Fictions & Fragments

I'm taking the long way around to another Cypher System hack. There is a lot to love about the Cypher System; in this case I want to emphasize the ease of creating NPCs and other entities by level. The Cypher System uses levels to abstract everything outside of player characters. They're generally rated 1-10 with 10 being the best. When you compare 2 things and they have different levels, the one with the higher level wins. You can make quick decisions based on that system or do things in a more granular fashion using these same rules. So here are some things I want to lay out in Cypher System for a monster battling setting. 1. Easy monster creation and ways to classify weakness/strength based on type. This would be something like: Splash (Level 3 Water Mon) Water Type is Strong against Earth types and Weak against Wood types. 2. Character Types based upon Monster Battling. Revising the default types of Cypher (Warrior, Adept, Explorer, Speaker) to be based around...

I haven't posted anything in a while! It's been a busy time. Day job work has been more intense and I've done less direct game design and more game running. I've also had the very pleasant opportunity to play Dungeons & Dragons on a schedule that works for me via play-by-post! So all in all, while there's been a change here, things are continuing like normal. But I wasn't posting here, and sharing my game ideas has always been an outlet for me, even if no one reads or comments on them. I like to keep myself accountable for designing and adding to the conversation on games. I've read a lot of fantastic blogs lately including work by Rob Donaghue of Fate and a developer on Pathfinder who also is making an RPG called Delve. I've been reading about representation, diversity and how to keep your gaming group strong and feeling like their ideas are included in the game. I've been playing more, and trying to give the lead away to the players m...

I've been reading a lot of quick starts for games recently. These are the short 30-page-ish versions of games that are designed to entice you to buy a full-priced product. I generally find these lacking in one way or another, which can keep me from buying the game altogether. The Gamemaster (GM) section of a book is really important to me. There are many games where I skip it altogether, but in others I really enjoy the rules. Some of my favorite books for GM sections are the Cypher System Rulebook by Monte Cook Games, Blades in the Dark by One-Seven Design and Fate Core from Evil Hat Productions. They all have good examples and advice for Gamemasters to prepare their games. I've found that there are a few things that are really important to me to understand a game. 1. A well-explained task resolution system. I feel like most games need a single primary mechanic, which needs to be well-explained with examples and commentary. Fantasy Flight Games' Star Wars series does...

I've realized lately that I'm doing something very different from the play examples in Cypher System books. I've been telling my players the difficulty levels of everything before they roll. I think this is because the majority of my games have been one-shots, demos and short arcs at home. But I like it! There's been little consistent growth in play, so it's been natural for me to make things really transparent for players. Here's what I mean: A player attempts a task. They describe it, saying what they want to do. I tell them the difficulty number (i.e. 5) and what they have to roll to beat it (15). We use Skills and Assets to modify the difficulty. They get the opportunity to apply Effort. Then we roll. That's how I've been running the game. I notice that the Play Examples in the book and most games I've seen keep difficulties secret. I think this is a natural thing in role-playing games but I don't know if I like the practice. It seems to...

I recently ran my first streamed Numenera game. The following are the notes I made for the session. This was a one-shot, so I focused on the scenario and how players would respond to it. I don't typically create a lot of notes for a game so I feel this is a good representation of my prep. I also feel like there are a couple things that really add to a Numenera game: XP cards and  a Cypher Deck. The XP cards make it easy and fun to trade in XP during the game, which I really like. The Cypher Deck makes the chore of generating random Cyphers painless and fun. I definitely recommend these products! The adventure notes follow with additional after-game notes made in italics. The Dangerous End Background Sallice A settlement on the edge of the Steadfast, Sallice is dangerously situated but the opportunities are too good to pass up. Recently the market for Numenera found in surrounding ruins has made Sallice a target. More raiders and abhumans are appearing, attem...

This Saturday I did my first Twitch stream of Numenera. I've been streaming D&D for about 11 months and this was my contribution to the growing energy of the Numenera 2 Kickstarter. The group that we assembled was mostly first-time Numenera players. The exception was a friend who has played Numenera twice with me before at Meetup events. It was a blast! I made myself nervous with my initial scenario, which was intended to tie into the Ellomyr narrative of the Kickstarter. As the KS campaign went forward my scenario fell out of touch with what had been unveiled. I tried a couple of revisions but knocked out my final scenario that morning in about 45 minutes. The players were amazing. They went through the Numenera Player's Guide in the days before the game and got their characters set. They developed connections between themselves and gave me a lot of detail to work with! As much as I love reading the Numenera setting, my players immediately started declaring details an...

