Free DINO-PIRATES Adventure!

Okay, now it's time for an example. Here's how you put all the pieces from my "3-List" method together.

FREE THE FLAME GOD

FREE THE FLAME GOD is a free adventure for DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND. It's ready to run, and you'll note it doesn't require all that much reading. Let's go through the document page by page and make sure we understand it.

First up is the cover, which hopefully provides enough explanation that you can use the adventure (even without reading this blog post). Every DINO-PIRATES adventure will have this info. You don't need to print this page.

The second page is for the players. There's a quick description of the Concept -- the problem the heroes will have to solve, as well as a sketch map of the adventure locale. It's not a very detailed map, and there aren't any further detailed maps, since the whole idea in Old School Hack is that you draw the maps yourself at the table. This is just to give the players a bit of a mental model they can hang the encounters off.

Then comes a page of tables: Adventuring Goals and Random Events. These are two of the lists that I use to create a DINO-PIRATES adventure. Print this page off and lay it out for the players to look at. If they want to choose an Adventuring Goal, that's great, but it's also okay if they don't. You'll use the Random Events table whenever you feel like shaking things up for the players. It's a great way to pull in a player who's been a little sidelined lately; just point at them and say, "Roll on 'The God Awakes'!" Suddenly they're at the center of attention.

That's it for player material. The rest of the document is for the GM.

Next there's a page that outlines the adventure -- this is the list of Locations. It's followed by three pages of Location Sheets detailing each one. Have the Location Sheets at the table and you can use them to keep track of the situation as the battle proceeds, and make sure you don't forget any important clues or bits of knowledge you meant to give the heroes.

Finally there's a page of NPC sheets with more details on a couple of the key bad guys in this adventure. These characters might show up in more than one location, so you can have their details at hand without flipping through pages.

And that's it! Eight pages of thrilling adventure, totally free! I hope this enables hours of fun for you and your friends. Let me know how it works for you in the comments!

Prepare an Awesome DINO-PIRATES Game

Prepping for a DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is actually really easy, but the key elements are not at all obvious. Here's my system for ensuring game sessions full of crazy adventure.

Having run probably more than a hundred of these sorts of sessions, I have a pretty tight system now for developing them. It really isn't that much work, but it's very different than the sort of prep work I do for other games.

Instead of describing a location in detail, or setting up an elaborate plot, this system starts from a high-level idea -- the Concept -- that's quite simple to come up with. Then I create three lists of loosely-related and not-very-detailed items, which work together at the table to produce a fun and satisfying adventure story.

Here's How It Works

I always start with a Concept. It doesn't have to be very fancy. Once I have that, I build three lists: one of Locations, one of Goals and one of Randomness. Those three lists will form the basis of the adventure. How they get combined is up to the players and myself as we play the game.

Concept

Why do you THINK they
call me "Heart-Eater"?

So the first thing is a simple, obvious Concept for an adventure -- like "Stop the evil sorcerer from enslaving the volcano god!" or "Destroy the SLAVE QUEEN'S mind-controlled army!"

A good adventure concept describes an ACTION to be taken by the heroes. This action needs to be about opposing some evil scheme (like mind-controlled armies, or whatever).

I can come up with this sort of evil scheme just by playing around in the setting, and generating "what if" sorts of questions to myself. "What if an Imperial Sorcerer decided to go undercover and take over a ninja clan?" Even the simplest idea can work.

Once I have the evil scheme in mind, I think about how the heroes would get involved to stop it. I don't mean "They meet an old wizard in a tavern who tells them where to go". That's way too much detail, and who cares about all that crap? This is about choosing a VERB. Do they STOP the scheme, or DESTROY the hidden base, or RESCUE the prince? That's it. One word does the job.

So that's my Concept -- an evil scheme undone by a verb.

Now I've got three lists to create. The order in which they get created isn't important -- actually I always build them in bits and pieces, letting ideas for one inspire entries in the other.

Add the Random

I learned this trick from Kirin, the designer of the original Old School Hack, and it always works great.

It's surprisingly powerful to supply a random factor that might interrupt heroes bent on saving the day. For the volcano god adventure, obviously I decided geologic activity would be the thing, so the random list includes lava, earthquakes and so on. For an adventure in which a bunch of heroes have to get a little baby to a distant fortress, the baby itself became the random trouble-making element.

I make a little table for a d12. 1 - 6 is always "no result," so that not every roll causes trouble, and then I come up with six other possible results for 7 - 12. Here's an example I used for the volcano god adventure.

So there's six possible results -- each with a different in-game consequence. I always make 12 the biggest, craziest one, just because, well, it's 12. The players have the table in front of them and every so often I'll just say, "Okay, somebody roll on the volcano god table." Then there's a tense moment while they await the result, and then the game carries on.

Provide Some Motives

Another table I create is one full of Adventuring Goals. I try to come up with 12 of these. This is a great way to seed the adventure with possibilities. Keeping in mind the Concept, I dream up reasons why somebody would want to do the ACTION described there. When creativity flags, revisiting the Concept often helps to get me going again. I'll let my mind wander and go a little goofy, allowing unrelated names to suddenly emerge, like in this goal from the volcano god adventure:

"Master Nobitsuna of the Dragon’s Eye Clan has disappeared, leaving only the word “Tuloanga” carved on his cell wall."

Who is Master Nobitsuna? Who are the Dragon's Eye Clan? It doesn't really matter at this stage. These details might inspire entries in one of the other lists, or they might not get referenced anywhere else. If a player picks this goal, we'll figure out how it fits into the adventure together.

It might seem like a strange thing to focus on, since in any given session, most of the supplied adventure goals won't even be used. But I've always found it a great way to generate ideas that can feed into the story, even if nobody picks the goals. Thinking about the adventure from the point of view of the heroes, and why they might get involved, is a powerful way to sort of trick yourself into creating a really hero-centered adventure.

And that ends up being more fun for everyone!

