Category: Designer Diary

Designer diary: Last Fleet

Josh Fox Leave a comment

I’ve been getting quite a bit of feedback on my current WIP, Last Fleet. In case you’ve missed hearing about it, the game is about the last surviving members of the human race, fleeing across space from an implacable inhuman adversary. The players are brave pilots, officers, politicians and journalists, struggling to keep the fleet – and themselves – in one piece, under immense pressure.

As you might gather from the above, a key theme in Last Fleet is pressure. The core mechanics revolve around gaining and losing Pressure, which acts like hit points and mission/team pool all rolled into one. Crucially, players can gain +1 to any roll, after rolling the dice, by marking 1 Pressure. This means players tend to push their Pressure up of their own accord. Your Pressure track has room for five marks, after which you have to mark and perform a Breaking Point action whereby you do something risky or irrational. Eventually when you’ve marked them all, the (presumably) last Breaking Point action is to die.

Side note: if this sounds quite a bit like Night Witches system of Marks, that’s no coincidence. I’ve drawn inspiration from that. And as you’ll see, I think the lessons from playtesting are pushing the design to being more similar to Night Witches than it currently is.

A significant issue in playtesting has been getting the balance right between being under too much pressure versus not enough. There are lots of variables which can affect this:

  • How often the players make actions that allow them to erase Pressure (social stuff, mostly);
  • How much space the GM gives them to do that;
  • How much the players have to roll the dice;
  • How serious are the consequences the GM puts on the line;
  • How much players work together to min-max their rolls and apply maximum bonuses from assists; and (not forgetting)
  • How well the players roll.

So the system puts the players under pressure, but getting it at the exact right level to avoid either crushing them or leaving them feeling totally relaxed, seems to be a bit of an art. But I’m currently feeling that the system itself makes it too easy to reduce Pressure, while leaving the consequences of bad rolls insufficiently terrifying to prompt the players to increase their own Pressure all that much.

So where is that leading me to? Three (or maybe four) things:

  • I’m toughening up the consequences of bad rolls, including on a 7-9, to increase the stakes of failure. In turn that should mean players wanting to spend more Pressure.
  • I may reduce the overall statline of starting characters, which currently start with +2/+1/+0/+0/-1.
  • I’m reducing how much Pressure is erased when Pressure-reducing moves are taken.
  • I said maybe four. I’m considering whether players trust each other too much. The initial relationships set up tend to push things towards distrust and conflict, but I’m not sure if I’ve taken it far enough. Something to think about.

What’s interesting is that the stories people are coming back with from playtesting sound like exactly the sort of play I want to see – so while people may not feel sufficiently pressured, the game is fundamentally working ok. It needs tuning, perhaps even some significant redesign of individual components, but the overall shape of the design seems right.

If you’re interested in Last Fleet, get in touch! I’ll be doing more playtesting later in the year and I’m always keen to have more playtesters.

Bite Me! Update – Congratulations It’s a PBTA Hack!?

Frax Leave a comment

Update: Please note that Bite Me was renamed to Bite Marks, after the campaign closed. The game can now be pre-ordered from Backerkit.

I am in full swing playtesting Bite Me! my Powered by the Apocalypse Game of Werewolf Pack dynamics.

About a year ago (despite all my complaints that I was bored of PBTA hacks!) I decided to write Bite Me! as a PBTA hack. Yeah, I know. But I really wanted the ability to sharply focus the gameplay on some specific elements of genre and PBTA is a solid template for doing that. So over a year later, I’ve got a basic game written, completed 2 one shot playtests and I’m in the middle of a 10 week long campaign playtest.

The core of the game starts with Moves and Playbooks/Skins as you would expect. But I really wanted to create a situation which cycles through two modes of play. Firstly the aggressive, domination riddled, toxic masculine play where things are feral and always on the brink of chaos and secondly, a close, tightly knit, emotionally close family.