I love Harry Potter! At home we talked about the idea of a Harry Potter game, inspired by Mark Plourde as mentioned on the Cypher Speak Podcast. So here's 2 ways to handle it: as a Fate skill system. In Fate Core, the game expects 18 skills. Here's a trial of mapping Hogwarts school subjects to skills. Apparition Astronomy Arithmancy Care of Magical Creatures Charms Defense Against the Dark Arts Divination Dueling - replace Fight and Shoot Flying Lessons - replace Drive Herbology History of Magic - replace Lore Muggle Studies Potions - replace Crafts Transfiguration also non-school subjects Contacts Provoke Rapport Resources The school subjects cover almost everything I'd want in a Harry Potter game, but I wanted to be able to explain why the Malfoys are so well-known and connected without using school subjects, so Contacts and Resources stayed in from Fate Core. Additionally, Provoke and Rapport seem important for dealing with other wizards (and perh...

One of the best ways to keep a Cypher System game interesting is to use GM Intrusions! I've found that they take the place of random/wandering monster encounters, add dramatic or comedic moments to games and give GMs an opportunity to reward or challenge players when a session demands it. To explain the idea to the unfamiliar, Experience Points are a currency in the Cypher System. You use them to re-roll and to declare story details, similar to FATE or FFG's Star Wars RPGs. In a GM Intrusion, the GM gives a player 2 XP - 1 is a reward the player keeps for themself, the other they give to another player. As a GM, you need to give out a couple of XP during a game, otherwise your players may not be able to make character advances at the end of a session. Those XP can be crucial for re-rolling failed rolls and keeping the story favoring the characters! As a GM, your reward for helping your players gain this crucial currency is to craft an exciting moment for the game in the for...

I've been interested in FATE for a while. It's a great premise for a game system but so different from games like D&D that I'm really taking some time to wrap my head around it. One of the great things about FATE is that there are so many great ideas in the base material! The Evil Hat Patreon/Worlds of Fate series has amazing ideas. The Fate System Toolkit and Adversary Toolkit are awesome products - in fact, the Regency Romance spread in the Adversary Toolkit will probably be the first FATE game I run, because it's something my wife has wanted for a long time. The hardest thing to understand how to do well in FATE is aspects. Suggestions in Fate Core is that aspects have both positive and negative connotations as well as boundaries. Instead of 'Strongest Man Alive', a good aspect would be 'Strongest Man in the State'. That final quality defines the possibility of conflict with other 'strong men' in other states. There are many other th...

Game Master (GM or in D&D, DM) prep is a chore. No matter how much you love world building and creating stories, there is a lot to get done in order to play a game. Generally, GMs end up handling scheduling, educating players about the game, creating stories and maintaining the flow of the game. To make things as easy as possible, the Cypher System uses a simple level system to determine difficulties and levels of effect. This can be a wonderful thing when you want to focus your prep time on stories and interactions. The level system is very simple and applies to everything the GM is responsible for. The difficulty of a task is given a level from 1-10 (sometimes greater). To achieve success, a player needs to roll equal to or higher than the difficulty * 3 on a 2-sided die (d20). So a level 10 difficulty requires a 30 (which is impossible) and a level 1 is a 3. Anything that is a difficulty 0 is automatically successful. To create Non-Player Characters (NPCs), traps, Cyphers ...

Some of my general favorite things about Cypher System games versus other RPGs: The game plays fast. I very rarely find myself looking things up. I typically prefer to bookmark pages I think I need on the PDF rule books and keep the books off the table. It works really well! The players have all the agency. They can decide what things to spend Effort on and what to ignore. Players take a little bit of convincing that an expendable resource like the Pools or cyphers should be used, but by the end of a first session, I find most acclimate to the system. The DM doesn't roll dice. It's a lot easier to act like the players' friend and advocate when you don't try to kill them with hot dice. Predation in particular is awesome because it has dinosaurs. It's even better because it combines dinosaurs with future technology. We played the whole game grinning and having a good time. Character creation was fast! With 3 players, we created a Karn (warrior), Tec ...