Fictions & Fragments

I just ran my roughest game in a long, long time. The issues in the game were things that could have been prevented or mitigated, but instead I had to do damage control and bring things to a halt. Some of the lessons I learned (again): Safety tools need to be introduced. Use a session zero or pre-session to assess how a group works together.. No game is better than bad game. If you want to use something during your game, prep it. Safety tools need to be introduced No one wants to cause a problem or halt a game. Everyone came to play, so players will put off a lot before they find themselves objecting to the direction of the game. As a gamemaster (GM) I outlined a series of safety tools and put them in the game prep area. I congratulated myself on doing that before I even put in character creation steps. Then I promptly left them alone until there was a problem. When there was conflict between players, I could have handled it sooner. When I did handle it, the offended play...

These are some quick ideas about Talents for Harry Potter characters. The first are Rank 1 Talents for characters by house, expanding their Career Skills. Gryffindor Rank 1 - Gryffindor Student: Cool becomes a Career Skill for you. Hufflepuff Rank 1 - Hufflepuff Student: Survival becomes a Career Skill for you. Ravenclaw Rank 1 - Ravenclaw Student - Perception becomes a Career Skill for you. Slytherin Rank 1 - Slytherin Student - Skulduggery becomes a Career Skill for you.

Careers are an important way of defining core skills for a character type. Since all the HP characters are Hogwarts students, I tried to frame Careers like cliques, describing how the character expresses themselves and their motivation at school. The Careers I decided upon are Athletic, Mischievious, Popular and Studious. Everyone gets Arcana as a Career skill, because a HP game is going to rely upon using magic. Athletic Athletics Discipline Coordination Perception Piloting (as Riding(Broom)) Resilience Brawl Leadership Mischevious Alchemy (as Potions) Coordination Skulduggery Stealth Streetwise Arcana Deception Negotiation Popular Cool Vigilance Arcana Charm Coercion Deception Leadership Negotiation Studious Alchemy (as Potions) Discipline Mechanics Medicine Vigilance Arcana Knowledge(Magical) Knowledge(Magical Creatures)

Getting into Careers reminded me that Genesys Skills need some updating for Harry Potter! The basic skills in the game include: General Skills Alchemy --> Potions Astrocartography (removed) Athletics Conputers (Muggle skill) Cool Coordination Discipline Driving (Muggle skill) Mechanics Medicine Operating Perception Piloting --> Flying(Broom) Resilience Riding --> Riding(Animal) Skulduggery Stealth Streetwise Survival Vigilance Magic Skills Arcana Divine (removed) Primal (removed) Combat Brawl Gunnery Melee Ranged Social Charm Coercion Deception Leadership Negotiation Knowledge Knowledge --> Knowledge(Muggle) Knowledge(Magical) Knowledge(Dark Arts) Knowledge(Magical Creatures) This is a very general mapping of skills. At this point there's no need for heavy redesign but some of the skills have little use in Harry Potter. Others, like Divine and Primal don't reflect the world that we've seen so far through the s...

I like Harry Potter. It's something I can share with my whole family, because everyone is a fan, so it's a constant interest of mine to see Harry Potter and the Hogwarts world in RPG systems. Genesys seems like a very good candidate for this. It has a very open magic system that seems like it would work well with HP. Something I enjoy about the idea of Genesys is the narrative dice system. My goal in creating an HP game is to have a co-GM game where my wife and I can play without feeling the burden of creating stories rests on either of us. I'm also happy that Genesys uses incremental (non-level) character gains. It seems to me like it fits the HP model well. So running down character creation step by step in Genesys, first you need a Background for your character. This is more descriptive than statistical. You answer questions about your character's life and upbringing pre-game. In my HP example, I want to start with Year 1 Hogwarts students, so the Background w...

As an idea for starting or fleshing out a campaign, consider using the characters' backgrounds to help you determine the important people and places of your starting campaign setting. Backgrounds are a great tool for describing how characters relate to the game setting, so lean into it and use them to make your initial location matter to your players. Start your game prep with getting your players together and having them make characters. This can be done in person, which is a terrific way to see how people work together and get them comfortable collaborating on story ideas, or online using something like a shared chat. In this example, the key element of the characters will be the Backgrounds. When you're talking over backgrounds with your players, think about how likely they are to be useful in the game. If your game is a one-shot or short campaign, make sure the background will see some use! In a city or town game the Outlander's background feature may not see a l...

Planning for Session 1 of Fate Accelerated (FAE) Caper,. I am likely to have 3 players and I have 5 roles. This is a game heavily based upon the TV show Leverage, which I have seen a ton of. As a review, the 5 roles are: Hitter, Hacker, Thief, Grifter and Mastermind. Out of these 5 roles, I think the Mastermind is the easiest to remove. I think it makes sense to abstract away the planning of the heist and treat the Mastermind character as an NPC who contributes a Game Aspect of "Planned for this". This allows all the players to benefit from the Mastermind's role without requiring someone to play them. Since there is still one role left over, I think that the same thing could be done with the remaining role. Hitter, Hacker, Thief and Grifter all have particular things they specialize in. The role not chosen can be represented with a Game Aspect of "Hitter", "Hacker", etc. If I had to choose a role to be represented this way, I would probably choose...

A show my wife and I really enjoy is Leverage. The writing is great, the show doesn't get too dark and the premise is fun. There is a Leverage RPG out of print which I recently found at a used book store but didn't find interesting. I decided I'd rather remake the premise in Fate Accelerated. I'm calling it Caper because it 1. is about stealing things 2. evokes a sense of fun and whimsy so that things don't get too grim. Fate Accelerated (FAE) is simple and easy to get involved in. It's been seen as the system for Rollplay Nebula Jazz and the Dresden Files Accelerated (DFA). It's just like Fate Core but with a set of Approaches instead of a series of skills. I've enjoyed the way that DFA implemented Mantles, which as Classes/Roles/Playbooks that add some focus to character creation. Roles For this game, I wanted to define a few roles that work like Mantles. They are directly taken from Leverage. The characters from Leverage each have very clear ro...

Working with an idea for a new D&D campaign, I want to provide lots of freedom for play, allowing players to contribute to the world, but I also want to have a central direction for the story and a drive to play. With that in mind, I want to design a small part of the Rediscovered Land, Shuul, that the characters can immediately access, as well as a small sampling of powers that influence the characters. Worship in the Outlands Everything outside of Shuul. These are the realms known to the characters. In the Outlands, divine worship is common but given little emphasis. Everyone says the name of a deity or deities but few truly believe. Temples are small and tend to be universal, serving as places of worship for many disparate deities. The powers of nature commonly worshiped by druids are known but given grudging respect. Outlanders consider nature a foe to be fought; much of the territory surrounding the Outlands is claimed by dangerous beasts such as dragons. Finally, b...

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...

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...