Locations

Meanwhile, I grab some location sheets and jot down whatever notes come to mind about scenes I might have. I try to think of fun locations for a fight, or crazy bad guys, or some clue that needs to be given to the players. I can play off ideas that came up on the other two lists, and as I flesh those out (or come up with all-new possibilities), I can develop all the different pieces together. And again, I can always go back to my simple Concept to renew my creativity.

For an adventure meant to last a few hours, I usually find four to six scenes is about right. What I normally do is come up with four "required" scenes and then a couple more "extras" -- sidelines or flavorful moments that aren't essential to getting the heroes to the big bad guy.

Structuring Scenes
I know my first scene is always going to be a fight -- an immediate threat the players need to deal with in order to survive. But it must do two other things: it must lead the heroes into the adventure -- there must be some clue or threat that draws or pushes them along. The first scene cannot be self-contained. It must present a mystery ("Why are these flying lava monsters attacking us?") or force them into immediate action ("Well, the ship is sinking and there's an island over there."). Or both!

I used to spend a lot of time setting up the adventure, providing the heroes with "hooks" to draw them in, but in DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, that's really pointless. I'll just start right in the middle of the action, and can just tell the players, "Well, you decided to check out Captain Red-Eyes' secret warehouse, and you got in okay, but now these pistol-packing lizard people are attacking you." 

Other details can (if anyone cares) get fleshed out in later scenes.

And I know my final scene will be a big set-piece battle, preferably involving lava, dinosaurs and maybe some shotguns. My other two key scenes might be more sneaky-around scenes, or get-someone-to-tell-us-whats-going-on scenes, although often they're just more fight scenes.

I use the location sheets not only because they allow me to note down all the necessary details on a scene, but their small size prevents me from putting down too many details. This is a LIST of locations I'm creating, not a guide book.

Putting It Together

Locations, Goals and Random -- three very different lists, each contributing something unique to the Concept upon which the story of the game will be built. Because they're so different, when I get stuck on one I can easily jump to another, and usually my brain lights up again. And because they each need players to bring them to life, I know the game session is going to be spontaneous and creative for everyone.

One of the real joys of running games, for me, is seeing a story emerge from something that wasn't a story before. It's really magical, especially when it happens from something like this -- with just a basic concept and three lists of disconnected items. I have time and time again seen how a group's imagination will take off and make a story happen right in front of us all.

I'll be publishing a sample adventure using just this format very soon -- stay tuned! In the meantime, please share your adventure prep ideas in the comments!

Location and NPC Sheets for DINO-PIRATES!

So many bad guys

Here at Scratch Factory we're big fans of making the DM's job easier; that's one of the key reasons we picked Old School Hack as the foundation for the new DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND role-playing game. You really can't beat Old School Hack for super-easy game mastering.

But we also really kind of sneakily LOVE filling out forms. We're addicted to character sheets, and have spent many long hours poring over how to fill out every field in our Campaign Planning Guide, and other such treasures. It's one of the things we've always cherished about tabletop role-playing games, and we wanted to make sure that the new DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND provided some of that love for the DM, not just the players.

So check out these fantastic Location and NPC sheets!

Easy-to-print, half-page forms that help you keep your notes organized, even if you're making them up during play! Keep track of minions and bad guys, potential treasure or secrets to be discovered. Have your bad guys easily statted up before the big combat, or make them up on the fly and keep track so they're consistent for next time.

You never know, your players MIGHT notice.

Anyway, you'll have fun filling them in, and hopefully the process of doing so helps you think through your next encounter so you're better-prepared than ever!

Download now!

In upcoming weeks we'll show you some complete DINO-PIRATES adventures using these forms and a few other key ideas that make a DINO-PIRATES adventure special. Stay tuned!

New! DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND Basic Game!

Okay, this has been in the works for quite some time, and now here it is.

An all-NEW version of the DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND roleplaying game! And it's free!

This game is based on (well, actually, just kind of copied almost wholesale from) the tremendous Old School Hack game by Kirin Robinson. It's super-simple, and designed for running off the top of your head, with very little prep required. The full rules are posted on the DINO-PIRATES website, and are available for you to copy and reproduce any way you like, under a Creative Commons license. We've created a great downloadable PDF that turns into a bunch of handy-at-the-table miniature rulebooks, as well as the class and character sheets needed for Old School Hack.

A complete RPG! Free!

There's nothing else you need, except a few friends and a lot of imagination! Well, and dice, and paper, and all that sort of stuff. In the days to come we'll be posting more materials, tips for getting the most out of a DPoNI campaign, and other great stuff.

The sharp-eyed among you will note that this is subtitled "Basic Game" -- that's not random. We are working on a more detailed sort of game, but it's a ways out yet. In the meantime, enjoy the new Basic Game!

PAXEast 2013: DINO-PIRATES Sells Out!

Well, the Scratch Factory team (that's me, in case you haven't been keeping score) joined a bunch of other indie game designers at the massive PAXEast convention in Boston last weekend. I was there to sell copies of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND.

I was a little trepidatious going in, since my model predicted I would only barely break even, and I wasn't sure my model was very reliable.

But away I went. And am I ever glad I did. I had a near-perfect result -- a complete sellout of my game on Sunday afternoon.

How did I do it?

The Number

Remember that I'd chosen to watch a number I called Revenue Per Attendee. At tiny (but fun) little Hammercon, I'd made nearly 50 cents per attendee. At Game Summit, a con ten times the size of Hammercon, my R/A dropped by more than 80% to just 7 cents per attendee. Disappointing, but I don't argue with actual data.

Using that model, and assuming another 80% drop to PAXEast (ten times again the size of Game Summit), it looked like I would see a R/A at PAXEast of less than ONE cent per attendee -- 0.6 cents, actually. That predicted I would sell 15 copies, earning just enough to cover the cost of the trip (with maybe $50 left over). It was a risk, but I figured I'd take it. I also figured I'd take a few more copies of the game than the model predicted. Live in hope and all that.

So I threw 21 copies (I don't count so well is why the funny number) in a box, jumped into a Honda Civic and rode down to Boston.

