So I talk a lot about making games, and I often add a lot of unsolicited advice about other people's game-making, I even tend to feel that I have a lot of ideas for improving professionally designed games. You know, the kind you buy for dollars(or pieces of bark and wood, if you're Canadian, you get what I mean.).
Here's my attempt at making a little thing of my own. Still very much under development, but I like to feel that even though I cranked this out over fifteen minutes of original writing, twenty minutes of talking to people and then five minutes of revising, this thing is pretty close to its final shape.
The basic concept is a game where magic(in this case Weaving) is synergistic with other skills, rather than some sort of separate profession that makes you way more powerful than others. Instead, the people with access to Weaving use it to craft impressive or useful items, to make themselves more powerful in combat, etc.
Of course, some people are capable of using Weaving without combining it with skills, more close to traditional magic, but this is a tricky and dangerous thing to do, as fate, known as the Great Loom, dislikes those who try to escape the predestined way of fate so grossly. In systemic terms, it temporarily robs you of Pattern(the way in which fate defends those vital to the proper happening of things with small miracles), making you more susceptible to being killed by accident or people with unpleasant intentions.
I like to feel that I've taken the chance to rob nice things from several systems(Earthflame's Mosaic inspired parts of the "Weaving" system, Trigger Discipline inspired the minimalistic approach and I've probably been inspired by a few other things without realizing it) without ripping off any of them.
So, when I first heard of Trigger Discipline, I looked at the name, I looked at where it came from(/tg/) and assumed it was some crazy-detailed, realism-wanky piece of shit and completely ignored it. Later some people mumbled something about mecha and I still proceeded to ignore it, because, hey, come on, giant robots do NOT need realism, are we agreed? They need to be all BAM BAM BAM, SPEED, BOOM, POWER GIANT LASER KATANAS, KABOOM, POWER, SHAZAM.
On closer inspection Trigger Discipline actually turns out to be pretty close to this.
That was the last real sound. The cut off so sudden, so loud in that sea of silence. Everything around was still, even your own flesh. Not paralyzed, not changed, not even sore. Just still. And then breath came again. The air around you moved sluggishly as you slowly stood up, and looked around the now silent lecture theatre.
All was still.
And then it wasn’t. One by one, a couple of others stood, shaking off a tangible slowness, and gazing around the room in shock. Everything was frozen. Chairs on the verge of sliding, drinks on the edge of spilling, a thrown paper aeroplane carrying a message from one side of the crowded hall to the other, all stopped in their tracks.
A silent, frozen world, populated by the five, counting yourself, you could see almost wading through the sea of slowness. Some seemed to be speaking, yet there was no sound passing through the still air. How odd…
Then a crack appeared through the wall. Except, it wasn’t in the wall, and even as you watched it spread, moving through the air, the furniture, the people, seemingly without effect. A sense of profound wrongness surrounded it, a feeling of instinctive dislike and discomfort, a knowledge that, whatever it was, it was Wrong.
[#] Ultima Online: The MMORPG Version of PnP Gaming
10:29am EST - 11/19/2008
So, upon reading the subject line you're gonna ask: "LOL PURPAL MMORPGS IS ABOUT GRINDANS AND LOOTANS HOW CAN THEY BE ANYTHING LIKE A PNP GAME HUR DUR I'M GOING TO GO CHOKE ON A DICK RIGHT NOW?" Because, hey, I know you people. This is what you're like. Crazy for dick and retarded.
But, merciful that I am, I am going to tell you how Ultima Online is fucking awesome and worthy of your attention.
Hey all, this is Earthflame. No, I'm not coming back any time soon. No, I'm not entirely better yet. I'm going to return at some point, but until then, I'll satisfy myself with writing articles. I'm not yet back on /tg/ or the sup/tg/ IRC, but I will answer questions posed in comments or emails. I'd prefer if these focused on the game or matter being discussed, rather than my own personal health or somesuch. There'll be plenty of time for that later.
This brief Article will, hopefully, serve as a foundation, giving the basic premise of the following articles, as well as a list of the games I've currently thought up, letting people know what's coming.
It also serves to let me put out a little of my game design philosophy. First and foremost, I design my games to be fun. Second, and nearly as important, I try to design games which will, at the end of the day, work with the players to make a good and interesting story.
[#] Optical Character Recognition and You: A Primer and Handy Guide
08:07am EST - 11/13/2008
But, what’s OCR? Why should I care if my PDFs are tagged with the (OCR)? Well, fair reader, let me explain.
Optical Character Recognition, or OCR, is a method of recognizing letters in a PDF in order to make it searchable. By stringing letters together to form words, the program – Adobe Acrobat – is able to turn what was a jpeg or similar image into clickable, highlight-able, searchable text. Sounds pretty handy doesn’t it? Why yes, yes they are! OCR technology makes reading a PDF that much simpler. In addition to making the text interactive, it also allows for the compressing of PDFs. Take your average Dark Heresy scan. It’s about 200 megs, give or take a few megs for the differences in scans available. Once run through an OCR converter, that size can shrink all the way down to under 50 megs. Repeat this process for any book out there.
