Did a test-play of the system for my NaGaDeMon game yesterday, and it went surprisingly well.

It was also a test-play of a one-shot scenario, and that went well too – the players had some notes about having a variety of antagonists in the final scene, and pointed out that “Days Since A Lost Time Incident”, while it’s a common enough term in many places I’ve worked, sounds like an awesome Dr. Who/X Files plot seed to everyone else.

It’s a normal office workplace.
The door is jerked open, and one of the team races in, swipes their card on the ID system to unlock the cover on the emergency button, then hits it, causing the “Days Since A Lost Time Incident” counter to flip to zero.
Everyone groans, picks up their coffee, and heads towards the situation room.

So that might become part of a game at some point.

The main thing I was testing, system-wise, was whether an aspects-only variant of Fate would work as I wanted it to, and let players define a character using descriptions & nothing else. It seems to have worked, and got me around the conceptual problem I was having with Fate Accelerated for this game, in that the approaches just didn’t have the right feel.

I hate to go with “It’s the vibe” as a reason, but that’s what it was.

I figured out sometime during the process that my NaGaDeMon game, which is currently called CVR, and a scenario/game I’m working on for The Gutter Skypes, which I’m referring to as Depot 17, were both addressing the same sort of problem – How to easily have a system cover a wide range of character types, in both cases, machines.

• In CVR, the player characters are robots; Specifically, Costumed Vigilante Robots.
  They could range from Garbage Trucks to Delivery Drones, from ER Medical Triage Bots to Police Records Department Bots, so the range of sizes & capacities is enormous.
• In Depot 17, they’re construction robots, and one of the PCs is described as being the flatbed version of the APC from ‘Aliens’, so the range there is also enormous.

Describing them using QAGS was … Disastrous. Made no sense to me to be assigning the ‘Body’ of a Load Hauler & the ‘Body’ of a Technical Bot on the same scale.
FAE was tricky, as I ran into the issue of approaches which simply don’t seem to apply. How sneaky is a load hauler? How forceful is a 3D Printer?

The system I ended up with has aspects which look like this;

Design – Features of the Bot; How it’s built, what it looks like
Downside – Bots aren’t perfect. The same features they were built with can also be really irritating
Job – What does it do?
Knack – Something unexpected they can do
Quirk – Outside of it’s job, what is the Bot like? What, aside from their servomotor system, moves them?

And, by way of example, here are the characters which ended up being played in the playtest;

Technical Bot

Design – A Spider Wearing Plate-Mail & A Ridiculous Number Of Tool Bandoliers
Downside – Do A Bodge Job!? Betray My Robot Heritage!?  (perfectionist)
Role – Technical Expert
Knack – A Born, Or Rather Built, Swashbuckler
Quirk – Movie Buff. OK, Media Junkie

Constructer

Design – A Bulldozer With A Range Of Digging Attachments, A Nailgun Chambered For Reinforcing Bar, And A Squirtgun Of Concrete
Downside – As Subtle As A Bulldozer
Role – All-In-One Foundation Builder
Knack – Expert Shot
Quirk – Has Always Wanted To Discover A Fossil

This week, I planned to knock out a piece of linking fiction for the game (which I now have a name for, so Go Me!) in the first few days, then spend a bunch of time on system.

Clearly, this was never going to happen, though I have spent time staring at my computer.

Hmmmm, what's a good backcronym for 'name'?

I do have notes for how that linking fiction works, and what points to hit along the way; Some written at the aforementioned computer, some on my phone, and some scribbled in a wee notebook while seated on a couch at a shopping mall, waiting to see a movie, which were then photographed & uploaded.
(Did I mention how much I’m liking being able to access OneNote & Word documents, and my cloud storage space, from my phone? ‘Cause it’s pretty damn useful)

While this was happening, I’ve also been working on a one-shot RPG for an actual play podcast. As in, another podcast who do actual plays, The Gutter Skypes. I’ve run a one-shot for them once before, and they seemed to enjoy it, and asked if I could do another sometime, if I was free.

The two projects have kind of converged, as I realised that the system problems I was mulling over for my NaGaDeMon idea were being solved in the one-shot.
Bit of a time saver, that.

A conversation with Kev let me kick around a few of those ideas, and clarify something I’d not been able to decide on (how to handle damage), and has left me with a much better handle on the system.

So, yeah, surprisingly productive week.

I found out about National Game Design Month a few weeks ago, when it was mentioned by Taz, a guest on the Big Red Couch.
The idea is to create, talk about, and play (at least once) a game during November.

Initially I’d understood it to be RPGs only, and had an idea of what I wanted to do, but then discovered that it’s games in general, which … complicated things.
Spent some time trying to decide between a table-top RPG about costumed vigilante robots, and a tactical boardgame about Zombies clearing out & securing a shopping mall.

The RPG won, primarily because the boardgame would need map tiles, playing pieces, and I suspect some iterative testing just to get the physical parts of the game to work together, long before anything like a playtest could happen.
With an RPG, all I need is an internet connection and some dupes with a few hours to kill.

As preparation, I downloaded Scrivener & worked through the tutorial, so I have at least a rudimentary understanding of how it works. I figure that after 20+ days of using the free trial in writing a game, I should have an idea as to whether I’d want to buy it.

Today’s ‘Game Design’ time was spent setting up a Scrivener project for the as-yet-unnamed game, downloading some resources, and getting to grips with the particulars of the Creative Commons licence on Fate Accelerated, so that I’ve got some idea as to what I can and can’t do.
The answer to that seems to be “Anything I Want, So Long As I Attribute It” and “Imply Or Say That Evil Hat Endorse What I Did”.