The Selling

First of all, if you don't know, PAXEast is an AMAZING event. And I say this as someone who neither plays video games nor reads Penny Arcade. People are incredibly friendly, the staff are knowledgeable and there to make your time fantastic. The tabletop area, which is really a sideshow at this thing, is HUGE and utterly packed from morning till night, full of people having a blast.

Second of all, the gang I was part of, the Indie Bazaar, included some of the coolest game designers and people I will ever meet. Epidiah Ravachol, designer of Dread and Vast & Starlight, Emily Boss, designer of Breaking the Ice, Vincent Baker of Dogs in the Vineyard and Apocalypse World, Joshua Newman of Shock and Mobile Frame Zero, Meguay Baker of 1001 Nights, Rob Bohl of Misspent Youth and of course Jason Anarchy of Drinking Quest all had their crazy fantastic games on display, and virtually everything sold like the proverbial hotcakes.

Frankly, if we'd offered FREE HOTCAKES I doubt we could have done better.

The Result

I sold the last copy I had of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND on Sunday afternoon -- a perfect result. Selling 21 copies instead of 15 produced a Revenue per Attendee of 0.9 cents, which means my predicted number was off by 0.3 cents. I think that's a very respectable margin of error (even if it is nearly 50% of the actuals).

Having my expectations set ahead of time really helped to reduce my anxiety, especially on the first day when Drinking Quest and Mobile Frame Zero were flying off the shelves but it seemed like everyone was turning their noses up at my pulpy baby. But I hung in there and Saturday was much better, just like my model had predicted.

And I learned new things. Games like Drinking Quest and Mobile Frame Zero are so easy to sell: their unique offering is easy to grasp immediately. While people invariably laugh when they hear DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, they can't so easily engage with the concept, and not everyone is going to sit still and listen while I explain it.

I doubt I could do much better with this game, no matter how I marketed or sold it. I have a few copies left which I'll take with me to the Calgary Entertainment Expo in April and sell, and then that will be it for the print version of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND. It's been a great learning experience, and the lessons I've acquired here I'm going to put to good use when the time comes to start selling REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS.

DINO-PIRATES at PAX East

PAX East will be the unveiling of the first all-new DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND adventure in two years!

CURSE OF THE SNAKE GOD will be a wild adventure through and under the streets of Chang Lao, the biggest metropolis in the islands. Our heroes run afoul of a sinister ninja clan known as the VENOM, and must race to discover this clan's secret agenda, and hopefully save the whole city from ophidian doom!

I'll be running two sessions of this adventure:

Saturday Morning (10am - 2pm) FULL

Tracey

Frank

Lori

Jodi

Kevin

Bo

Sunday Afternoon (12 noon - 3pm)

There are still slots open for the Sunday game, so let me know if you'd like in!

These sessions will use the standard DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND rules, as found at our website, or available for sale if you'd like to give me money.

Giving Up the Initiative!

For a while now I've been poking at a new idea for a role-playing game I had that I called Initiative!

I like the concept of the game, and the single play-test session revealed the concept will probably work, but for now I am suspending any further development on the game.

I need to stay focused, and for the foreseeable future that means staying focused on the development of REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS. Since the girls are set in the DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND universe, that means developing the universe further is worthwhile, but building a brand-new set of rules for running games here is just not a good use of my time. I've already got three entirely separate rule sets for games in this world, so maybe a fourth just isn't super necessary.

That said, I believe Initiative! is a unique game concept and captures a really fun model for conflict and story-telling. So I'm releasing it under a Creative Commons Share-Alike Attribution license, which means you can copy it and do whatever you want with it.

Have fun! And please let me know if you end up using it for anything; I'd love to hear about it.

How I Sold DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND

The biggest project before me is REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS, my comic book about five awesome ninja girls sent to the Ninja Island Correctional Academy. I'll be printing this book and selling it at conventions sometime later this year.

I had never done that before, so I decided to run a smaller project and see what I could learn about selling printed stuff at conventions.

For my test project I choose DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND – it is probably the thing for which I am best known (besides being really tall and Canadian). The game (and the setting) has existed for years, getting steadily refined through one playtest after another. It stabilized in its current form a few years back, and ever since I posted the rules online, I've been getting regular requests to provide it in a print format. So I had 60 copies printed (a minuscule print run, to be sure).

My plan is to learn as much as I can about selling something like this in a few targetted efforts before the comic book lands. The cost of printing DINO-PIRATES was about $400. Since the objective here is to learn about selling, I'm not too worried about making a big profit here, but I figure I'll know I learned well if I at least break even.

I wanted to start small, limit my risk, and learn as much as I could at each stage. I decided on three conventions within a few months: Hammercon, a tiny (200-people) con in Hamilton, Game Summit, a much bigger (2000 or so attendees) con in Ottawa, and PAX East, a big famous con that draws as many as 30,000 attendees to Boston. I just wrapped up Game Summit this past weekend, and thought checking in and sharing my discoveries with people would be interesting.

Lesson One: Watch a Number

I'm kind of a nut for metrics, so I spent some time thinking about useful metrics for this experiment. I wanted something I could use predictively, that would help me set expectations on revenue so I knew how much I could spend. It does me no good to make $1,000 at a show if it costs me $1,500 to attend.

I settled on "Revenue per Attendee" as my metric. R/A, for short.

It's simple to calculate: divide the amount of money I collect by the number of attendees at the con. Once I have a notion of what's a reasonable sort of value here, I can look at other cons and at least have a ballpark sense of how much I could expect to earn.

Hammercon

I started at Hammercon, a fantastic tiny con in Hamilton, where I had hopes of selling maybe 10 copies. I figured that was a high number, but best to shoot high, I thought.

By the end of the show I'd sold five copies, two to friends who happened to be there, but three to TOTAL strangers (that was exciting). Five copies means $100 in revenue. Compare that with 200 attendees and my R/A was 50 cents.

A fantastic number, I thought, casting my eyes forward to Game Summit's 2,000 people and PAX East's 30,000. Could I really make thousands of dollars doing this? Should I do another print run?

