Back From Being Away

In my "day job" I am a freelance skills trainer who works with PhD students and researchers in general. I do various things, most of which is to get people thinking about their skills, what they can do to develop them and maybe more importantly how they want to develop them (getting them to reflect on what they want).

This week I was away tutoring on a week-long course in the Lake District. And as a bonding exercise we were all (on the tutor team, and also on my tutor group) talking about guilty pleasures or things that we do for hobbies. And a couple of times I mentioned how much I've enjoyed playing tabletop RPGs over the last year or so (which is when I got into it). On the last night in the bar someone asked me "so what is a tabletop RPG?" followed by "is that the same as LARPing?"

We talked about it for a bit, and she was genuinely amazed at the thought that there was more than one system (i.e., that there wasn't just Dungeons & Dragons). Not in a malicious way, but because it was so far removed from her experience. In talking about it I described tabletop role-playing as

"Collaborative story-telling between two or more people; typically one person will facilitate the game, and the others will take on the roles of individual characters; the remaining one person will take on the role of any other character in the world of the game, and respond to the other players' actions and requests for description about the world; if the outcome of any proposed action is in doubt then typically dice are rolled according to some game mechanism; other materials can be used depending on the type of game; some games require players and the game facilitator to keep track of details of attributes that their characters have."

Or at least I said something close to that. I'm sure it is a trope of people blogging about games to ask, but what would you say to someone who has little to know experience of tabletop role-playing games?

Dogs Thoughts

As I mentioned last week, due to work commitments I've had to take a few weeks away from regular games nights and Dogs in the Vineyard. Dogs is the first campaign that I've run, and it's been really enjoyable. It is a system where there are so many different directions that a game can go in. Even with the simplest of backgrounds and a handful of NPCs rolled up you can get an intriguing game going.

I read the final section of the pdf a few days ago, and there were some neat thoughts that have helped steer my thinking a bit more as well. Vincent Baker describe it (paraphrased badly by me) as a noir investigation that happens to be set in an alternate West. And with several factions possibly at play, none of them exactly in the right - but one or more of them probably very much in the wrong, it gives the Dogs something to do.

In the first and second sessions the Dogs set up a town meeting, so that the guilty/sinful could confess in front of the whole town and hopefully get rid of any bad blood that existed. This worked really well, a solution that I didn't see coming at all. Quite a facilitated solution in fact, the Dogs didn't immediately pass judgement, but brought out into the light everything that was going wrong. And they were happy with how things ended up.

And yet in the last town they were deeply unhappy with the situation as they arrived in the town of Jewel: daily sundown services where people confess the wrong they have done so that the demons are kept at bay. Leaving aside the demons (whose existence wasn't proved until the last session), they did not like the Steward leading these public confessions. And then one of them said, "Is that different from what we did?" - which was a great realisation. It was in no way planned by me (the setting detail of the sundown service had been made before the start of the campaign), but was a neat thought. The Dogs do have a final say: I don't judge their choice of actions, and there is no higher authority in the game that says they can or can't do something, other than their own thoughts/beliefs.

If the Dogs start to doubt past actions perhaps that leads to something interesting - as I plan for possible future sessions - can I exploit their doubts somehow...? Present them with situations where they might really disagree? Can I devise a situation that's not "on-rails" but which is a kind of Kobayashi Maru? Not so that I can say "that was a bad decision" but so that THEY can't see a way out, but have to act all the same. And when they do act, how will they respond to the consequences?

(lots of half-formed questions there! Apologies)

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 2

Last week we left things with Sister Basemuth (Patrick), Brother Caleb (David) and Brother Paul (Steve) at the farm; they've tracked down Newton's kidnappers, Cornelius and Nate, but they're too late - Newton has been strangled to death...

...or has he?! The slight trace of breath is in him, and so they perform ceremonies to call him back, to tell him that his time has not come - and it works. They save the boy.

Thursday Tales

Making a few connections with the help of the Tales From Zero Point Oracle...
Jack of Spades: The recycled Death Scream of a world. The cult that worships it.
Three of Diamonds: A renegade librarian guards a vast archive in the station's lower reaches with dangerous traps.
Jack of Clubs: The Engineers Guild prepares an initiation and a geneered woman flees persecution.
Two of Spades: A chitinous, black mercenary arachnid alien, terrifying yet honourable guard for the elite.