“But if OCR is so good, why aren’t all books OCR’d!” one might be wondering. Well. There is a slight loss of quality involved in the process. The same Dark Heresy book lost some of its quality. It still remained an excellent scan, however during the OCR process it does lose some. The remaining problem is the necessary equipment. Not just any program either. Adobe Acrobat is the only one I’ve found so far that is able to perform the process. Along with the program, a certain amount of time is needed, usually a few hours for the OCR to take place. During this period, the program uses a large amount of resources, making other endeavors nigh on impossible.
However, this brave author, has started OCRing books, in a venture he calls UNLIMITED OCR WORKS. Through this program, he’s OCR’d a fair number of books, and the library grows often. Though intensive, I have a number of books that I have OCR’d personally. The catalog will be updated and posted shortly, along with handy links.
If you have a particular or special request, please field them. It’s kind of fun to OCR books and stuff, so let me know over the IRC or something.
As you may have guessed, I love mechs, and Mekton is my system of choice for robot fightan. What you may not know, though, is that I greatly prefer “harder” scifi to Newtype hax and experimental mind-powered units that are actually the demons. I have created a setting to accommodate this, and in so doing, I feel, have curbed the worst excesses and exploits of Mekton. These mechs are powerful, sure. But they rely on a good pilot, accurate shooting and tactics rather than flying, beamspam and the Itano Circus (although I would argue the Bane-3, YMN-6Y or LGB-12C could probably outshoot any Valkyrie when you’re talking missiles, but a Battletech versus Macross debate should probably stay in /m/.)
This article will take the form of a series of flavour texts for 6 “medium” mechs, followed by a link to where a collected set of datasheets can be downloaded. They make good enemy units or NPCs in a semi-realistic, “3025-era Battletech” style campaign - the weapons are not hax powerful and there aren’t any really odd things.
So, what's more epic than a character who steps in, kicks a ton of ass, delivers some awesome one-liners and rides away with the girl at the end?
A character who goes out with a bang while saving the party, the world, the girl or all of them. Especially if he gets a fucking set of RESPEC' KNUCKZ from his deity afterwards.
Sometimes, what creates the best game setting it taking something familiar and turning it on its ear. In this spirit, I present to you a game setting that I simply call "The Mall."
Last week on HeroClix Exposed, I introduced you all to HeroClix, a collectible miniatures game that revolves around building teams of your favorite superheroes (or villains) from the DC or Marvel universes. Now, while there are figures from such series as 2000 A.D., B.P.R.D., and Alien vs. Predator, we’ll focus mostly on the heroes and villains coming from DC and Marvel HeroClix. Today, we’ll be discussing powers and abilities.
I have never seen a setting or a game that really used all the creatures in the MM. They were assumed to be there, somewhere, yes, but did you ever see them in an adventure module? Did you actually seriously use one in a game? Have you seen someone else use one?
If you confirm that you have for any of these creatures and prove me wrong I will hate you forever for the rest of the day.
(Editor's Note: I'm going to take some credit for putting the images together for this one, particularly the ones that took me 9,001 hours in MS Paint. All other images copyright Wizards of the Coast, exceptforwhenitisnot, derp.)
So hey, board games. Most /tg/ folk love them, I mean, I'm pretty sure you could recruit most of us for a game of chess, checkers, Ludo or whatever. Still, there are less traditional games out there which nonetheless manage to be fucking fun. Let's have a look at some, shall we?
Oh god I was hungover and grumpy because i recorded this once but didcked it up i'm sorry i sound so horrible oh god how did this get here i am not good with computer
(Editor's Note: Man, I almost choked to death laughing when he finds out what the nation name turns out to be.)
I'm a big fan of under-represented games, as nearly 2500 points of Battlefleet Gothic, Inquisitor rulebooks and Mordheim warband suggest. It's only by virtue of my FLGS not stocking them that I don't have a horde of Battlemechs and Heavy Gear figures in my cupboard. So when I was given the chance to try Urban Mammoth's small-scale sci-fi game Urban War, I leapt at the chance.
And I found a real gem there. Long story short, it's a very fast paced skirmish game with a healthy variety of factions to try out and some nice minis. While nothing is going to topple GW's domination of the market for light, fantastical wargames, UW is a nice alternative. The aesthetic is a bit more video-game or anime themed than 40k, but I don't feel you lose too much from the lack of Grimdark. I'll begin with a rundown of the faction aesthetics and play style (the fluff is interesting, but I personally wouldn't say it sells the system) to whet your appetites, then move into a discussion of the rules.
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