|
 Imagine that the NFL and the Premier League and the Rugby Union all got subsumed by one supersport and everyone who liked sport in the world watched it. That sport is Arenaball. And you get to play it. In the world of New Pangaea, though, that may be a blessing or a curse. Players play as a five-man Arenaball team, both playing the exciting game of Arenaball (using a 52 card deck plus Jokers) and competing to move up the league ladder and playing their personal lives/off the field activities (using a Tarot deck) which affect their play on the field. Think Shin Megami Tensei: Persona meets Blood Bowl.
|
#
¿
Jul 28, 2012 18:00
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 23:57 |
|
|
Design Outline & Ad Blurb for Arenaball https://docs.google.com/document/d/1XgBLhV6J0N-OCUEGllELg5nuPLp53XWm7JLjyeltQ8A/edit EDIT: Phew! Just made it. 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 1, 2012 01:05
|
|
|
Jurors shouldn't just get "convinced" to one side or the other immediately, perhaps? You could just have stages of convincing - they start on the fence, and then whichever side gets them to however many Good Argument Points first convinces them, and once they're convinced one way it makes it harder to convince them of the opposite (maybe halving the points they get from a good argument?). Juror 1 - Neutral Juror 2 - +2 Prosecution Juror 3 - +2 Defense Prosecution flips to a 7, Defense flips to a 4. Prosecution gets 3 Good Argument Points. Juror 1 - +3 Prosecution Juror 2 - +5 Prosecution and is Convinced of Prosecution Juror 3 - +2 Defense, +3 Prosecution Prosecution flips to a 2, Defense flips to a 3, with the Judge giving the Defense an additional +4. Defense gets 5 Good Argument Points. Juror 1 - +3 Prosecution, +5 Defense and is Convinced of Defense Juror 2 - +5 Prosecution, +2.5 Defense, Convinced of Prosecution Juror 3 - +7 Defense, +3 Prosecution and is Convinced of Defense
|
|
#
¿
Aug 2, 2012 14:20
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:Reviews It looks like you're going through the thread in order and missed mine; can I politely request you do one for Arenaball as well? I'd love to get another set of eyes on it. VV Rad, thanks! VV
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2012 17:47
|
|
|
Mors Rattus posted:There's another reference to backups; is this a sports thing I'm just not getting? Just that most sports teams in the real world have about twice as many players as they need in case of injury, etc. - but it would be super lame to have a player in an RPG have to roleplay sitting out a game because of injury. I'm actually leaning towards getting rid of the injuries entirely, because I don't think they add anything. I might just kill those references. Thanks!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 3, 2012 23:10
|
|
|
Ode To The Players 'Twas five o'clock, before the sun had set and sent the eager bookies to the halls to place upon tomorrow's teams a bet; that one should win, the other take the fall. But in the stadium the lights did twinkle, the sound of pads colliding shook the sky, the coach's face was furrowed with a wrinkle, a furious glare a'pouring from his eye. "Again!" the shout erupted from his lips, and dutif'ly the players did engage, "Again!" he screamed, "explode more from your hips!" but naught the players did could quell his rage. At last, the player's will was all but strangled, they gasped for breath, poured water on their heads. They made it through, their bodies not yet mangled; though all their minds could ponder were their beds. But as each lay upon their mattress dear, the 'morrow's game began to seem so real. Their first game of Arenaball this year, the moment they'd prepared for with such zeal. At last, they fell asleep beneath the sheets, their snoring loud enough to wake the dead. So grab your pencils, and your player sheets, it's you who gets to live inside their head. Oh! Will you guide them to a season fill'd with triumphs they will sing of far and wide? Or see your team's ambitions unfulfill'd? At this point it is your fate to decide. So call your plays and throw it down the field! So guard your quarterback like you're a wall! Run through the defense, score to seal the deal, it's all here in the game Arenaball! (still working on my rules module, but the artistic challenge was right up my alley so I couldn't help but post it early!)