The first environment creates the events and issues which will fuel the heartfelt conversations in the second. Behave badly, react with extreme violence to extreme events and then expect to get challenged on it by people whose opinion you care the most about. I feel that games need a more direct and mechanised link between character’s emoting and giving them something to emote about – this is what Bite Me! is squarely aiming at.

Nightwitches by Jason Morningstar has a similar (ish) mechanic with the Night and Day play styles. But I wanted something more organic and slightly less formal to mimic the ebb and flow of the pack relationships. So instead of separating the play into different formats I’m using a points mechanic – you get to spend points on taking powerful and tempting actions, in order to get points you have to call people on their behaviour, you have to express opinions and be vulnerable about your emotions. In fact before a big action scene (in which you’ll need some tasty points to spend) you’ll definitely want to clear the air with a big ‘ol secret revealing row.

So far this loop has playtested really well and I’m extremely pleased with the results. It has also helped me put into words how I feel about secrets at the table – something that will form core player advice for the game: “The point of a secret is to throw it in someone’s face in the most dramatic moment.”

Once the campaign playtest is finished I need to do the really hard bit. Write the MCing guidance. In a MC’d game guidance on doing it well is one of the most important and most overlooked sections in a traditional rulebook. Writing really clear, practical and specific guidance for MCing my games is vital because if anyone else is going to replicate the game in my mind I have to get it down on paper. That is the difficult bit, because there is always something you are doing when you run your own games that you don’t realise you are doing.

I’m hoping to get the next draft finished by the end of Autumn 2017 and release it into the wild for some external playtesting after that.

Designer Diary: Space Askew

Josh Fox 4 Comments

I’ve long had an interest in designing a Dream Askew hack, thanks to very positive experiences playing the game tempered by some issues that I wanted to address. I’ve been tinkering around with this concept for quite a while, and finally managed to get a working prototype to a playtest this weekend.

The game is currently a fairly thinly reskinned version of the original, since I want to concentrate on streamlining and reworking the design framework. But I didn’t want to just copy Avery’s game, so I’ve changed the setting. Space Askew is set in the belly of a space station, where outcasts and misfits live in the shadows below a more prosperous settlement.

What’s changed?

  • I felt that DA would benefit from some more in the way of relationship-building in setup. I’ve added a set of Hx-style relationship seeds to choose from, and some Hillfolk-style unrequited desires. In both cases the process involves choosing something yourself, then asking another player a question, the answer to which provides a completed background element.
  • I wanted a clearer and more intuitive set of MCing guidelines for running the Situations. I’ve brought the MCing system a bit more back towards the way Apocalypse World works, supplementing each Situation’s Principles and Moves with a set of general Principles and Moves, and giving clear guidance for when an MC makes Moves. The Principles are a bit different from AW’s, focused more on small-scale interpersonal drama than constantly shifting external threats.
  • I’ve placed question-asking at the heart of the system. When you want to create a bit of content for the world (a character, a location, a piece of technology, a rumour…) you don’t create it yourself; you ask someone else about it. This is true in setup and during play.
  • I’ve created a more developed process for deciding what scenes should focus on, and for deciding who is MCing at any given time.
  • I added a very simple harm system. Whenever someone tries to inflict harm on another character, they say what they’re doing in the fiction, then ask someone else what the outcome is. I want harm to be kept simple and fiction-based, and I want the decision to inflict harm to recognise that, once the bullets start to fly, you can’t entirely control the resulting pain and injury.
  • I’ve switched the psychic maelstrom to a Battlestar Galactica-esque set of gods who you make sacrifices to and petition for aid.
  • I’ve added a new skin called The Foundling, who was once part of a networked hive mind connected to a parent AI and has somehow become separated from the parent. They’re a bit like the Hollow in Monsterhearts, lacking a clear identity and anxious to understand humanity.

How did the playtest go?