The geneered woman has an artificial adaptation that is anathema to the Screamers Cult; she runs, heading for a labyrinth of learning, aided by an alien mercenary. She cannot pay him, but he recognises something kindred in her, something "right". The archive is well-protected, and if they can get past the initiation ceremonies of the Mechanikers they will have to persuade the insane old Archiver to allow them sanctuary...

Notes

• The Screamers are living mosaics and mash-ups: their appearance and speech is taken from images and sounds captured from the Dying World. They wear and speak to honour the world.
• The Mechanikers' initiations are legendary, both for the wave of innovation that follows a novice's acceptance and for the collateral damage usually inflicted.
• The Archiver does not like people returning items late. He hates it so much that people now have to prove themselves worthy of being in the archive. Few do.

Dogs in the Vineyard, Session 1

Last night was the first outing for Dogs in the Vineyard in our group, and I was GMing. It was the first time any of us had played it, but I think that despite a couple of head-scratching moments with the mechanics (more on those later) it was a good evening.

We started out with character gen; it took a little while because of thinking about potential with relation to the setting (it's late August, 1851), but after a bit of thinking we arrived at:

• Patrick, playing Sister Basemath Armstrong, a fearless and funny Dog with a Strong Community background. During her initiation she corresponded with a geologist and was able to satisfy both him and the public that dinosaur bones had been left behind in Noah's Flood.
• David, playing Brother Caleb Romney (a distant relation perhaps), a Well-Rounded Dog who is able to employ a coldly logical perspective, track people and he's also pretty handy with a gun. During his initiation time he unfortunately failed to capture a criminal, but this has now spurred him on.
• Steve, playing Brother Paul Usher, a Dog with a Complicated History - not raised in the Faith, but a part of it now. He's rugged, stubborn and has all the traits that you might expect from a western gunslinger. During his initiation he saved a child from a burning building.

After initiations and descriptions of their coats they were given their commission by Brother Emmanuel from the Dog's Temple: go out on a long journey to the southern-most valley where the Faithful live. It's a long time since Dogs have been through that part of the world; give the Stewards letters, help the communities as you see fit and do whatever you have to do to keep the Faith strong in the towns.

We join the Dogs as they come up to a farm outside of the town of King's Bridge.

Dogs and Dice and Decisions

It's Games Night! And tonight I start GMing a game of Dogs In The Vineyard, something which I'm really excited about. It's the first time I've played DitV and also the first time (assuming all goes well) that I'll be GMing something which isn't a oneshot. And we have at least one new player joining our merry band.

I think I have my head wrapped around the dice mechanics and the general principles of "Say yes or roll dice" and "Escalate, escalate, escalate!" Other than that, I'm just interested in playing something a bit different. DitV feels like a breath of fresh air. I thought that setting prep would be difficult, but so far it has been really straightforward. Why? Because they focus on people, what they need, what they want and how far they might go if others (or demons!) push them. And it is so much easier to focus on those fundamentals, the inclinations and breaking points. I have a little map (which I have to redraw to get rid of my notes) and I have notes of circumstances for a few towns and their inhabitants, as well as a paragraph each for those I've not fleshed out yet - I want to see what direction my players take things...

I'll be writing a lot about this over the next few weeks. If I ever finish writing about other dice mechanics I've been interested by I might even get around to thinking about the simple but complex dice of DitV. I can't wait to see it in play.

Thursday Tales

From the Tales From Zero Point Oracle...
Five of Clubs: Uplifted spider-monkey clans worship a pantheon of Echelon-II emulates.
Two of Hearts: A scroll-bearer for a librarians' cult makes a discovery.
Four of Clubs: The League of Docking Bay Families refuses passage to any and all who would attempt ingress.
Ten of Clubs: A HMBT stasis-pod drifts in to Zero Point's gravity well; the occupants awake.

The Echelon-II emulates are machine consciousnesses based on old (but still hyper-advanced) sentient software; the cores available to them in the Eighth Level Arboretum are merely functional at best. They can still think at far faster rates than humans. Or uplifts, like the Spider-monkey Clans that bring them processors, drives and other tech as offerings. The uplifts know that the Echelon-II gods are not divine, but they are technology indistinguishable from magic - and to be obeyed. One day, the gods request a very dangerous offering...

