{"id":682,"date":"2015-11-16T14:30:05","date_gmt":"2015-11-16T01:30:05","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=682"},"modified":"2015-11-16T19:04:20","modified_gmt":"2015-11-16T06:04:20","slug":"nagademon-halfway-ish","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/?p=682","title":{"rendered":"NaGaDeMon &#8211; Halfway-ish"},"content":{"rendered":"<p>Did a test-play of the system for my NaGaDeMon game yesterday, and it went surprisingly well.<\/p>\n<p>It was also a test-play of a one-shot scenario, and that went well too &#8211; the players had some notes about having a variety of antagonists in the final scene, and pointed out that &#8220;Days Since A Lost Time Incident&#8221;, while it&#8217;s a common enough term in many places I&#8217;ve worked, sounds like an awesome Dr. Who\/X Files plot seed to everyone else.<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><em><span style=\"color: #333333;\">It&#8217;s a normal office workplace.<\/span><\/em><br \/>\n<em><span style=\"color: #333333;\"> 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 &#8220;Days Since A Lost Time Incident&#8221; counter to flip to zero.<\/span><\/em><br \/>\n<em><span style=\"color: #333333;\"> Everyone groans, picks up their coffee, and heads towards the situation room.<\/span><\/em><\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p style=\"text-align: center;\"><span style=\"color: #800000;\">So<strong> that<\/strong> might become part of a game at some point.<\/span><\/p>\n<p>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 &amp; 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&#8217;t have the right feel.<\/p>\n<p>I hate to go with &#8220;It&#8217;s the vibe&#8221; as a reason, but that&#8217;s what it was.<br \/>\n<a href=\"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Its-the-vibe-your-honour-The-castle.gif\"><img loading=\"lazy\" decoding=\"async\" class=\"aligncenter size-full wp-image-684\" src=\"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/wp-content\/uploads\/2015\/11\/Its-the-vibe-your-honour-The-castle.gif\" alt=\"from http:\/\/www.thecastlequotes.com\/ - Didn't want to pinch their bandwidth by hotlinking\" width=\"420\" height=\"231\" \/><\/a><\/p>\n<p>I figured out sometime during the process that my NaGaDeMon game, which is currently called\u00a0<strong>CVR<\/strong>, and a scenario\/game I&#8217;m working on for <a href=\"http:\/\/www.anim5.com\/IDDFOS\/TGS\/\">The Gutter Skypes<\/a>, which I&#8217;m referring to as\u00a0<strong>Depot 17<\/strong>, were both addressing the same sort of problem &#8211; How to easily have a system cover a wide range of character types, in both cases, machines.<\/p>\n<ul>\n<li>In CVR, the player characters are robots; Specifically, Costumed Vigilante Robots.<br \/>\nThey could range from Garbage Trucks to Delivery Drones, from ER Medical Triage Bots to Police Records Department Bots, so the range of sizes &amp; capacities is enormous.<\/li>\n<li>In Depot 17, they&#8217;re construction robots, and one of the PCs is described as being the flatbed version of the APC from &#8216;Aliens&#8217;, so the range there is also enormous.<\/li>\n<\/ul>\n<p>Describing them using QAGS was &#8230; Disastrous. Made no sense to me to be assigning the &#8216;Body&#8217; of a Load Hauler &amp; the &#8216;Body&#8217; of a Technical Bot on the same scale.<br \/>\nFAE was tricky, as I ran into the issue of approaches which simply don&#8217;t seem to apply. How sneaky is a load hauler? How forceful is a 3D Printer?<\/p>\n<p>The system I ended up with has aspects which look like this;<\/p>\n<blockquote><p><strong>Design<\/strong> &#8211; Features of the Bot; How it&#8217;s built, what it looks like<br \/>\n<strong>Downside<\/strong> &#8211; Bots aren&#8217;t perfect. The same features they were built with can also be really irritating<br \/>\n<strong>Job<\/strong> &#8211; What does it do?<br \/>\n<strong>Knack<\/strong> &#8211; Something unexpected they can do<br \/>\n<strong>Quirk<\/strong> &#8211; Outside of it&#8217;s job, what is the Bot like? What, aside from their servomotor system, moves them?<\/p><\/blockquote>\n<p>And, by way of example, here are the characters which ended up being played in the playtest;<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"padding-left: 30px; text-align: center;\">Technical Bot<\/h3>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>Design<\/strong> \u2013 A Spider Wearing Plate-Mail &amp; A Ridiculous Number Of Tool Bandoliers<br \/>\n<strong>Downside<\/strong> \u2013 Do A Bodge Job!? Betray My Robot Heritage!?\u00a0 (perfectionist)<br \/>\n<strong>Role<\/strong> \u2013 Technical Expert<br \/>\n<strong>Knack<\/strong> &#8211; A Born, Or Rather Built, Swashbuckler<br \/>\n<strong>Quirk<\/strong> \u2013\u00a0<del>Movie Buff.<\/del> OK, Media Junkie<\/p>\n<h3 style=\"text-align: center;\">Constructer<\/h3>\n<p style=\"padding-left: 30px;\"><strong>Design<\/strong> \u2013 A Bulldozer With A Range Of Digging Attachments, A Nailgun Chambered For Reinforcing Bar, And A Squirtgun Of Concrete<br \/>\n<strong>Downside<\/strong> \u2013 As Subtle As A Bulldozer<br \/>\n<strong>Role<\/strong> \u2013 All-In-One Foundation Builder<br \/>\n<strong>Knack<\/strong> \u2013 Expert Shot<br \/>\n<strong>Quirk<\/strong> \u2013 Has Always Wanted To Discover A Fossil<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"<p>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 &#8211; the players had some notes about having a variety of antagonists in the final scene, and pointed out that &#8220;Days Since A Lost Time [&hellip;]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_jetpack_newsletter_access":"","_jetpack_dont_email_post_to_subs":false,"_jetpack_newsletter_tier_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paywalled_content":false,"_jetpack_feature_clip_id":0,"_jetpack_memberships_contains_paid_content":false,"footnotes":"","jetpack_post_was_ever_published":false},"categories":[9],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-682","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-nagademon-2015"],"jetpack_sharing_enabled":true,"jetpack_shortlink":"https:\/\/wp.me\/p3O6N9-b0","jetpack_featured_media_url":"","_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=682"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":686,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/682\/revisions\/686"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=682"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=682"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/hoarde.net\/craigblog\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=682"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}