  • Character gen was fantastic. Beyond my wildest dreams, really. It took 45 minutes and yielded well-realised characters with charged relationships but plenty of undefined space to explore in play.
  • The play itself went well, but I think that was more a testament to the quality of my players than the system I wrote. I suspect people were relying on their own habits of running fairly systemless games rather than my rules. (The excellent setup will have helped, of course.)
  • This was partly the result of my failure to effectively teach the rules, and I’m clear that the game needs a Lovecraftesque-style teaching guide that guides you through the rules systematically.
  • It was also partly the result of information overload. I should have realised this would be a problem, because I think DA was already pretty hard work and Space Askew added a bunch of extra stuff.
  • I hadn’t fully appreciated how Play to find out and Ask questions aren’t particularly obvious or intuitive ways to play. As the only person who had read the rules outside the playsheets, I needed to do more to explain this (and the teacing guide would need to include this).

So what am I doing next?

  • I’ve already begun work to streamline the amount of information in the game, reducing the number of Principles and Moves to a manageable level, and focusing on what is really core to the game.
  • I’m going to write a teaching guide which ensures certain rules that aren’t on the playsheets gets mentioned, that key principles are explained in more detail, and that character gen is more structured.
  • I’m going to turn the Situation sheets into something a bit more resembling a character sheet, complete with setup questions.

Watch this space!

Lovecraftesque’s sinister influences

Josh Fox Leave a comment

So I read on G Plus recently that nobody ever credits the designers who influence them. I don’t know if that’s true, but we’re really keen to acknowledge the debt Lovecraftesque owes to previous games.

[*turns to camera* Lovecraftesque! The GMless storytelling game of creeping cosmic horror. Back it now on kickstarter!]

There are three influences which really loomed large in our thinking.

  • The big one is Graham Walmsley’s Stealing Cthulhu. Graham forensically analyses the style, structure and atmosphere of Lovecraftian stories and how you can replicate them in a roleplaying game. Once we had read this, we couldn’t stop thinking about how you could make a game system which would do some of that work for you – which would feel just like a Lovecraft story.
  • Ben Robbins’ Microscope is another major influence. The game gives you the structure to create a shared world, while abolishing tedious discussion of what should happen next. In so doing, it ensures that all the players contribute to the story; that was inspirational. The “leaping to conclusions” rule in Lovecraftesque was influenced by our desire to  duplicate that discussion-free story creation.
  • Jason Morningstar’s Fiasco is obviously a very well-known indie game, and one of the first indie games that we played. The use of in-built story structure, guiding the story from initial scenes through the tilt and on to the ending and aftermath, stayed with us. The Journey into Darkness in Lovecraftesque is a direct descendant of the aftermath in Fiasco.

We’d also like to mention the indie design community, who have provided fertile territory to develop our design thinking in general. Members of that community have shaped our thinking around how games should strive not to perpetuate harmful stereotypes and, indeed, promote diversity and inclusivity. This was crucial in developing our desire to create a Lovecraft game with a specific design objective to tackle the issues of racism and mental illness. We wanted to include a list of community members who were particularly instrumental, but the truth is there are so many of you that the list became unwieldy. Even so, Anna Kreider and Chris Chinn deserve special mention.

Lovecraftesque update

Josh Fox 1 Comment

For those who have been following this project, we’ve just been through another round of playtesting (some internal, some external) using updated rules.

This was a bit of an odd playtest in a way. The rules updates we had made had their intended effect, the game seemed much improved, and overall we seem pretty much bang on in terms of realising our design goals while keeping the game fun to play. But we had two pieces of fairly broad-brush negative feedback which shook our faith a little and made us re-evaluate where we were. The bottom line is that after some soul-searching we concluded that we should not panic over two bits of feedback, when most of our feedback is so positive – but this feedback nevertheless led us to make some further changes.

The big one was that the game was too complex. Of course, as an indie/story game-style game, it is a *lot* less complex than your average traditional RPG. At the same time, it is probably significantly above average complexity compared to its peers. More importantly, after reviewing the game we concluded that there were elements of complexity that could be removed quite easily, without changing the play experience. A no brainer, really.