The Scroll-bearer is a junior functionary in the Sophos Cult. They track and worship knowledge - especially precious paper based media. The Scroll-bearer finds information that a lost enemy stasis pod is approaching Zero Point. The Cult has known this for years, and known that the HMBTs inside would surely wake, surge through the station and kill all inside. The Cult suppressed the knowledge because this apocalypse seemed inevitable...

The Docking Bay Families have been ordered to lock off the entire docking bay, and to do everything they can to repel the HMBTs. They are not optimistic. A Salvage-boy wonders if there might be another way when he receives a shortwave radio signal from a nearby habitat area. The sender claims to be a digital deity...

The PCs
A Spider-monkey: The alpha-warrior in the tribe, a faithful servant of the Pantheon. Called on by the "gods" to serve and to aide the Scroll-bearer. A true believer in the power of the Pantheon, he calls the HMBTs "space devils". His best interest is to kill a space devil and thus earn eternal glory.
The Scroll-bearer: Has a digital treasure trove of information about the HMBTs, and knows how to access their equipment. She needs help to get there because the Docking Bay Families have secured most of the passages. Her best interest is to use the information she has to stop the HMBTs.
The Salvage-boy: He knows all of the ways in and out of the docking bay circle, including the unblocked passages. The Echelon-IIs have promised him some truly great tech if he helps them. And what other choice does he have? His best interest is to help the Scroll-bearer and the Spider-monkey. This may be thwarted because others in the Docking Bay Families will see it as their duty to prevent any access, HMBT or otherwise.

The NPCs (lots of them!)
The Sophos Cult: They did the maths in years past that plotted when the stasis pod would return. Zero Point no longer has external defences to divert the pod away. They have gathered knowledge for years, with only a few knowing the true purpose: a faint hope that the apocalypse of the arriving HMBTs can be averted. Their best interests are to keep searching; if they think all hope is lost then they will become maudlin and possibly suicidal.
Spider-monkeys: A long-forgotten experiment gifted these creatures with human-level intelligence. Still slightly primitive even though they know the nature of the world. It is in their best interest to help the Pantheon.
Echelon-II Pantheon: If they can get access to a HMBT computer core they should be able to instantiate into a faster existence. And if they do that they may be able to find a way to defeat the HMBTs. A lot of ifs. It is in their best interests to convince representatives of the spider-monkey clans, the Sophos Cult and the Docking Bay Families to work for them. Their long term goals are unclear...
Docking Bay Families: Normally they deal with arriving ships and provide services. A central Zero Point AI has tasked them to hold the HMBTs at bay at all costs, and to allow access only to war mechs which are several days away (having to navigate through internal corridors and broken travel tubes). It is in their best interests to follow orders, but more fundamentally to stop the HMBTs and gain prestige for their caste.
The HMBTs: That's "Hideous Murdering Bug Things". When they gain access to Zero Point they will start xenoforming everything in sight. They will kill, maim and destroy, and find ways to reproduce. No-one knows quite how their reproductive cycle works - they were always too hostile to study - but they capture, kill and eat a lot of living creatures to do so. Their best interest is to get past the docking bay and into the habitats.

Thursday Tales

The Tales From Zero Point Oracle delivers something a little different...
Queen of Spades: A trio of crippled friends, none human, all without fear and destined for adventure.
Six of Clubs: A starscraper lies empty, save for the man who tries to maintain it.
Nine of Diamonds: A slum lord depressurizes a section of the station because his tenants can't pay the rent.
Seven of Spades: An epochs-old damaged war mech, one functioning weapons pod and cracked lenses, guarding the last repository of original art.

The Caretaker lives in a starscraper that is owned by the Slum Lord. He's the last person living there after the Slum Lord depressurised it because of "non-payment of tithes". The Slum Lord sees himself as a feudal baron, and because he has access codes to local environmental controls (among other things) he will see his will be done. He has some retainers, police thugs, and most of the tenants were evicted beforehand. He is waiting for them to disperse before he can repressurise it and claim their belongings, then advertise the starscraper as new living/business space. Living in the far future, his thinking is trapped in a hybrid 12th/20th century model. He holds secure a treasure trove of art, acting as banker and broker for minor art houses (some legit, some not).