|
|
#
¿
Aug 6, 2012 00:56
|
|
|
Gau posted:I've decided to start with a strong base for my system and do the Parcours du Combattant system in one fell swoop. As such, I have modeled out my "modules" as such: http://www.random.org/playing-cards/ is what I've been using, but I don't have "hands" in my game for this very reason - keeping track of it on a computer seems to be a pain and I can't find anywhere that does it well.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 9, 2012 14:09
|
|
|
Module #1 for Arenaball: Rules and Procedures I chose to present the Rules and Procedures as a rules manual for a sport, because I like when rules documents have a bit of flavor attached to them, but abandon that when they actually get to the nitty-gritty rules. I think the small flavor in the Letter from the Commissioner is just enough to get a taste for how the game will play out, without beating the players (who this manual is more aimed towards) over the head with it before they even start playing. I also am not particularly skilled with digital manipulation mumbo jumbo, and so I thought this was a nice way to up the production values a little bit without getting in over my head. This module is more or less exclusively the structured parts of the rules. As my rules sections are fairly long in order to make the game strategic and nuanced while also reminiscent of actual sports play, I wanted to make sure there weren't too many fiddly bits attached that weren't necessary obfuscating the nuts and bolts that are presented here. On the other hand, I envision the Coach's Manual (the second module, which I will be presenting next week) as being for all of the modular parts of the game, like Abilities, Social Contacts, Formations, Calamities, etc. All of those could have infinite different examples and variations, and the Coach's Manual will present some of those and ideas for a Coach (the player running the game) to take them further. I intend to have the sample season & other teams included in the Coach's Manual as well, and to only have two modules, but we'll see how that goes. Also, from earlier, my poem for the Bonus.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 10, 2012 22:26
|
|
|
alakath posted:Arenaball, by sc4rs: I love how you structured the rulebook as the sport's rulebook. Smart move. I was just able to playtest what I have so far with my friends tonight! It isn't RPG-y yet, you're right. That's where I'm planning on focusing during the second module. Fortunately the downtime was no problem at all - everyone was discussing strategy each turn, and they all had a blast! ...but they also only got through two chances in an hour and a half.  At that rate it'll take two nights to just get through a game. Fortunately they really enjoyed themselves, and did get faster as the night went on, but I need to figure out a way to speed up the process a little bit, I think. Maybe by increasing the amount players can move per turn, or something. I'll probably fiddle with it some at some point.EDIT: My friends assured me they would not mind playing the first half one night and the second half the next night. PROBLEM SOLVED.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 11, 2012 05:51
|
|
|
sc4rs posted:I intend to have the sample season & other teams included in the Coach's Manual as well, and to only have two modules, but we'll see how that goes. Random update: Based on the work that I've gotten done so far this week, this was a bit too ambitious. My third module will be the entirety of the sample adventure. In that third module will be:
That should be more than enough to play an entire Season of Arenaball, which based on the speed my playgroup played at would last, like, a year if you're playing once a week. The second module will still contain all of the rules for running the off-the-field part of Arenaball, as well as all of the 75 or so Abilities and the 20 Formations. Here's hoping I don't bite off more than I can chew! 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 14, 2012 21:34
|
|
|
Arenaball Module 2 - Coach's Manual Included in the second Module are the rules to play the Off the Field portion of Arenaball, another worksheet to help the Coach keep track of the Social Contacts the players have, 10 offensive and defensive formations, and nearly 80 unique abilities for the players to use while playing. I think this turned out mostly like I imagined it to, though it took a lot longer than anticipated because 79 abilities are a TON of work, and by the end some of them sort of turned into vague sort-of-repeats of one another, but I think it gives enough variety for players to get better and better and do cooler and cooler things. The off-the-field gameplay I also think turned out great - simple but not too simple, and allowing for players to do cool things and get rewarded for doing so with easier Draws and potentially, if the roleplay is spot on, automatic successes. I was not able to add a linked Glossary to this one like I would've liked either. I think the Glossary worked really well in my first module, and I'm a little frustrated that I didn't have enough time to make one for this module, but c'est la vie. I also didn't have time for one of the bonuses this time either, unless the stupidly large amount of abilities counts as proving my iron determination. It certainly felt like it. Wishing I had prioritized things better. The final module is going to exclusively be the pre-made adventure, which as I said last time, should have enough content to run once-weekly games of Arenaball for the better part of a year. Whoever playtests this should have plenty of material to work with! I'm excited to write that and to stop writing Abilities, finally.Enjoy!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 17, 2012 23:38
|
|
|
If anyone wants to playtest Arenaball, let me know. oh god it takes forever to play one game what have I done
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2012 05:51
|
|
|
Gau posted:Holy poo poo, I am reading these rules and this does seem like it might take forever. Have you considered having everyone submit moves and go simultaneously? I considered it but it takes away most of the strategy of moving first or second, which is actually really cool. The major problem is the game works really well in my home playtests, and my players think it's awesome...but it just takes a long time; at least a half an hour per play for them to consider their options and debate moves and so on. (except the one play where they literally tackled the quarterback before he even got to move due to luck). I don't know how much I want to mess with a good thing - I'm thinking of just making a game be 2 offensive plays and 2 defensive plays per half instead of 4 and 4, which seemed to work based on our second playtest tonight. I guess it depends on what people consider a "night" of gaming - if you're playing for 8 hours, it's perfect - you could get a game and an Off the Field session in every meeting. But if you only have a few hours, it's just way too long.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 18, 2012 06:22
|
|
|
In what I hope will work as both my evidence of playing a game and enjoying it AND my playtest of another game, I hereby present: Jurassic Central Park Part 1 Jurassic Central Park Part 2 Kudos to my friends for acting silly for the benefit of the internet. All in all, we had a great time. Some thoughts - as the DM, it was hard to keep up with everything. I definitely missed a bunch of Urges on video review, and as my players mentioned in the wrap-up at the end, they were trying to perform them once or twice and I totally missed it. Also, their jobs and Species never came up, and though I tried to get them to make Opposed Challenges they never did. Ultimately, though, they thought it was a great party game, and we had a lot of really funny moments and all had a blast. Also I talk too fast. Sorry. 