This has led to a number of changes:

  • Progress through the parts of the game is now driven by scenes played rather than clues revealed, which seems simpler and more intuitive.
  • We’ve ditched the idea of separate reprisals scenes (and the reprisals track), and merged reprisals into our card system.
  • We’ve ditched the decreasing narrative distance rules and, again, merged them into the card system. By default you can only introduce rationally explicable clues throughout the game.
  • The revamped cards allow you to introduce a thematic element (e.g. a cult) and enable thematically appropriate rationality-breaking clues or reprisals (e.g. the cult threaten or attack you).
  • We’ve simplified the journey into darkness so you can pretty much choose whatever role you like on each step rather than having to switch back and forth between roles.

The gameplay is more-or-less unchanged, but the burden of explaining the rules has been significantly reduced. The cost is that the cards are much more important – we need to playtest that before we’re sure if they work the way we want them to.

The other issue we picked up was around tone. The default tone of the game is very much slow-building, brooding horror, with a protagonist who is at the mercy of events and probably doomed to meet an unpleasant end. But there’s nothing to stop the game from being a bit more heroic in feel. You could even run it for laughs, deliberately parodying the style. We’ve introduced a stage where this choice is explicitly discussed. This is less because we think these other options will be chosen, and more to make sure that whatever choice is made, everyone has explicitly agreed to it. We think this will reduce the risk of divergence of styles causing grief in play.

We’ve also hit the start button on a couple of art pieces (we’ll only commission the rest if/when the kickstarter is successful) and some sample layout options (again, we’ll pay for the book to be laid out if we get the funds). Discussing ideas with our artist and layer-outerer (?) has really got us excited, and we saw some early sketches this weekend which look really awesome. We’re beginning to talk to printers and flesh out our ideas for kickstarter reward levels and stretch goals for the kickstarter. We’re still a little ways off launching the campaign, but it’s beginning to come together.

Watch this space.

Lovecraftesque: playtest

Josh Fox 1 Comment

After half a dozen external playtests and a similar number we ran ourselves, we’ve been beavering away on an updated version of Lovecraftesque. We’re now opening it up for a second round of external playtesting.

What’s the game about? You create your own story of brooding horror in the mould of Lovecraft, but without using any of Lovecraft’s material. It’s a GMless game, in which you spend most of your time as a narrator whose role is to intrigue, torment and terrify the Protagonist. You and the other players create strange clues for the Protagonist to investigate and, ultimately, draw them together into a compelling Final Horror to drive the Protagonist to despair or insanity.

What’s changed since the first playtest?

  • We’ve ripped up the token mechanics. They were clunky, and they were getting in the way of engaging with the game.
  • You’ll receive one or two cards at random at the start of the game, which make each story unique and a little unpredictable.
  • We’ve introduced the “leap to conclusions” rule, which keeps things coherent while leaving everyone plenty of room to influence the story and be surprised by what the other players contribute.
  • We’ve created a teaching guide which makes it quicker and easier to teach the game to new players, and which gives a great summary of Lovecraft’s style and themes for players who aren’t familiar with his work.
  • Plus loads of other, smaller tweaks designed to make the game easier to play or deepen the atmosphere.

If you’d like to take part in the playtest, please leave a comment here or email lovecraftesque at vapourspace dot net and we will send you the playtest files.

Lovecraftesque update

Josh Fox 4 Comments

So, as you might have noticed from my earlier post about playtesting, the first round of Lovecraftesque playtesting is over. We picked up a lot of issues – a few quite major, most not so. We’ve moved quickly to make some changes and additions to tackle the former, in order to get some rapid feedback from some playtests we’ve already got lined up. So: here is a summary of some top-level issues we encountered and what we’re doing about them, with the caveat that this is only a first cut and we reserve the right to have a total rethink in the coming weeks.