The Trio lived in the outer floors of the starscraper, on the 110th floor out to space, in a relatively low gravity environment away from the core of Zero Point. They were soldiers, variously an uplifted dolphin, an uplifted wolf and a neanderthal. Wounded in battle, they retired to live out their remaining years in peace and quiet. Until now. They have left the starscraper in some basic mobility suits, but need both power, shelter and revenge on the Slum Lord... A plan is formed.

The PCs
The Dolphin: is totally reliant on the suit that she wears. A muscle paralyser dart has reduced her motor functions, and besides she can't get around on land easily without it. In the water she can get about. Her best interests are to locate the art and to have revenge on the Slum Lord.
The Wolf: has two cybernetic hind legs, and has cognitive brain functions boosted by implants. Consequently he is tactically brilliant, even if his mobility is not what it once was. His best interest is to rip the throat out of the Slum Lord.
The Neanderthal: lost his arms and eyes in combat. He has excellent vision now, his eyes boost light in multiple wavelengths and "see" what the station sees (where service allows), but his arms are very basic models, and do not fit with his body type at all. His best interest is to take the Slum Lord's place and attempt to lead well (not as a tyrant).

The NPCs
The Slum Lord: an evil greedy bastard, basically. Not too smart, but not stupid either. If there's an angle, he wants to play it. The artworks are a nest egg; he gets a cut of their appreciating value, and a cut when transactions are made. Usually, everything stays in the vault, which is guarded by the Mech: a great big ancient City Pacifier, capable of controlling a city district of 10^6 sentients single-handedly. Luckily it doesn't have the firepower it once had... Right? The Slum Lord's best interest is to do whatever it takes to get the Caretaker out of the starscraper, to establish total control, kill anyone he has to and make a lot of money.
The Caretaker: a middle-aged man, trying to find a way to usurp the starscraper controls away from the Slum Lord, hopefully permanently. If he can do that then hopefully the former tenants can move back in, and form a proper defence against the Slum Lord's future ambitions. He has a few floors pressurised, and otherwise gets around in an atmosphere rig. His best interest is to get control of the starscraper and re-pressurise it. If possible he may want to try and lock out the Slum Lord's access permanently. (could work as a PC)
Various Thugs: a motley crew of ne'er-do-wells and mercs, they do what the Slum Lord says. He pays them. Their best interest is to get the job done and drink themselves stupid afterwards. Nuff said.
Former Starscraper Tenants: have set up a shanty town nearby to the starscraper. Thugs keep harassing them, but so far it is mostly for fun. The Slum Lord will want them to be moved soon though, so that he can sell up the facilities. Their leader has lived in the starscraper for her whole life, and is uncomfortable at the fringes of the Zero Point habitat. The Tenants' best interest is to hold out and reclaim their homes.

The trio jump out to me as protagonists, but maybe that is because the Paralympics start today. I also like the idea of the themes about justice and revenge. If the Slum Lord is taken out then there may be some social justice, but possibly through the lens of revenge... Why does the Neanderthal want to lead in the place of the Slum Lord? What is the motivation?

What do you see in the Oracle?

Some thoughts on a Time Travel RPG

I've been thinking about how a time travel tabletop RPG for some time now, wondering how it could be put together in a neat way without being burdensome in terms of rules. noisms is responsible for two provocations that started me thinking about it. The first was introducing me to Microscope, which works really well in terms of role-playing and world-building, and which has the neat mechanism of populating a worldline with cards that put things in historical places.

While playing it I thought about how the end result was really neat, but that if you took a picture at the end you might not have a clear picture of the timeline of the player actions (i.e., the order in which the group put things down). A simple way around this would be to just number the cards as they come in to play. That was the first seed which went in to my mind.

The second thing that noisms did was talk about Continuum on his blog:

Part of [what makes Continuum compelling] is all the talk of time-travel combat: trying to "frag" your opponent by making him cease to exist due to historical discrepancy. And undoubtedly, a large part of the attraction was the air of enigma surrounding this apparently excellent but impossible-to-possess gaming grimoire.

But he went on to say that there were plenty of reviews and notes out there from people who had played the game that it inevitably lead to a kind of railroading. Not so much Doctor Who as the Time Tunnel by the sounds of it: instead of exploring the whole of time and space to explore you have to contend with a "mission" at a particular instant. Again, I have not played Continuum, but having played RPGs that have been presented to me more as "story games" the idea of this described game doesn't appeal all that much.

