Wednesday, March 17, 2010

Twice Damnit

You know what I forgot to bring? A note book. I wanted a notebook so that I could get started on NA25 stuff and I have found that while doing brain dumps here in the blog FEELS satisfying they are ultimately unproductive. Also just having a nice little outline thingy next to me instead of one window over is more helpful. However, don't have a notebook and the closest place to get one is walmart. Yeah I am totally going into walmart to buy a single 1 dollar notebook. Not bloody happening times infinity.

The other fuckery thing is that I seemed to have gotten something foul on my copy of Pressession of the Simulacrum. This is enraging because I really like that book, enough to just sort of put it on auto replace and just keep going. I'm not going to do that right just yet, I am going to try and repair it as best I can but I am not sure if it will work out. Ecrits made it through okay because Lacan is fucking evil.

I am convinced that the devil sold his soul to him. Because Lacan drew a chart that makes no sense. So I guess it is time I go get to work or something like that.

THE GOAL! To get a play test version of NA25 up and running by summer time. So that way when I get a spare afternoon or three I can get the gang to play test my rules. The thing about the rules is that they need not be overly complex, but they definatly need to be better written than say SLA industires.

Once upon a time I wanted to use a dice pool system that used a variety of dice, and I think I am going to keep that but to a far more limited degree, or to just remove it altogether. The important thing is to keep a very simple game system. Dice pools are easy to modify and 1d10s have that sort of percentage thing that people naturally click with. SO I want that. I also want the visual pool thing for the social combat which where people can see how close they are to getting people to believe them. That sounds good. I want 6 stats three mental three physical, something nice and simple. I want a couple of derived stats... actually NO the only derived stat will be the power stat and that will be done on a power by power basis.

Lets go back to the social combat thing again. I want to have a visual pool of what the players need to do. So lets do an example. THe players are standing around in buisness or buisness causal atire, there is a man with an unusual amount of bullet holes in him at their feet and a cop who is notably suspicious. As the players try to go back an forth trying to make them seem as innocent as possible. I think the way I want socialization to go is that the players will have a variety of skills which they can use to influence. The actual dialouge will provide pluses or minuses to the roll. Any sucesses that the player rolls the cop rolls against. The players can also burn auto sucesses to help out in this regard.

Oh Auto Success system. Okay here. First and foremost the general flow of the game will be, players start with needing a mission of sorts. This will either come out of them being blackmailed or their dark secret or something of the sort. Everyone starts with something like this at character generation. The players then set out with a goal, usually breaking into somewhere and stealing/killing something. Stealing and killing things is fun and the back bone of the rpg experience.

Over the next few days of game time the players will try to amass information about the area. This will be everything from getting the building's layout, to the security load outs, to scouting out the actual areas, to calling in terrorist hits to check police response times. There will be TONS of examples of these in the main rule book I am thinking of at least 5 pages of nothing but examples for the players to do ranging from simple to very complex. This planning phase can take one or many game sessions. Executing the plan is almost like a boss fight in a normal game except instead of having a big bad to fight, they are trying to get back home alive. All these preparatory actions add a number of automatic successes to the eventual action. To keep things from getting to out of control all information gathered degrades over time, so they can't expect passwords they grabbed a month ago to still work.

Okay I also kinda want there to be some sort of limit on how easy it is to kill people. Maybe not, nobody really digs forced morality in their games.

I think that will be a nice simple start to getting things running. Really what I need to do is get some some background information typed up so that my players can get some idea of what they are doing in the world. This is good so I can come at it from two diffrent angles and get things set and ready to go.

Really the whole part that I find utterly intimidating is getting layout and stuff like that. Also just making sure my writting is clear but that is the blessing of play testing. Okay now fer serial I am getting food.

1 comment:

Xantcha said...

Although I briefly browsed through it, this game of yours sounds really interesting. I will read more into it tomorrow when I am not as tired. Good job though!