I know well enough that a line requires two points, so I held off on any changes to my plan until the next show.

Game Summit

While Game Summit would be ten times as many people as Hammercon, I didn't really believe my Revenue per Attendee number would hold. I scaled my expectations way back, and set a target of 15 cents. With 2,000 attendees that would mean selling at least fifteen copies, a modest increase it seemed given the size of the new event.

Sadly, my expectations were insufficiently modest. My R/A collapsed to just 7 cents, a drop of 86%. Ouch.

If I imagine another 86% drop to PAX East, I'm looking at a R/A of not even ONE cent. Taking into account the costs of attending an event like that, coming back with any money is looking unlikely.

Of course there's so little data here that any predictions are fraught with peril, but it's great to be able to have SOME idea of where things are at.

Lesson Two: Say Hello

When I'm walking around on a convention floor, I don't stop at EVERYTHING that catches my attention. If I did, I'd never get through even a tiny percentage of what's there. I see all sorts of things that look interesting, but don't grab me for whatever reason. I need an "entry point" of some sort -- a quick thingamabob I can pick up, or even better a personal contact with someone at the table. And sometimes it seems like the people at the table are busy, or don't want to chat, and so sometimes I'll walk right on by something I'm interested in because I don't think I'll be welcome.

I smiled at people at Hammercon, which helps. But at Game Summit I stood up and made a point of saying "Hi," to just about everyone who walked by. Not in (I hope) a phony sort of way. I'm not a phoney sort of guy and I like just about everyone, so if some total stranger stops to chat, I'll probably have fun even if they don't want to buy anything.

But reaching out to connect to people seemed really powerful. At Game Summit, which was admittedly not a very RPG-focused event, I'm pretty confident I sold at least 50% of the total possible sales. That is, of everyone who was there who MIGHT have bought my book (in that they were an RPG player with sufficient cash and an interest in indie pulp games), I bet I landed half. I sold a LOT more copies than anyone else at my table, I know that.

Lesson Three: Work My Pitch

I'm what you call kind of noisy. I'm not extroverted, but I do talk an awful lot. This is not always a blessing. And I'm not always the best listener ever. So learning how to pitch something doesn't come naturally to me, since sales is all about understanding what the customer wants and finding it for them.

I mostly rely on sheer enthusiasm. I love DINO-PIRATES more than just about anything, and it takes very little to get me gushing about it. At Hammercon I just sort of babbled; I didn't have any plan and I stumbled over myself many times. Sometimes people had to ask me to repeat myself because they couldn't understand what I was telling them.

I was always really awkward about trying to close -- trying to bring the conversation around to "Here, pay the $20 and take the book."

For Game Summit I paid a lot more attention to what I was saying to people, and what seemed to resonate most with them. I came away from the weekend with the realisation that I need multiple pitches for a product like this, that I can choose from to grab and direct someone's attention.

Pitch One: The Rules

Some people immediately start browsing the rules, looking at tables and asking "How does it work?" For those people I started talking about the lineage of DINO-PIRATES, from True20 from Mutants and Masterminds from d20. I mentioned streamlined action and easy DM prep, showed them the character sheets and in general focused on the mechanical attributes of the game that make it fun and unique.

Pitch Two: The Setting

Other people studied the cover and asked about how dinosaurs, pirates and ninjas could all fit together. I told them to imagine a fantasy archipelago, islands with prehistoric monsters and volcano gods, ninja clans and scheming sorcerers. I talked about my love of kung-fu movies, pirate tales and King Kong.

Pitch Three: The Story

And then some people could accept the setting at face value, and were unconcerned with the rules, but wanted to know what happened in the game. I told them about the evil Empire to the north with its eunuch sorcerers always trying to take over, gave a little detail about them trying to chain a volcano god, and how the pirates and the ninjas are always fighting to preserve the independence of the islands.

Of course any given conversation included material from all of these. The pitches that evolved (and they are still not very clearly defined) became sort of standard openings I could choose from depending on how I read the customer's interest. They were a powerful collective tool for me as they made it easy for me to launch a conversation with just about anyone.

Once I've said "Hi," and they've stopped and checked out the game, having options as to how to guide the conversation was a huge advantage.

What's Next?

Well, that 86% drop is ugly. If that continues to PAX, it will be a struggle to ever break even on this operation.

But I'm sure learning a lot, not only about the selling side but the logistics of being a retailer at a convention. I'm doing this super-cheap right now, staying at friends' places and car-pooling, but I'm still just barely squeaking by. I took a loss on Hammercon, and only managed to make about $25 at Game Summit. If my Revenue per Attendee falls as far as my current project suggests, then I'll only make about $50 at PAX East.

A third data point will really help solidify my R/A, but as I mentioned before, a lot of this is completely up in the air. Different cons even at the same size will have different R/A numbers, and it'll take a lot of study to learn which ones are most cost-effective. And R/A doesn't tell me if I'm actually making any money. I made more money on Game Summit than Hammercon, even though my R/A was so much lower, because costs were less and the total sales were higher.

So I need to learn more about cost-cutting on these ventures, and then how to maximise my sales at the event. I especially need to get better at closing sales. I know at least one potential customer at Game Summit walked away without buying because I just couldn't bring the conversation to the right wrap-up.

What have you learned about this subject? I'm an utter beginner at this, so anyone with more experience, please share your lessons!

Initiative! Play-Test the First!

We ran the first-ever Initiative! playtest last night -- a game of giant robots fighting monsters in our hometown of Toronto. Learned a lot, laughed a lot, ready to do it again!

The goal in this first playtest was just to see if this wacky engine would actually work at all -- would the concept of gaining and losing the initiative bring a fresh sense to the table?

The answer is definitely a YES.

People cottoned on to the concept immediately. If you don't have the initiative, you can only react via Cool or Aware, and if you have the initiative you can try to win via Deadly and Compelling. It took a while, though for people to internalize the idea and start working WITH it in order to achieve their goals.