But it did spark a couple of ideas... (continued after cut!)

Game Idea: Mystery Novel

This is a sketch of an idea: if anyone knows of an already existing game like this then please let me know, I want to play it!

A Microscope/Cluedo hybrid game. Together the players work to simultaneously create and uncover an Agatha Christie style murder. I'm really thinking of the way that information is presented, uncovered and connections made, a little like a Poirot story.

Perhaps the following elements could be used in some way:

• Every turn a player draws a card and Oracle-style this gives a provocation as to a clue or to the investigation. Or random tables could help populate a setting with 1920s/1930s upper class characters with murder in mind, and also introduce other plot elements, objects or artifacts.
• Microscope-style event placing leads to finding out what happened - or what people think they saw happening - with the timeline being populated by only scenes (no events or periods).
• There could be a rough positioning of scenes in to three periods perhaps, "Before the Murder", "During the Murder", "The Investigation."
• One feature of Poirot novels is the fact that he is the only detective (save for Chief Inspector Japp, who invariably has the wrong end of the stick). Perhaps the GM could be the detective - in that sense determining the focus at times to allow the other players reign to be characters, bring to light evidence or lay red herrings.
• Each player could have their own little playbook of random tables that is distinct from the others.
• Rotating GMship could occur between games to allow players to take turns being "the Detective" and being "the Suspects."

I think there is some scope here; my "little grey cells" are working away trying to draw some attention to possibilities, and to make connections between others.

Games Night: GHOST/ECHO

noisms has already beat me to writing about games night, where we played GHOST/ECHO. GHOST/ECHO is really stripped down, which is pretty freeing I think. We were using it as part of our shared universe that we generated with Microscope, and were playing it as a one-shot in just one of the events that we had determined.

'Blueprints' for Zero Point Way Station stolen by spies

GHOST/ECHO works by giving provocative words - names for PCs like Coil, Demon, Grip, names for places like Heartbreak Square, Echo Park, and names for 'Wraiths' (enemies) like Dogs, Spiders, Hawks - as jumping on points, and a really simple but deep dice mechanic (more on that in a moment). The names really worked well as the provocations for an interesting world, that just kept building up around us. We "knew" some things already, there was a hint of what kind of tech level the world was at (from our Microscope play), and the rest just came along as we encountered it.

I really liked the concept of the "Ghost World" that we came up with ultimately: a globally persistent augmented reality that had been partially corrupted, somehow infected and then abandoned. People still went there (we went in to look at a dead letter drop) and it was safe from snooping because any sane person would stay out, lest whatever does exist in there should hunt you down. Quite a chilling place. I'd be interested in playing another round of something where that was a part of proceedings.
 
The dice mechanic for GHOST/ECHO works like this: in any situation where you roll dice, you have your Goal and a possible Danger - kill someone and take damage, hack someone's brain and suffer neural feedback, etc. You roll two d6s, high is good, and then you choose where you assign each die: so if you roll two 6s then you have your goal and avoid the danger.

But say you are in a knife fight with a street-thief: you roll your dice, and get a 6 and a 2. What do you do? Do you stab the guy in the throat (6) but suffer an injury yourself (2), or do you fumble shivving the guy (2) but manage to dodge his blade (6)? It's an interesting mechanism, almost like compounding the "what do you do?" of Apocalypse World - the GM asks you "what do you do?" to state your intentions, but also "what do you do?" when you get the result of a roll. This is a pretty neat mechanic, and means that you can avoid stats and everything. It's not about how strong you are, how tough you are or how dexterous.

Another great thing from the table last night: Patrick, at the start of the game gave us ten syllables to describe the equipment that our characters have. I will have to remember that for future games.

Next Games Night: a story from Zero Point Way Station, another one-shot, generated by an In A Wicked Age style Oracle. And I'm GMing!

Two Game Ideas

These are just the seeds of things that I was thinking about over the weekend. Maybe there is something interesting in these; maybe not. I am not sure where they might lead, I'm just trying to capture them somewhere.

