks like Noble Armada is being resurrected using Mongoose's Call to Arms system.

This will be interesting to watch.

40K v FS

On the FS Yahoo mailing list, someone asked about the difference between 40K and FS. It's an interesting question; I've posted, but I'll stick it up here as well so it doesn't let lost in the noise.

For me, the difference is simple; subtlety and space to ask questions.

40K has EVERYTHING turned up to 11; one hive city holds the worlds' current population, a Super Star Destroyer would only make it as a frigate and everything is nastier than everything else. I mean, just look at the bad guys; zombie robots that serve soul-eating star gods, god-level manifestations of raw human urges, fungal super-soldiers that not only fight but infest so there's a never-ending source and some hive-mind god intelligence eating our galaxy and turning our own biospheres against us.

And all of these are fought by demi-human supersoldiers with guns that fire rounds bigger than your thumb.

The morality is black-on-black; the good guy is a fascist, xenophobic human empire that uses criminals as spare parts and got its fashion tips from the wrong side of WWII.

And the thing is, all of the technophobia is good and necessary after the scrap with the Iron Men. Psykers need to end up as the God-Emperor's lunch because that's what keep space travel going and because until they mature they'll only serve to break reality. You can't stop and ask if it's OK to bomb a planet of civilians because you'd already be eaten by whatever got to them.

And that's awesome (I should point out that I have both DH and RT and I think they're great). Everything is supposed to be epic and more than a little mad and hardcore - the political conceit of being hard men making hard decisions made very real, desperately fighting to survive just one. More. Day. Against things that would make Cthulhu go 'I'm outta here; this stuff is *whacked*'.

Compare with FS; each of the sects has factions ranging from evil bastards to moral paragons and most shades in between; even the symbiots as written are a weird transhuman thing that doesn't quite work out, rather than the 'consume!' thing of the Tyranids.

Yes there's technophobia and space feudalism too, but they're inverted by being painted as a choice. The nobility took their chance when the Second Republic fell down, and remade the Known Worlds as they wanted them - and they had to fight to do it. The Guilds' precursors built the Second Republic and would like to do it again in some form.

In many ways it's classic sci-fi of the type we don't see often enough, questioning the human condition.

Tl:dr: Fading Suns asks 'why' - why did all this change and can we escape it? 40K says 'blessed is the mind too small for doubt. Now reload and let's get that thing or die trying!'

The End (Of Summer)

Yeah, I know. My time in the last few weeks has been taken up with the student magazine, as a bunch of writers failed to do their part. Not to mention only just having my modules registered despite having put them in before the end of term.

Yay.

On the upside, I do have a regular gaming group. Bad new is that it's monthly and I'm running Stargate. The weekly gaming group hasn't, for various reasons, although I hope my newly-started Dark Heresy game may flourish (I pimped FS but a player vetoed it).

Another upside is that an old LARPer of mine is moving to Essex. He's been helper to a regional Camarilla guy (and was still there after they split) so I'll have help. He's not quite round the corner, but he has already pledged to help me set up once my degree's over. Next year will involve me doing some writing but I'm shucking my magazine role in favour of being a showrunner on the new radio station.

Downtime (Again!) [Updated xI]

OK, here's another crack at sorting out some kind of supportive downtime system. I've been pondering for a couple of weeks now and I think I've wrapped my head around the basics.

Basic Principles

• I still want to keep this as abstract as I can, while providing options for players to stiff each other interact during downtime.
• It needs to be an extension of player actions, not something they rely on.
  
• But it also needs to provide a more epic canvas, to give players the feeling of being in charge of something greater than they are.
  

The Fief

Each player (or group of players) can buy a fief at character development. The advantage of clubbing together is in having more actions per downtime; the downside is that you have to share power.

A Fief has the following basic characteristics:

Owner: Obvious if only a single owner, but groups have to pick one person as leader. This is important, because it defines the fief as owned by one of the factions.

Morale: Goes up and down. Once it hits negative, the rating is applied as a modifier to all the downtime actions. Morale can be attacked by certain actions and is lost when you lose battles.

After that, the character(s) can buy Holdings to increase their abilities.

Holdings are individual buildings that allow the character to project their power. The most obvious holdings are the ones that produce troops and spies, allowing the characters to harass and fight with each other, but they also produce money and equipment. Holdings are bought at Level 1 and can be upgraded, which costs time and money.

Holdings generate a level of whatever they build equal to their level

• Agency. These generate their level in spies. As a downtime action, spy points can be assigned among four stances - Internal Security, Sabotage and Passive/Active spying.
  
  Internal Security is the fief's defensive rating and Sabotage destroys Holdings levels, while Passive spying provides info on what holding an enemy owns and Active spying provides info on your opponent's downtime actions.
  
