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Totally entering this. Don't have a name, yet though. I'll come back with a write up soon.
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Jul 24, 2012 21:22
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 12:46 |
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 You are a worldthought, a simulacrum spontaneously birthed by your father-plane. You are part of it, yet seperate; a portion of being given the power of self-determination. You are a regent, lord over your herited expanse. The entirety of the plane is yours to command, according to the laws set down by your creator. You are a representative, thrust into unwanted responsibility when your reality smashes into the rest of existence. There are others in the splinters of the worlds, others much like you; patrons of their own planes, confused and angry at this muddling of realities. You are an explorer, travelling the world with others to try to reseperate your planes and heal them to their unfractured forms, or even to find new things birthed by this strange world. You are an intersector, one of the many of this grand design. You find your dominion waning over time, as the worlds meld into schizophrenic plenitude. But as your power, your very essence, declines, you feel more and more a part of this new world - a world of the unknown. What will you do?
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Jul 26, 2012 23:05
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I'd like to request clarification on a rule:Rules posted:2. It has to be an original creation for this contest, and it must recognizably be a role-playing game by the definition of players taking on a role or persona for the duration of the game in whatever capacity. By "duration of the game", do you mean that the players have to keep the same persona for the whole game, or just that players should always take on a persona?
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Jul 27, 2012 20:36
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Intersector: Here's a more stable link: https://docs.google.com/open?id=0B4JbWvQgHDu9YW9MXy1nNm9EaG8
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Aug 1, 2012 01:05
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I've heard a few complaints that my game Intersector is a bit hard to follow. In an effort to clarify what it's going for, I've created an additional ad blurb that will (with any luck) be easier to understand. As always, I strive for the largest possible audience.
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Aug 7, 2012 22:27
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Rulebook Heavily posted:Tio estas mirinda kaj bela. Mi feliĉas ke vin ĝi plaĉis!
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Aug 7, 2012 22:39
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Here is a rough diagram of the course of Intersector, from the rightfulness of seperation to the mixitudinal end. Unfortunately, it's in a language not yet born, but I think the rest speaks for itself.
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Aug 9, 2012 19:51
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Here's the first Intersector module, which details Praxes. These are the core gameplay aspect of the game - important and varied enough that they take up their own (20 page) module. Also, another art thing, representing the Hand, the Eye, and the Sun. 
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Aug 10, 2012 23:27
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alakath posted:And your rulebook is impeccably laid out. It takes quite a bit of... determination, perhaps, to lay out a proper document. About this much determination, I'd say. 465 lines of determination.
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Aug 11, 2012 03:05
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Intersector Update (August 11th) Here's a preview of the Clock, which is the main prop used in conflicts.  The Clock tracks initiative, as well as targeting information. It has three tracks: the turn track on the inside (with numbers), the PC track in the middle, and the Obstacle track on the outside. Turns progress clockwise around the Clock. Turn structure is like this:
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Aug 11, 2012 22:42
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MadRhetoric posted:Flaky, for God's sake put an inclusive glossary at the beginning of your modules. Intersector Update (August 12th) Worked on the glossary today, as well as making a step-by-step pictorial explanation to combat. I've had the glossary half-finished for a while, and it was actually going to be part of the first module, but making all those damned pictures for the Praxis explanations really took out a bigger chunk of time than I'd expected. The rules overview / glossary also makes it clear that each player only has to deal with one Praxis and never needs to consider how the other ones work (I highly doubt i could make a game where players deal with all those rules at once).
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Aug 12, 2012 23:08
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Intersector Update (August 13th) Spent a sleepless night thinking about both the difference in explaining macro- and micro-scale gameplay, and how best to structure a GM-less game. Micro-scale gameplay is fairly easy to get across (this is how a turn goes, this is how turns are taken in an encounter), but explaining how to structure a session or a story-arc is much harder, especially without explicit rules for it. Also, thinking about how a fixed story structure (a 7-session arc, in Intersector's case) works with varying group sizes.
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Aug 13, 2012 18:44
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Intersector Update (August 14th) Both the game and the document itself now have some structure. I didn't get much time to work on it today, but I revised the overall document into a digest-sized book (I was debating between that and a two-column book, but I feel like the two-column gives too much the feel of a textbook or other academic work). I also thought through the arc that I want to take players on, as well as how that arc can be deviated from and how the game will react.