1. Not Lovecraftian enough.

Man, this was a real disappointment to hear. The structure of the Lovecraftian tale is clearly in our game, but in terms of realising the alien, uncaring universe of Lovecraft – we didn’t do so well. Admittedly, this was most visible in groups who were not familiar with Lovecraft, but even some experienced players found that just following the rules wasn’t enough to make the game feel like Lovecraft. (Although one group said it was about as Lovecraftian as most Call of Cthulhu, which is either a backhanded compliment or damning with faint praise… but better than we’d feared.)

The main change we’ve made is to provide a style guide to Lovecraft, covering the themes, paraphernalia and language used by Lovecraft. This is supported by other changes which I’ll describe in a moment. It remains to be seen whether knowing the themes and having them at the forefront of one’s mind will be enough to make the game feel like Lovecraft – we should know pretty quickly after the next few playtest reports come in.

We’re also thinking about introducing a requirement to choose a theme for the story, from a list we’ll provide. But that’s something we need to think about over a slightly longer time period – it hasn’t gone into the game yet.

2. Hard to teach, hard to learn

This was also a bit of a disappointment, if I’m honest. I have to explain complicated concepts for a living, so I thought I’d do pretty well at this. I think most of my playtesters managed ok at learning the game. Those that didn’t, were new to indie-style games, which may account for the problem. The teaching of the game, however, seems to have been more laborious than it needs to be.

We’ve created a teaching guide to tackle the latter problem. It’s pretty clear that, since this is a game that has a number of stages that work quite differently to each other, the best way to do this is to teach the game as you play it, not attempt to explain it all at once. That’s what we’ve done – create a guide which you read out at key junctures to explain the key concepts (at the start) and how the basic procedures differ as the game evolves (when the changes happen). The guide also includes a potted summary of the Lovecraft style guide, so that it isn’t just the facilitator who benefits from that. The whole thing would take about 15-20 minutes to read out if you literally just monologued it, but it’s broken into chunks, so hopefully the job of teaching is a bit less strenuous.

We’re going to have to think about whether the rules are just too complicated, or the rules guide not structured in the right way. That’s something we’ll get to in a later iteration.

3. The Final Horror

Quite a few groups found that it was a real challenge to weave together all the clues they had seeded through the story into a single compelling Final Horror. They ended up either ignoring some clues, or laboriously explaining through exposition how they fit in, or having a lengthy discussion as a group which obviously breaks the tension.

We’ve introduced a new rule to address this. In the new version, after every scene there’s a pause in which everyone individually writes down what they think is going on. Obviously nobody really knows – but the rules say you have to leap to a conclusion. The idea is that you’ll then use that premature conclusion to guide what you narrate in the next scene. Since the other players will surprise you, your ideas will change every scene – but because nobody is just firing off ideas into the void, the story will be a bit more coherent. More importantly, when the Final Horror comes, nobody is starting from a blank slate.

Other stuff

These weren’t the only issues our playtest uncovered! But they’re the biggest – we think the rest will be relatively easy to crack. We’ll be going over these, and thinking more broadly (and maybe more deeply) about the game’s overall design, over the next few weeks, with a view to commencing a fresh playtest on a completely revised version of the game.

Lovecraftesque – who watches the watchers?

Josh Fox Leave a comment

Since the last post we’ve been hard at work nailing down the few remaining details of Lovecraftesque that weren’t already nailed down. We’ve conducted an informal playtest that went well (though we didn’t have time in the end to try out the Journey into Darkness or Final Horror, which are two parts of the game I’m excited to see in action). And I’ve been beavering away turning our notes into a proper set of instructions so other people can playtest the game too. Plus we asked people on our G+ feeds who would do good art for this game, which yielded some really excellent suggestions. It’s been a busy week.

Anyway, a bit more detail about the game is in order. One of the things that’s unusual about the game is that there’s (normally) only one Protagonist. This mirrors Lovecraft’s fiction, but there’s also a very good reason for it – it creates a sense of isolation and helplessness that just isn’t there when you have a party of competent people supporting each other. A consequence of this is that at any given time only one person is playing the Protagonist, which created some interesting design challenges for us. These design challenges have created an aspect of the game I’m really keen on – the Watchers.