Smiley Faces
Law enforcement in a dystopian future where everyone is supposed to be happy. What if there was crime? What crime would people commit? Who might criminals be? What would they gain? And what would law enforcement professionals be like?
I see this as an Oracle-starting game, it's all about the storytelling, filling in the blanks from both players and GM. The dice mechanic should be there to add some spice to things, so that events can go badly sometimes. In principle, I want to see other ways of negotiation dice/player negotiation to resolve things.
There might be a system out there already which would just natively support this.

Starts on a Spaceship
Make it as big or as small as you like. The players are senior crew. What are their positions? What are their responsibilities? (perhaps they don't have a command structure in the same way that, say, Starfleet does)
After twenty minutes of routine shipboard stuff, minor engineering stuff, maybe crew command decisions, the ship is hit by something. Something big. What do you do?
Does the ship crash? Does it reach that small planetoid? The captain is dead. ("HE'S DEAD JIM!") What do you do?
The ship reaches the moon, most of the crew are dead. The engines are fused metal and crystals. Scans of the planet were strange. Possible signs of native intelligence. What do you do?
The ship doesn't reach the moon, and is adrift, venting atmosphere. The captain is dead. ("I'M A DOCTOR NOT THE MESSIAH!") What do you do?
There are strange noises/scans coming from the section of the ship that was hit/Lt Redshirt didn't come back from the perimeter patrol. What do you do?
More importantly: how are you going to get back to civilisation?

The second hints at possible undiscovered life etc, but perhaps it might be interesting to do it as an ultra-hard sci-fi, where it is all about the decisions and consequences of humans in the void.

More Microscope

My friend P, from our gaming group, has put together a timeline of the space-time continuum that we built on Tuesday playing Microscope and posted it on his blog. Go and check it out, it's particularly cool I think, especially for paragraphs like this:

Karl-4 the Hyper-Neanderthal President of Humanity is persuaded to let Echelon VII lead the Ontological-Warhead strike by Stanislaw Brock the Grand Hierophant of Earth. Echelon VII will encode humanity in the Sun's Corona then seed Jupiter with self-creating nanoswarms that will transform the Jovian mass into a Hypermind that can re-constitute and recreate mankind. Sigmund Ross - Chief Warlock, and mutated psychic, and Augustus Schwarzkopf, 11-Star General of the United Military of Mankind, decide not to accept the offer and will stay and to fight to the death.

(yes, that really is how things played out; we took every single half-remembered hard sci-fi idea we had ever heard and spewed them out over the course of three hours)

Really looking forward to our first one-shot game in this shared universe now!

Games Night: Microscope

As we don't have a regular campaign/game running at the moment we decided to play Microscope last night. This was for two reasons:

1. It's a really great, engaging and fun game to play.
2. We're going to use the shared universe we created last night as the jumping off point for a series of one-shots and mini-campaigns that we're going to play over the coming months.

It was my third time playing, and again we started from scratch in our universe-building. It was the first time that we had played it as a whole group, but it didn't take too long before we settled in to the groove of establishing periods, then events and then launching into (often) crazy scenes. We were detailing a hard science, space opera, man reaches for the stars universe. For a flavour of things, this is what our "yes and no" lists looked like.

Yes

• Technological plagues
• FTL travel
• Geneered humans
• "Horrible costs for psychic powers"
• Mechs and powersuits
• F*cked up but explainable alien demons
• Artificial consciousness

No

• TNG humanoids ("no bumpy fore-headed aliens speaking English!")
• Terraforming
• Single biome planets ("welcome to desert world", "welcome to frozen world", "welcome to the land of hats!")
• Time travel (other than normal relativistic effects)

This was quite a departure from previous shared-world-building with Microscope, as previously we had always gone for more fantasy-style settings. It worked though, just as it had in the past. We had a really rich and varied timeline building up, with concentrations of interest around the first near-collapse of humanity (centring around very small, personal moments) and an incursion into our reality by Schwarm-Laden beings from beyond normal space-time. Imagine being on the bridge of the only starship, when a wave of 5 times 10^15 ships from beyond ab-reality arrives, too many ships occupying the same space, computers and space marines going insane...

Really, really good fun (so much so that two of us were crying with laughter at one role-played scene), and will lead in to next week's first one-shot/mini-campaign, based around the game GHOST/ECHO.

TNG Season 8/In A Wicked Age Mashup

I've been thinking about Oracles since I had so much fun with In A Wicked Age last week. I cannot be the first person to think about them as a great way, not only of setting up one-shot games, but of developing campaigns, quests and the like in much longer games.