One player whose character was heavily invested in being Deadly lost the initiative in the first round, and never tried to get it back (didn't know that she could, to be fair), and got beaten right out of the fight in a couple of rounds.

So on the one hand, good that things can swing that wildly -- but it wasn't a great time for the player!

As they started to figure it out, however, you could see people trying to set themselves up. Players would deliberately give up the initiative so they could use a Trait that had a higher chance of success. It seemed like the decision-making at each moment offered lots of options, with pretty clear risk levels. So people could think, "Well, if I try to use Deadly here and I fail, I could be in a lot of trouble. But my Reactive Traits aren't very good, and if fail, I'm really going to get pounded. What to do?"

So I'm encouraged that way. It feels like this core mechanic is going to work. But of course there's some real issues to be resolved. The game as it stands is basically unplayable.

Real Issues

Nowhere is Safe

For example, there's no way to "lay low" -- people would try to use their Reactive Traits in order to step back and get a sense of the battle, like someone might play a rogue or a wizard trying for a vantage point, but in the current system, being Reactive is much riskier than being Active, since a failure in Reactive turns straight into damage. So there's no way to model that sort of "pulling back" from the fray to recollect oneself.

Which is kind of part of the design -- in Initiative!, if you're not pressing forward, then you're giving ground to your opponent. But at the least a lot of people are going to come in with an assumption that this system will have to fight against. And perhaps that assumption -- that there's safety in holding back -- is a reasonable one that I have to consider.

What Are We Doing?

Another problem is even more fundamental -- it was really hard in our "social" scene to establish what damage really meant. In my head, dealing damage is associated with advancing towards your objective, but when the "field of battle" is a social situation with a number of characters each of whom may have their own objectives, trying to understand what dealing damage to an NPC actually MEANS is complex.

There may need to be some structure around establishing goals for each scene, or maybe players will choose which NPCs in particular they wish to engage with. Not sure, and more testing is required, but I'm pretty sure something will have to be created around handling objectives.

One thing I really liked about Apocalypse World was the way in which characters could establish true things about the situation through strictly-constrained lists of questions. So you could use whatever the ability was called to learn something, but you had to choose your question from a predefined list. It's possible something of that nature might work here.

Next Steps

I'm not going to make too many changes right away. There were a few outright holes in the rules I have to sort out, but I want to try and run this again just as it is before I start making a lot of changes. There were a few quirks about the way I ran last night's session that definitely threw the results, so mixing things up and seeing how that influences play will be very important.

Not much reference to the rules was required, which was great. And it was definitely a free-wheeling sort of game, which is exactly what I'm hoping for. Onwards!

Initiative! Locals

So we've talked about the two main types of Tags: Stunts and Connections. Stunts are things your character has or can do -- talents, items, magical powers, whatever. Connections are ways in which your character relates to or supports other characters in the group. These are the basic character elements in Initiative!

Tags are how you improve your Trait rolls. Every time you make a Trait roll, you can add one of your Tags to it. Simple enough, right?

Well, there's a third type of Tag: the Local Quality.

Local Qualities

Local Qualities are Tags that are connected to a particular location: a crowded tavern or a storm-tossed pirate ship deck or whatever. They are elements in the scene that heroes can use to dramatic or cinematic effect. A Local Quality can be ANYTHING: a physical characteristic of the locale, or a quirk of one of the NPCs, or just a declaration about how the action here is going to manifest.

Once established, any player can choose to apply the Local Quality to any Trait roll. This counts as their Tag for that roll, but there's a little wrinkle to this: Action Points.

Action Points

Of course Initiative! has an Action Points mechanic. Giving players a currency they can choose to apply for advantage at their discretion is a great idea, and works well in lots of games. In Initiative! a player can spend an Action Point to use a second Tag on a given roll, OR to create a Local Quality (and apply it to their roll). Once a Local Quality is created, anyone can use it at its current rank just like any other Tag.

But if they invest an Action Point, they get to increase the rank of the Local Quality (or create it from scratch) AND add it as a second Tag to their roll.

So there's an interesting choice here for a player -- they can use their Action Points to add one of their existing Tags to a roll, but get no ongoing benefit, OR they can invest in something which may not be as potent (all new Tags always begin life at rank "Good"), but which other players can not only make use of but also invest in. And as they invest in the Local Quality, it gets more and more powerful.

Swashbuckling Scenes

Cam Banks started a "swashbuckling" conversation on Google Plus recently, and one of the ideas that came up was the notion of introducing "themes" into battles, whereby for example, "tabletops" are the theme and so any action that involves them gets a bonus. Local Qualities allow for that sort of play -- somebody can establish a Local Quality (say, "Pit of Barbecuing Pigs") and then not only do players make use of it, but they are incented to make it steadily MORE impactful over the course of the scene.

And of course in Initiative! combat and social scenes are handled in exactly the same way, so you can establish Local Qualities in the midst of a delicate negotiation and have the same impact.

The goal of Local Qualities is to give players new options in each scene that they can make use of for their characters' awesomeness. Since Local Qualities evaporate at the end of the scene, they can make an individual fight much more memorable. Initiative! is meant to be a simple, freewheeling game of memorable stories, so the hope is that the combination of Stunts, Connections and Local Qualities allows for exactly that.

Initiative! Teams

I like the "niche protection" ideas of games like Old School Hack and Leverage, where each player fills a clearly-defined role on the team and the roles are all designed so that each hero has abilities that only they can use. Everyone gets their share of "spotlight time," which is a great thing at any table.

But a lot of the games I run don't have those sorts of ready-made niches that you can easily carve out. DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, for example, ends up handling parties made entirely of swashbucklers competing to out-buckle each other's swashes. That's kind of part of the fun.

And niche protection is different from relationships, and relationships are much more interesting to me than niches. I want a game where the relationships between party members can be as important as the skills and abilities of the individuals who make up the party. I found Apocalypse World really interesting this way, and successful at generating interesting and playable relationships between PCs.

Initiative! encourages strong relationships between characters, and using those in play, and investing in them as much as you would your character's abilities. Indeed, those relationships can actually BE a character's abilities. In Initiative! those relationships are called Connections.