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2012 03:17
|
|
|
Rulebook Heavily posted:Get some player testimonies if you can and post them! I tried to include that at the end of the second video, but I'll see if they don't mind typing something up as well. Ulta posted:Urges aren't working quite how I want them to. Maybe have the player interject? Someone mentioned that after the camera stopped rolling - if they did it again, they would shout out "URGE!" if they noticed each other eating food or if they wanted to do it themselves, and it would immediately interrupt everything. I think having a mechanic to interrupt other players or the GM would be a good thing if you have a funny idea that comes up. We didn't do any trading beforehand. Everyone liked having both options equally, I think. I'll have to ask for that in the player testimonies. Carrots being hard to eat in 6 seconds - that was the biggest surprise across the board. It's crazy how difficult it can be to eat a baby carrot that fast. I think at least one player if we played again would try to dump off carrots on someone else. That said, I do like that there was a pretty even line between success and failure for both, and my players afterwards said they were consciously counting faster if they thought it would be funnier if the action failed, which is excellent. I like the counting part a lot. Whose Line really is a good analogue for this. I actually regret that I had to choose a night that my friend who does improv couldn't make it. I'm sure he would've had a blast.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 22, 2012 15:39
|
|
|
Oh god never again leaving something on Google Docs to be done on a netbook. The pain of 50 second saves every time I changed anything. Module 3 - Arenaball Starter Kit, including player sheets for 5 player characters, a Social Contact cheat sheet and information on 22 NPCs for Social Contacts, a league schedule for the 9 team Third League, and information on each team and how to play them. Last, but not least, three Calamities to run. Hopefully all of this information is general enough that Coaches can make their game unique, but specific enough that they can run a game with minimal preparation. That was the plan, anyway. In any case, I've had a blast with this entire project. I've gotten lots of good feedback from my friends, and I'm really excited to see what improvements I can make from a real playtest. I also think it's pretty conducive to PbP, so perhaps once this is all over I'll run a game in Trad Games. I think that'd be pretty neat.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 24, 2012 17:46
|
|
|
Depending on if I have time, I may run another game in addition to my Jurassic Central Park test, just because getting my friends to put things in writing has been more difficult than I anticipated (they're all like "but we already said everything in the video!"). No worries, other people will probably need their games tested anyway. Making up a sheet of tokens for Arenaball sounds like an excellent idea. I have no Photoshop skills whatsoever but I may work on that and just append it to the three modules so that whoever (Gau? someone else?) wants to test it has a little bit less work to do. At home, my setup was a sheet of large graph paper with a field drawn on it, ten dimes with stickers on them representing the two teams, a penny for the ball and a nickel for the Passing Target. That worked really well. As far as the playbook, I actually wrote a bunch of those plays down on napkins and receipts and with cute drawings in a binder to photocopy and look like some coach's plays jotted down. Unfortunately, they all scanned terribly, and were basically completely illegible, so I scrapped the idea and just listed them. Congrats to the 14 finishers!