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Aug 15, 2012 00:57
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Intersector Update (August 15th) Major breakthrough. I have figured out how to work AI into both Intersector's mechanics and its story. This solves the problem of how to fill out an arc with less than 6 players, as well as how to unite all the players against a common enemy in a GM-less game.
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Aug 15, 2012 19:38
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Intersector Update (August 16th) With all the content planned out, it's time to begin layout and visual design. Luckily, I still have the skeleton from the Praxis module, and I've made some tweaks to make it look nicer. If there's anything I've learned over my years of playing games, it's that the way a product looks and is presented is just as important as that product's content, mostly for maintaining the reader's interest and easing comprehension.
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Aug 16, 2012 19:21
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Intersector Update (August 17th) And it's finally done! I've split it up into a few PDFs for ease of reading, but it's all Module 2. In this Module are the almost-complete rules for creating a character and the rules for running a combat, plus a glossary for all the strange terms used throughout. Character Creation Conflict Glossary Additionally, here's the blank and sample character sheets:   In Module 3, you can expect full listings of Laws and Axioms, as well as a guide to the non-Conflict gameplay, a guide to building Sessions and Arcs, and sample characters and their Adventures. Also, this isn't part of Module 2, but I redid Module 1 to be more in line with this Module stylistically. There were a few wording changes, but it's essentially the same document, just with a little extra glam. E: poo poo, I forgot to post it! Haha. Praxes (Module 1)
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Aug 17, 2012 21:31
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Tonight was the semi-monthly meeting of my board-gaming/roleplaying-gaming group. We played a rousing game of Dominion (with the new, all-improved card art) and a round of Epic Spell Wars. These were so engrossing that, unfortunately, I completely forgot to take pictures! We capped off the night with Ingenious, though - and I got pics. Near the beginning. We hadn't played in so long that I messed up my opening and gave the other players a lot of points that I shouldn't have.  The board begins to fill out and I got desperate.  In the end, I lost by tiebreaker (my second-lowest score was lower  )Unfortunately, we didn't get to play any real in-depth games, because we had to start late. Still, a fun night of games as always.
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Aug 21, 2012 04:31
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Intersector Module 3: Intersector Structure Laws & Axioms Cards and Supplies Whew! Intersector Structure is the setting/story document for the game. Laws & Axioms are the final piece of character creation. Cards and Supplies is all the art you'll need for Praxes and the Clock.
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Aug 25, 2012 00:25
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I would be very glad to playtest Emperor Mittens again. I'd like to see how it changed since the last time.
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Aug 25, 2012 02:09
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I need three to five other players to help me playtest Emperor Mittens. I'll be hosting it on Roll20 sometime in the near future. I'm free from about 7:00 PM to 12:00 PM any day, and can be on earlier than that depending on what class I have each day.
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Aug 26, 2012 04:08
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Agh, sorry, I'm CST.
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Aug 26, 2012 04:32
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Anyone who wants to play Emperor Mittens - I'll be on from 7:00 PM to 12:00 PM CST today. Come into either #alldayplaytest or #tradgamesdesign and hit me up whenever you want to. I'm aiming to get this started around 8:00 PM CST tonight.
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Aug 27, 2012 18:05
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I was also in the Dungeon Manager test, running: Schmovecraft the Mythos Investigator Talent: Mystic Deductive Skills Clubs: "I'll Take That" - claim up to 2 cards from any zone, unless player spends a protection token (if it's in their zone), or 2 if you take 2 Allies: Small and Relatively Benign Cthonic Horrors Hearts: "Scare Tactics" - Remove any 3 protection tokens from play. Treasure: Smart Suit Ensemble Diamonds: "Take Control" - perform any suit's Keep, then perform any suit's Lose. Dreams: Never See Another Cthulhu Victory: Solved the Puzzles of La Mu I got King of everything but spades
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Aug 30, 2012 18:12
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I was also in the playtest of Deathrow Live, playing Ol' Asner the infernal old inmate. For a rules light system, ThU/D is pretty decent. One of the problems that I had, though was that, though 'thumbs down' was supposed to be used when someone does something that you thought wasn't good or was uninteresting, it only punishes the player instead of helping them to make a more interesting story. I like the concept of the voting system, I just think there needs to be a more compelling reason to compete, and more tied-in mechanics that make the story better.
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Aug 30, 2012 23:59
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If anyone'd like to help playtest Emperor Mittens, I'll be holding it sometime between now (about 9:30 PM CST) and like, 1:00 AM CST. Just drop into #tradgamesdesign or #alldayplay on SynIRC, and we can get this ball rolling.