Connections

Connections are the second kind of Tag in Initiative! -- the fundamental characteristics that you use to flesh out your character. We talked last time about Stunts, but Connections are a little more complicated. When you create a Connection, you benefit at least TWO characters (you and the character you're connected to), so you each get a benefit at a lower cost than if you'd each invested the same in your own characters. Further investment in that Connection is likewise cost-effective.

Making Connections

In addition to the usual character sheet most role-playing games require, Initiative! also has a GROUP sheet, where all the Connections are noted. Every Connection has three elements: a quick one-line description, a Rank and a list of the characters connected.

The description is how you decide when a Connection is relevant. Stunts have exactly the same thing. So for example, you can create a Connection with another character and call it "To The Emperor!" -- perhaps thinking this is a toast you and the other character always use as a signal between you. So any time that toast (or any other implication of the description) comes into play, you can apply the Connection.

Playing Connections

Applying the Connection allows you to add the bonus associated with the Connection's Rank to your roll. Higher Ranks mean higher bonuses, so it's worthwhile to spend some energy building up your Connections. Connections are even more potent when used to aid one of the connected character's rolls. When you use a Connection that way, its Rank is increased by one for that roll.

All the connected characters share the Connection's Rank, so if any one of you increases it, that's an increase you all get to share in. Being a good team player is its own reward!

There are some limits to all this goodness. A Connection is tied to a Trait, and you can only have one Connection per Trait. In addition, you can only have one Connection per team member. Finally, a single Connection can only connect a maximum of three characters.


The goal is a network of Connections that draw all the group members together, and encourage coordinated action. Of course this needs lots of playtesting, so it will probably undergo lots of change, but I'm hoping the basic idea will get a lot of use in play.

Are there other games with great relationship-building mechanics?

Initiative! Stunts

So when I first started talking about this new system I'm tinkering with, I mentioned that each character was defined by five Traits: Deadly, Compelling, Quick, Cool and Aware. Of course you characters can get more specific than that. The primary way you define your character is through Stunts.

Stunts

A Stunt is like a shtick, or a signature move, or a strength, or anything that gives a bit of colour to HOW your character manifests one of the basic Traits. Is he Deadly because he has Fists of Iron? Is she Cool because she's Single-Minded? Stunts are descriptive notes that you use to improve your character's chances at success -- or even to ensure success when you really need it.

Each Stunt is attached to a Trait. So you have Deadly Stunts, or Aware Stunts, or whatever. When you make a Trait roll, you get to apply one Stunt for that Trait to the roll, so it's good to have Stunts spread across your Traits.

(actually, Stunts are just one category of things you can apply to Trait rolls, but we'll get to that later)

Each Stunt also has a Rank. See, Stunts and Traits are both Qualities -- and Qualities are the building blocks of the Initiative! system. Quality Ranks range from the bottom of Fail to the top of Mythic. Each Rank has a corresponding Modifier and a Target number. When you make a Trait roll, you add the Modifier for the Trait's Rank. If you have a relevant Stunt, you can add its Modifier, too.

Making Stunts

Remember, I want this game to be simple. So there can't be long lists of Stunts to choose from. Instead, you can make up your own Stunts -- a Stunt can be anything you want it to be. The basic guideline, though, is that your Stunts can't just mean MORE of the Trait they apply to. That is, you can't have a Deadly Stunt called "Super Deadly". Stunts describe HOW your character operates in a Deadly fashion.

The rule of thumb is that a good Stunt must have obvious conditions under which it would NOT be useful. If you can't easily come up with a situation in which you're using Deadly but would not be able to use the Stunt, it's probably a bad Stunt.

Playing Stunts

Now I also want this game to be freewheeling. So there's an Action Point mechanic, like in many games. What these points allow you to do is apply more than one Stunt to a given roll. The second Stunt can be from any Trait, although you'll be required to explain its usage here.

The big deal with these Action Points is that you can use them AFTER the roll is made. So if you fail by only a small amount, you can spend an Action Point and draw in another Stunt to ensure that you succeed. So you're having to do some fancy narrating at the table, but you know you're doing it for a win.

I've used this type of mechanic for years with DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, and am convinced that a post-roll opportunity is a great way to encourage in-play creativity.

So there you have it! Stunts, part of the core of the Initiative! system -- more details coming soon.

Initiative! The Plan.

Well, the other day I posted a bit of a tease about how this new game system I'm thinking about is going to work. I wanted to lay out some basics, just so you understand where I'm coming from and what I'm trying to achieve with this.

Design decisions only make sense in light of specific constraints or objectives.

Initiative! is meant to be a simple, freewheeling game of teams overcoming evil.

Simple means:

• No long lists of things to remember
• No complex decisions before you have the information you need
• One roll tells you all you need to know
• Negligible DM prep required

Freewheeling implies interesting options at the table, the ability to create new stuff in the story and to combine things in unexpected ways.

It's about teams, because not many games do the team concept really well, and it's something I think deserves more game design impact at the table. I'll get more into how I see that working down the road, but it's a part of the system I'm really excited about.

For right now I don't have a story concept more complex than "overcoming evil." You could use it just as well for overcoming good, I suppose. But while Initiative! is a generic system, it still assumes a story that is about a group or a team that work against opposing forces in order to accomplish their goals.

I'll be posting more detailed outlines of how the system works over the next couple of weeks. Any feedback will be very welcome!

Initiative!

In honour of National Game Development Month, I thought I'd share a new basic mechanic I've been tinkering with. I call it the Initiative system. It has its roots in Fraser Ronald's very fun Sword's Edge system (which powers Kiss My Axe and Sword Noir), but has a much crappier name.

One of the ideas in Sword's Edge is that only players ever make rolls. In combat, you're either on the offensive or on the defensive, and the rolls you make are either to inflict or avoid damage. It's a unique way of thinking about modelling conflict, and it occurred to me that this idea could be expanded to cover ALL situations.