We toyed with having a completely shared approach to GMing, like (say) Fiasco, but we wanted to provide a bit more structure to help players to know who is responsible for driving the story forward, when it’s ok to contribute, and so forth. So we’ve kept the traditional GM role in the form of the Narrator (albeit rotating amongst the group) but supplemented it with the Watchers. The Watchers are able to intervene in the current scene by spending tokens to introduce fixed effects – most commonly clues, but also other things, like suddenly turning an investigation scene into a reprisals scene. Just as important, they are allowed and encouraged to elaborate on the Narrator’s description of the environment and NPCs.

This produces a powerful sense of atmosphere, in which every aspect of the scene is dripping with vague unpleasantness and tiny details the Narrator added for colour become amplified.

Narrator: “There’s a clock on the wall”

Watcher 1: “It has a loud, intrusive tick-tock noise”

Watcher 2: “The ticking is incessant. Tick-tock. Tick-tock. You find it hard to sleep.”

This mechanism is placed right at the centre of things during the Journey into Darkness – more on that later.

Each of the roles (Narrator, Protagonist, Watcher) is summarised on a cue card.
Each of the roles (Narrator, Protagonist, Watcher) is summarised on a cue card.

Introducing Lovecraftesque

Josh Fox 2 Comments

[Edited to add: Lovecraftesque was successfully kickstarted in 2015 and you can now buy it here]

Admiral Frax and I have been working on a new story game. It is a game of cosmic horror in an uncaring universe, for 2 or more players. It is called Lovecraftesque.

What’s different about this game?

  • This GMful game will see each of the players contribute clues which build up to a cosmic horror of your own devising. You won’t encounter Cthulhu, deep ones, mi-go or any of Lovecraft’s creations, but something fresh that feels like it came straight out of a Lovecraft story.
  • You spend most of your time as a narrator whose role is to torment and frighten the protagonist of your tale. There’s no party of investigators, and the protagonist may be more interested in running away than uncovering what’s going on.
  • The game owes a heavy debt to Graham Walmsley’s Stealing Cthulhu – it codifies and mechanises the ideas in that book, creating a story along Lovecraftian lines while leaving you flexibility to deviate from the formula when you need to.

Here’s a little teaser of the game structure – more on the way.

Screenshot 2015-01-03 11.35.37

A mini-Monsterhearts hack: provoke

Josh Fox Leave a comment

When you try to provoke an emotional reaction, roll with Hot.

On a 10+, you get the emotion you wanted, and take a string on the character. They choose how they respond.

On a 7-9, they choose:
The emotional reaction you wanted, and give you a string.
An emotional reaction of their choice, but it’s overwhelming and they have to respond strongly and immediately to it.
No emotional reaction, but they have to respond in the way they think you want.

The standard Monsterhearts version of this move is “turn them on”, so the emotional reaction desired is sexual arousal. In the original move, there wasn’t any specified emotional reaction (it was just implied by the name of the move) and there wasn’t any option to choose an emotional reaction either.

So now, you can use this move to:
Turn someone on.
Fill them with fear.
Provoke them to anger.
Make them jealous.
…and so on.

And, when you get a weak hit, they could avoid giving you a string by having an overwhelming emotional reaction of their choice:
Getting turned on and throwing themselves at you sexually.
Gibbering incoherently or running away in mortal terror.
Exploding with anger and hurling themselves at you, fists flying.
Venting their jealousy or rage at you, loudly and conspicuously.
…and so on.

They can also avoid giving you a string and keep emotional control by responding in the way they think you want them to, such as:
They think you’re trying to turn you on, so they sleep with you.
They think you’re trying to intimidate them, so they they back away slowly, hands where you can see them.
They think you’re trying to provoke them to anger, so they punch you in the face.
They think you’re trying to make them jealous, so they watch transfixed as you kiss that other guy.
…and so on.