  
• Barracks. These produce trained troops who will die for you. Troops can be assigned to Garrison your fief (providing a defensive rating), or sent out to skirmish. They are better at damaging enemy Holdings than saboteurs, but have to wade through the enemy Garrison first.
  
  
• Counting Houses. No matter what the Church may say, money is too useful to give up. Your fiefs are generally self-sufficient - that's what serfs are for. Instead, Counting Houses provide spending money, needed to pay for building upgrades, additional troops for that downtime period, bought info and equipment - things that may otherwise be unavailable or where you've reached the natural limit.
  
  
• Fabricants. These are used for fabricating equipment, weapons and so on. Not so much in the sense of 'I want a new pistol' (that's what contracts are for), but on the scale of 'my army needs rifles. And tanks'. Of course, you don't have to keep them for yourself - you can always contract out to other players and make some money/cement alliances in doing so...
  
  Equipment provides bonuses and occasional special rules, but I'll talk about crafting in another post.
  

Player Actions:

This system isn't supposed to replace player actions, but supplement them. As such, players can spend an additional downtime action to join in the fun. They get to add an appropriate skill to the action - so if they're sending out a warband, they can throw in their tactics skill on top of the army's rating, or contract in an Engineer to add their technical skill to a science project.

The number of downtime actions per downtime come from averaging the lead character's Mind + Bureaucracy. If playing in a multi-player fief, the Mind rating comes from the ruler, while the Bureaucracy skill may be donated by another fief member. If there are more than two members in a fief, each further player adds +1 to the skill rating (unless they choose not to for some reason).

[Update x1]

Combat is something I'm a little uncertain on - not in general, but the specifics of which model to use.

My first choice is to have each Garrison point being ablative - each point must be assigned to defend against specific attacks, rather than simply providing a set defence number. Resolution is simply by who scores the highest, with the difference between scores representing the amount of damage the winner can throw around. The point is to give a small sense of realism in that troops can't be in all places at once and makes players think about what they wan to defend.

The second method is to make the Garrison stat apply to all fights, but resolution isn't 'who scores highest'. Instead, the victor must achieve a multiple of the defender's score, as in Games Workshop's Battle For Armageddon. The higher the multiple scored, the greater the devastation.

Update

I have a Mandarin resit this Friday, hence the lack of much happening beyond writing complicated pictograms and trying to remember the tone and meaning for what is basically the same word.

But there's still something I can update on. When I initially planned my game, it was going to take place on Rampart. I had a bunch of reasons behind this, such as the social conflict, oriental flavour and others, but one thing I needed was player infodumps.

So I made a tourist sheet, distributed by the Guilds and costing only few Crests each.


Obviously it's unfinished, but I think you can see the way I'm trying to provide details though both infodumps and style.

And yes, the Mandarin symbols actually mean stuff. And should be grammatically correct...

[Clothing] Initial/Random Musings

I've been thinking about costume prep on and off for a long time now and it's still a little confusing.

There are fifteen major factions, split into three groups, in the Fading Suns universe, each of which has their own logo and style. They usually break down into sub-groups as well; for example, the Orthodoxy wear red or white, depending on whether they're Mahayana or Hinayana.

But what's described in the books (in this case, Lords & Priests) isn't always workable for a LARP where you really need to be able to switch and swap around. For example, the Orthodoxy's fashion sense doesn't quite work out - the Whites start off wearing black robes and exchange them for whiter ones as they move up the ranks, while the Reds do the same (the book doesn't say if the Reds and Whites are linked to the Mahayana and Hinayana, but it would make sense to conflate the Reds and Hinayana, given their shared conservatism).

My thought would be to stick with one colour set for the main robes (black to white) using a cassock pattern available from any clothes-making shop and set out a character's sectarian leanings using extras. In this case, I plan to use those pashmina scarfs you can get at two for a fiver on street stalls. Get a white one and a red one, add the holy jumpgate sigil to both of them and then you don't have to worry about catering for both sides.

Another thing I think about is identification. Characters in the Passion Play book tend to have have tattoos marking their faction, which made me think about where they'd go given various cultural leanings.

Here are some thoughts about Scravers I had last night:

Icons

The nature of their activities means that most Scravers tend to trust in luck, not expecting the Pancreator to approve of all their actions. They often reach back to their founding myths from ancient Aegypt.

The most common investment is in the Scavers' icon:
In a job where they often need luck and quick reflexes to survive, they often choose to place the icon somewhere appropriate.

Eye: A popular place for permanent markings is over the eye, believed to provide second sight.
Nape of the neck: Because we all need eyes in the backs of our heads sometime.
Forehead: To invoke the perceived wisdom of the third eye.