What if the key mechanic in a game system revolved around possession of "initiative"? What if in order to accomplish things you had to acquire and act with that initiative, and failing to get it, or losing it, would force you to try and regain your cool?

We see this all the time in situations that aren't physical confrontations. When one person gets rolling in a debate they can steam-roller their opponent, sway the room to their side. Many of our social institutions contain elaborate rules to try and limit this effect, precisely because it's so powerful. And when you don't have that initiative, when you're stammering and struggling to make a response, always on the defensive, it's very hard to advance your own agenda. So Initiative is meant to try and model that aspect of getting along in life.

Here's how it works:

Traits

You have five Traits. Two are Active Traits -- Deadly and Compelling. Two are Reactive Traits -- Cool and Aware. The fifth Trait is Quick, which is what you'll use to try and gain the initiative.

Success and Failure

At the start of any confrontation, all the players roll their Quick to determine if they have initiative or not. Those who do can use Deadly or Compelling; those who do not can only use Cool or Aware.

In the Initiative system, all results have degrees of success or failure. This comes into play here.

If you're making a Deadly or a Compelling roll, success means you "inflict damage" on your opponent -- essentially, you advance your position while damaging theirs. If you're making a Cool or Aware roll, on a success you resist any efforts to do damage to you.

If you succeed really well on a Cool or Aware roll, you might be able to take the initiative (allowing you to make a Deadly or a Compelling roll next round); likewise, if you fail really badly on a Deadly or Compelling roll you might lose the initiative this round.

That's it!

There's more details, of course, but that's the heart of the system. It's a very different sort of model than most simulationist games, I know, but once I got the hang of the basic idea it really took hold of me. 

When working against natural phenomena, or anything that isn't an independent agent able to respond to the players, the players always have Initiative and can use any Trait they want.

I'm toying with the idea of allowing Quick rolls at all times -- that Quick can be both Active and Reactive (inflicting and resisting damage, basically). I'm worried that will overload Quick and make it the only Trait worth investing in, however.

Am definitely thinking about ways to implement this in new games. I think it suits any game meant to tell high-action stories in which conflict, success and failure form the driving narrative.

REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS!

We are making a comic book, and YOU can help!

REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS is a new comic book written by Corey Reid and drawn by Dave Knox. The script is written, the characters are designed, and we're finishing up an 8-page Prologue right now, but we need $10,000 in order to make finishing and printing the book a reality.

This story is about five awesome ninja girls and their stuggle to do the right thing and save the day, even when nobody will believe in them. There's action and suspense galore, and beautiful art to go along with it, and we can't wait to share it with everyone. The world needs more ninja girls! And YOU can make it happen!

What We Need & What You Get

We've gotten a long way already. We have a script that covers four full issues (with plans for many more), top-notch character designs, a wild fantasy setting (that you can contribute to), and we've posted an eight-page full-colour prologue on our website for everyone to read.

The $10,000 we're raising now goes straight to paying Dave, our artist, so he can work full-time and finish up the first issue. We have some really cool rewards for our backers. Of course everyone gets a copy of the book when it's done, but we'll also have pins for different ninja clans, so you can show your ninja pride, an exclusive sketchbook of art and writing, or even original art and the chance to make up your own ninja clans that will be featured in future issues of REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS.

Going Beyond

We've set a couple of ambitious "stretch goals" for this campaign:

If we make $12,000, we'll make sure every backer's copy of the book has an exclusive cover only for backers of the Indiegogo campaign. Your book will be a real collector's item!

If we make $18,000, we'll do the whole book in GLORIOUS FULL COLOUR!

So Many Games

GenCon 2011 really showed for me what different games can do.

A variety of game systems produced amazingly fun stories in the world of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, as I and three of my favourite DMs in the world ran our ambitious little "con-paign" THE JADE THRONE.

Four days, seven games, across four different game systems. How'd it go? Fantastic, which surprised me. I honestly didn't think it was going to work out, which is one of the reasons I most wanted to try it. For me, GenCon is a chance to push RPGs to the limit. You're surrounded by thirty thousand of the most enthusiastic gamers in the world, imaginative people who have come to Indianapolis looking for chances to do what they can't do with their home games. The perfect place for DMs to try out things that demand a lot of their players.

Or their settings. I wasn't at all sure that the proposed games of our mini-event were going to work well in this setting, but they did.

Feng Shui and Mutants & Masterminds, perhaps not so surprising. Old School Hack has turned out to be a reliable generator of hilarious awesomeness. But Leverage? A game designed to very faithfully reproduce the idiosyncratic story-telling style of a TV show about con men and thieves?

Yup, it worked just great. The REFORM SCHOOL NINJA GIRLS set out to confront Jihanna the Demon, infamous pirate queen, and as you might guess, wrapped things up with explosions, screaming bad guys and catapult-launched hang gliders.

DINO-PIRATES is a broad, pulpy setting, in the full sense of "pulp" as a "shapeless mass". It's about adventure, thrills, and delight, but the stories that take place there can come in all sorts of flavours. Different game systems produce different kinds of stories. Some, like Feng Shui and Leverage, are meant to emulate specific story-telling modes. Others, like Old School Hack, encourage certain kinds of events or situations. All of which mesh perfectly with DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND, which was designed from the start to support all kinds of stories and story-telling.

I've taken to running some DPoNI games using what I now think of as the "classic" rules; the ones based on Green Ronin's True20 game, and some with Kirin's fabulous Old School Hack system. I loved how the Leverage game went, and so I'm working on a Leverage hack for the NINJA GIRLS. DPoNI is never going to be a game the way Dragon Age is a game, or even Dungeons and Dragons -- it's too messy and unselective about what it includes. I think of that as a strength rather than a weakness.

We'll be posting the full story of THE JADE THRONE in the next few weeks (I hope), and we have even more ambitious plans for next year's GenCon conpaign. Zombies! Maybe. Or possibly lizardmen.

The Jade Throne: A DINO-PIRATES Event!