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Sep 2, 2012 03:25
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 Going into this, I expected to finish more than one round. Welp
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Sep 2, 2012 06:34
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Emperor Mittens Playtest Log - http://app.roll20.net/campaigns/chatarchive/33800/ (this link doesn't have anything at it, though it is where the log is supposed to be. I think Roll20 just takes time to upload maybe?) I think a real problem with Emperor Mittens as it stands is that it has so many things that you have to derive from other things - there are 4 stats which require derivation, each in a different way, plus the nightmare equation that is finding out how much damage you do in combat. All of these values are set up such that they would be perfectly easy to find out if we had been given a board, like if this was a real board game, but we weren't - we had to remember that one stat gives you a trade value of 6-stat/5-stat (min 1) while another gives you half its value in Luxury, and so on. Because of all this math we had to do, and because of the fact that the document is nigh impossible to navigate, it took us a lot longer than it really should have to get playing and then do a round. The worst thing is, I can see the system beneath all of this clutter and math, and I want to play it, but there's just so many things getting in my way.
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Sep 2, 2012 14:17
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Because I felt a little bad about being so negative, I designed an example character sheet for Emperor Mittens. This is just the three Resources and their stats, but it illustrates how much easier it could be to keep track of how much resource you get each turn. The numbered rows are the stats, and at the start of each turn the player shunts off any pre-existing resource to the big hold boxes to the right and fills any box that connects to a filled stat space with a cube representing a resource of that type.
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Sep 2, 2012 16:20
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I managed to get in a short playtest of Intersector today, after some hearty games of Battle Beyond Space, Glory to Rome, and the longest 300-point Heroclix game ever (unfortunately, we didn't get to play Netrunner quite yet). At only 10 minutes, I don't feel that it's enough of a playtest to really give me an idea of how a session will run (though it was still quite enlightening). As such, I will attempt to run a fuller session on IRC sometime before the final deadline. sc4rs posted: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. You're right, it never did get explained. Like a lot of us, I ran too close to the deadline to include everything. Basically, the seventh and final session is a conflict directly against the spheres themselves, and each player would have their own obstacle that they controlled. Other things that I didn't have time to expand upon: MadRhetoric posted:And how do you make simulacra? Each simulacra is akin to a premade adventure in other systems. Basically, there are descriptions of the environment and the people of the sphere, and when a player acts, the other players decide what happens. To get to the anchor, though, they must come to a conflict, which are described in the simulacra. In conflict, the obstacle actions are decided by a deck of cards that are flipped over whenever they need to be. MadRhetoric posted:What are anchors, mechanically? Anchors are an entirely narrative device. They are the goals or win conditions of the players during the session, and are the impetus for getting into conflict. Narratively, they are things in each world that do not belong - a silent clearing in a busy jungle, an obsidian sphere in the middle of the desert - things like that. The only rule that should be followed with the anchors is that there needs to be some way to remove them or alter them. MadRhetoric posted:Do you find the anchor when you overcome all obstacles in a given sphere? It depends on the GM's discretion. You could, say, find the anchor and have a conflict to puzzle out its interlocking gears that hold it together, or you could have the players enter a rite of passage conflict in a empirical sphere that allows them access to the bizarre message-whispering stone that the emperor covets. MadRhetoric posted:What does the GM do in their own sphere, narratively? They are there as a helper, mostly. They could point out paths or pull another character out of harm's way, but they can't actually affect the world in a meaningful manner.
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Sep 6, 2012 07:04
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| # ¿ May 3, 2024 12:46 |
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I was also in the FYEW playtest, and I've got a few thoughts on the things I found unappealing or bad about the game. First off, never ever ever ever ever make a game with player elimination! There's a reason board games as a whole have gotten rid of that concept, and I think you'd be better served without it, too. Kicking players out of the game because their stories weren't good enough does not engender a fun time. Second, voting does not work with so few players. As I said in the playtest log, any given vote is your number of players minus 3 (the two contesting Prince(sse)s and the King). The average gaming group is maybe a GM and four or five people, leaving you with two or three votes, which i just don't feel is a meaningful amount. Now if this was a party game where you had up to eight or so players, that would be better. Third, I kind of see the King as a peripheral character. I didn't really feel that they were important to the game (besides the tie breaking duty), and could be safely removed without changing anything, which would allow a smaller group to tell more stories. All in all, I'm just not sure what this did that Extraordinary Adventures of Baron Munchausen didn't do better.
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Sep 7, 2012 19:13
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