I've also really been loving the Twitter account, @TNG_S8, which are the always humourous, always plausible synopses of the continuing Season 8 adventures of the Enterprise-D. It hit me this morning when P and D from my game group retweeted a few that @TNG_S8 - or something very much like it - would make for a great game, and something which could be set up and played very, very speedily using the mechanics of In A Wicked Age.

There are six dice pools in In A Wicked Age, and I think that only a few of them would have to be renamed, if, for example, the player characters were restricted slightly to play Starfleet personnel. The mechanics would work exactly the same, rolling when in conflict, each character carrying a different strength. Data and Picard might be a bit too powerful for player characters (special strengths, Android and Captain respectively). Riker, Troi, Crusher and Geordi should all be fine, Worf too.

I'm not sure if this would be the most serious game in the world - but it would make for some interesting plots I think. And it could be interesting as well to play a game that was formatted a little like a genre TV show. noisms has told me about a game before which was a little like this - it was maybe called Primetime Adventures? I might have to check it out.

All in all, perhaps something worth tinkering with! I have other ideas running in the background about Oracle based games. There are so many settings which it could work well with; and I'm convinced that in terms of providing background events for a long running game it could be really, really useful. More thoughts on that another time perhaps.

Counting Stories

In yesterday's post I posed the following question:

How many stories are there in the manual for In A Wicked Age?

In A Wicked Age has four Oracles - Blood & Sex, God-kings of War, the Unquiet Past and a Nest of Vipers. To start a game the GM and players select one Oracle to draw elements from, and then pick 4 cards (let's assume randomly) from a standard 52 card deck of playing cards. These cards are then matched up to references within the tables for each Oracle.

Let's assume (wrongly, but go with me on this) that the number of stories is the same as the number of sets of four elements that we can take. This being the case, our magic number can be found by multiplying

The Number of Oracles

times The Number of Ways One Can Draw 4 Cards from a 52 Card Deck

times The Number of Ways One Can Arrange 4 Cards

First and last things first: we have 4 Oracles - we've said that quite a few times! If you lay out four cards in an ordered row - any four, distinct cards - then you have 4 choices for what you put down first, 3 choices for what goes second, 2 choices for what you put in third place and only 1 choice for the last one (i.e., whatever card you have left in your hand).

The number of arrangements of 4 distinct objects is thus 4*3*2*1 = 24. In general we can use the notation n! to denote the arrangement of n objects (and we interpret this as "n factorial").

So, how many ways can we take 4 cards from a 52 card deck? Interpreting and explaining the notation is a matter of combinatorial maths, in particular combinations, and while it is not difficult it would take a bit of time to explain here. So if you're really interested, go and read it on Wikipedia!

In maths, if we want to count the number of ways of taking 4 distinct objects from 52 distinct objects then we can denote this as "52C4" which we could read as "52 choose 4". Again, looking at Wikipedia will tell you mathematically what that comes to.

But here we can now say that the number of set of elements from Oracles, and hence the number of stories in In A Wicked Age is:

4 Oracles times 270,725 card draws times 24 ways of arranging cards.

Which is 25,989,600 stories!!! AKA, lots!

While this makes for good maths fun times, I did state further up that there was an incorrect assumption with this process. The maths makes for interesting times, but the assumption that the number of sets of elements is the same as the number of stories is wrong. It has to be.

People interpret things differently. That's one underlying reason. Two days ago, when GMing, we had the element "the guardian of a tomb, a statue cast in silver with ruby eyes". I took that to be, and started coming up with ideas based around the statue BEING the guardian. One of my players, P, took it to be two provocations, that there was someone in the game who was a guardian, and that there was a silver statue with ruby eyes. Already, that's two ways of looking at things.

But:

• The statue could be like a golem, prowling the tomb.
• It could be that an eye is missing.
• It could be that the guardian is a man who pilots the statue like a mecha of some kind.
• The statue might not be humanoid (I definitely don't want to tick off a silver spider guardian).
• Or it might be really small, a foot high only.

There are all kinds of ways of taking these elements, these inspirations.

The maths of this is fun: in In A Wicked Age, the invention and creativity of making a story collaboratively is even more fun, both for GM and players.