This year's GenCon in Indianapolis will be hosting an exciting event:

The Jade Throne

This is a first for me, and I think for most of us participating -- a GenCon-specific DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND mini-campaign, with four GMs participating, running four separate game systems (at least) across six or seven gaming sessions. We'll have Leverage, Mutants and Masterminds, Old School Hack, DPoNI: The Animated Series and Savage Worlds all in effect. Good friends (and awesome GMs) Matt, Jody, Kennon and James are all running sessions in this never-before-attempted (by us, anyway) feat: to run a multi-session story over the course of "The Best Four Days in Gaming".

We don't know if it's going to work out. We don't even know how exactly it's all going to end -- we're leaving lots of room in our plans for players to throw us curveballs and introduce all sorts of trouble. We'll be making things up as we go, for sure.

Fortunately, low-prep games like Old School Hack and Leverage make it easy to "roll with the punches" and we're anticipating this will turn out to be tons of fun. If you're coming to GenCon, check out the announcement and sign up for any of the games that look appealing to you.

Old School DINO-PIRATES!

Wait, how can there be old school DINO-PIRATES? We haven't even really established the first school, much less the new school to come after so that there can even BE an old school.

Nevertheless, it's here. Our friend Kirin has produced the rather awesome game Old School Hack, and it's a whole ton of fun packed into a mere 26 pages (including five pages of cut-out displays, a cover and seven character sheets). This is truly a game you can pick up and just run, right off the cuff. It's a lovely bit of game design.

And Kirin has done us all the very great favour of releasing it under a Creative Commons Attribution Non-Commercial license, so anyone who wants can create their very own works based on it.

You can see where this is going, can't you?

Yes, there is a DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND version of Old School Hack now available. Choose from the Swashbuckler, the Sea Dog, the Ninja Shadow, the Ninja Sword, the Shaman, the Hunter and the Sorcerer -- all with their own powers and abilities. Imperials, DINO-PIRATES, ninjas and natives all in the mix. We tweaked the armor rules a bit, since heroes in DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND are more swashbuckly, less clompy and stompy.

The DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND setting isn't tied to a particular mechanic, and the rules aren't meant to model physical laws. Rather, the rules (both the "classic" DINO-PIRATES and these Old School rules) are meant to provide a structure in which interesting stories are likely to happen. So why not supply multiple rulesets? If you like one more than the other, that doesn't make you a bad person. Try 'em both!

All you need to do is download the original Old School Hack rules from Kirin's site, then download the DPoNI substitution for the DINO-PIRATE-y classes and abilities. Then yaaaarrrrr! You're ready for adventure among the islands!

Slimmer, Faster

One of the reasons there isn't a downloadable version of DINO-PIRATES OF NINJA ISLAND is that I'm still wrestling with the final ruleset. It's been one of those projects where the idea expanded to take on a variety of cool ideas, but in a couple of years of playtesting, the most obvious need is to have fewer rules.

So a bunch of things are going away. Nothing very core, but a few key things that will, I hope, really help to cement the rules (and in doing so, the setting).

Reputation: I really liked the idea of reputation being an alternate form of wealth, but it just made for a complex set of rules that never, ever got used. It's gone.

Adjustable Powers Stats: You used to be able to drop the number of ranks you put into a power, so you could bump your Resilience Roll. Too complicated. Even just explaining it was complicated. So it's gone. Your Power stats are all static now, but there's a feat you can take, "Resilient", that gives you a bonus on your Resilience Roll. Simple.

A Bunch of Feats: There were a number of feats that just made things complicated without being very useful -- stuff like "All-out Attack" that just made for MORE math at the game table, and again, that nobody ever used. And "Leadership", because I've always found that one annoying.

Also a Bunch of Powers: Some powers likewise got the boot. For example, Harm, and Pain. Harm is wrapped up in a new power called Pressure Points to mimic the common wuxia ability of "blocking energy flows" or whatever whangdoodle they call it when somebody goes tap, tap, tap on someone else and they drop down dead or freeze in place. So you can use that to either injure or paralyze someone. Pain went away because I find the Mental Grapple ability of Mind Link accomplishes the same thing (screwing with someone's ability to act with YOUR BRAIN) just fine.

And Then Just Some Tables, Too: We threw out all the Role progression tables and just included the formulas required for each progression. The formulas are simple enough and the tables annoying enough that hopefully that won't slow anyone down.

We've also explored a completely different ruleset, and will have postings and things about that, too. Stay tuned!

Fiasco: Adrilankha

So this fascinating game Fiasco has been popping up all over the place on my radar recently.

Made by Bully Pulpit Games, it's a GM-less story-telling game that attempts to produce the sort of knotty caper flicks well-typified by the work of the Coen brothers: Blood Simpler, Miller's Crossing, The Big Leibowski -- stories of characters with, as the game tagline says, "powerful ambition and poor impulse control."

So the game is built up using what are called "playsets", which are basically sets of story elements -- relationships, needs, objects, locations -- that the players assemble at the start of the game in order to kick off the story. A given playset reflects a particular genre or setting. So there's playsets that enable stories in modern suburbia, or a luxury liner in the 1920's, or the Old West, or Ming Dynasty China. Very cool stuff.

What I find really cool about this is how easy it makes it for folks to create new material for the game. There's no need to reproduce any copyrighted material in order to create a playset -- no rules, no stat blocks, nothing. Just lists of story elements, organized into groups of six. So they publish a new playset every month, written by all sorts of different people.

Being me, I immediately wondered about a playset I could create, cause I don't really get excited about playing a game until I've sat down with a page layout program and built myself some forms or something. I thought about various caper stories I loved, and realised that a lot of them had been written by the wonderful Steven Brust, and were set in the imaginary capital of his imaginary Dragaeran Empire: Adrilankha.

So that's what I used. It's a very narrow-appeal sort of playset, since only die-hard Brust fans will have sufficient background on life in Adrilankha to be able to build a game there, but it pleases me. I was able to get Devera into it, of course, and it includes a number of deep in-jokes if you're a fan of the Vlad and Paarfi tales.

Download the playset and check it out!