|
|
#
¿
Aug 25, 2012 14:45
|
|
|
Hoping that Gau is still planning on running Arenaball with his buddies. If not, I'll see about taking pictures of my own friends & setup and getting some opinions (albeit heavily biased ones, I'm sure!) from them on Friday.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 29, 2012 19:14
|
|
|
alakath posted:I'm going to post what I have of feedback and gameplay for ThU/D: Deathrow LIVE!, but it was so rushed I don't feel like it's very representative of what the game could be. Thus, I make a desperate plea: if anyone has the time to run ThU/D before the deadline, I'll be forever in your gratitude. I'll even buy you a forums upgrade! I just feel really lovely that we ran out of time, and I feel like ThU/D didn't get a fair shake. No need for a forums upgrade. I'll be running a game of ThU/D: Deathrow LIVE! as soon as I finish cutting out some challenge cards and re-reading the rules. And, of course, as soon as enough people show up. synIRC & #alldayplaytest
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2012 16:34
|
|
|
So a few of us ran ThU/D Deathrow Live! and some Retrocausality this afternoon. Logs are up there in Ulta's post. As GM of ThU/D, I thought it went swimmingly. We got through only one Episode, but I was laughing a lot and I think that the setting made for a ton of fun moments. I love the reality show pun names, especially Shark Shank and Dancing Behind Bars. I drew Ninja Inmate and An English Theatre, which was a hilarious combo and was super easy to make up some events for. I'm sure more Episodes would have gone just as well. I think that four people (one GM, three players) is basically the barest of minimums, though, and I think only having two people vote, making it impossible to get a non-unanimous fail or success, is a bit of an issue. It's hard as GM to keep thinking of extra bonuses every single time something succeeds spectacularly. I think that either giving the DM a vote with 4 players, letting the players vote "thumbs sideways" if they kind-of like something, or just introducing a random element like a coin flip would help keep the results interesting and more varied. As a player in Retrocausality, I liked the system as far as we got. It really feels like PDQ: Playing Card Edition, which I loved. It was a little tricky to have to remember what the face cards meant or to remember exactly what suits mattered and didn't without loading up the rules, but I'm sure playing it more would get a better sense of that. The pre-made adventure was really cool, from what I saw of it. I was hooked on the story even after only playing for a short while and loved the little details.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 30, 2012 21:46
|
|
|
While I wait to hear back from Gau about whether or not he still plans to run a test of Arenaball, if there's anyone who has the time and energy to attempt to run what is essentially a retardedly long game of WarhammerSports (it's real fun if you're into that sort of thing!), that'd be super great! Otherwise, I'll see what I can do with my group at home.
|
|
#
¿
Aug 31, 2012 23:08
|
|
|
Rulebook Heavily posted:Finally. The scoring system being based entirely on the playtest is immutable. However, in light of authors having trouble getting their games tested, here is a final amendment. You may playtest your own game. However, any game that gets playtested by someone other than its author gets a +1 bonus to its final score. You should already know how important a simple +1 can be in this contest. Dear denizens of TGD, I would very, very much like this +1 bonus. I know that Arenaball may be frightening on the surface, as it does involve rules and boards and sports, any or all of which alone might be enough to send some of you running for the hills. That said, I truly believe that in this time of great turmoil, Arenaball represents what is best about humanity - the ability for a few individuals at a time to set a little bit of their hectic, crazy, stressful lives aside in order to do an activity simultaneously so fruitless and yet so fulfilling as playing a game. (Especially a game set in the future, when there's no more financial crisis! Go go escapism!) And it's based on American Football, which is starting again, and what better way to celebrate America's national I ask kindly, for all of those, whether I have playtested your game or not (but seriously I playtested two! c'mon y'all), who participated, read, or otherwise enjoyed this thread to play a game. My game. Give me that +1 bonus and I will use it for the greater good, nay, the greatest good; my own personal gain. For that is what it truly means to be American.    (If you aren't American that's OK too, please feel free to playtest my game anyway!)
|
|
#
¿
Sep 2, 2012 18:09
|
|
|
Intersector is actually really straightforward. I was going to make a character but my printer isn't cooperating to print out the character sheet. I'm gonna write one out later tonight, though, so I'm ready to play at some point this week. FlakyBiscuit did a great job laying everything out. I think part of the confusion probably stems from the order they were presented in - if you save the first document about the Praxis for last until you read everything else, it makes way more sense and is actually very easy to follow. The only question I had from reading his (her?) documents was that there was a mention of "the ending of a session is special and will be explained elsewhere" that never seemed to be explained.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 6, 2012 01:21
|
|
|
Congrats to everyone for your efforts, and thanks to those that gave me encouragement and kind words. I'm sad that nobody besides my friends got to play my game, but I'll work on making it less daunting and maybe someday I'll get some random internet strangers to try it out!
|
|
#
¿
Sep 8, 2012 03:57
|
|
|
|
| # ¿ May 3, 2024 23:57 |
|
|
Hahaha, the top three were all games that I playtested. Congrats you guys. I had fun playing all your games; all very deserving in my mind.
|
|
#
¿
Sep 15, 2012 00:28
|
|