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KidCon 2013

You know how you get a song stuck in your head, and you just can’t shake it no matter how many times you slam your skull in the door? I had that. Except it wasn’t a song, but a terrifying idea: my daughters had a day off school coming up; I should have them invite their friends over to play games all day. Yes! A houseful of 8-12 year old girls rolling dice and flopping cards! What could possibly go wrong?

We found out last Friday. Spoiler alert: It went surprisingly well.

The day’s schedule looked something like this:

Slot 1: Watch Adventure Time (to get us in the fantasy adventure mood) and eat donuts
Slot 2: Play the Quicksand board game.
Slot 3: Paint Miniatures
Slot 4: Eat Lunch
Slot 5: Play the Once Upon a Time storytelling card game.
Slot 6: Play Microlite20 fantasy RPG (a stripped-down version of D&D third edition)

I didn’t actually have times linked to any of these slots, aside from the whole game day starting at 7:00 AM (because I’m a masochist, and our guests’ parents were going to work). I figured we’d just do whatever the thing was until people were tired of it, then move onto the next item on the schedule.

Everything went more or less as planned. They enjoyed Quicksand, but were really really psyched about painting minis. Pink dwarves, cotton-candy cowboys, rainbow soldiers… What the girls lacked in experience they made up for in surreal color schemes.

Some girls drifted away from the miniatures table and started playing some LARP-like thing in which they were soldiers. As more girls joined them, they formed factions and built blanket forts in the living room. Then went to war! Suddenly, it was Lord of the Flies in stocking feet!

As the final painter turned soldier, the schedule completely broke down. The girls took their war outside, where it evolved into a challenge to survive in the wilderness. They collected water. They fought off bears.

I looked at my schedule, the clock, and the gorgeous spring day outside. Nope. I wasn’t about to make them come in and play games around the table. Instead I made lunch, and let them eat it in the yard.

When the war for survival wound down, I invited the girls in for some roleplaying, and had each of them grab their favorite miniature that they had painted; these would be their characters in the game.

One guest grabbed a werewolf. Another a pastel-colored cowboy. I’d been planning to run a straight fantasy game, but… whatever. In a dungeon-crawl, an archer with a 1d6 bow is the same as a cowboy with a 1d6 six-shooter, and a werewolf’s just a fighter whose sword can’t be taken away.

We rolled up characters at the table. The M20 system is quick and easy, but it still took a while to finish all six characters. (I could have gone with pre-gens, but by rolling their own based on their miniatures, the girls were a lot more invested in the game.) In the end, we had six new heroes ready to explore the kobold caves. It wasn’t until it was over that it occurred to me — SIX PLAYERS!? I hadn’t run a game for that many people since the last game convention.

Thirty minutes and 10 dead kobolds later, we started losing players as their parents came to pick them up. I sent them on their way with their character sheets and hand-painted miniatures.

I figured with these particular party favors at home, it’ll be that much easier to set up KidCon2 in the summer.

Mind Strike Preview: Meet Tina

As those of you who’ve been following me on Twitter may have noticed, I finally got a readable (and possibly even playable) version of Mind Strike off my hard drive and into the hands of a few brave souls. (Mind Strike, for the uninitiated, is the roleplaying game of psychics in a dystopian near-future America.)

To celebrate this milestone, I’m sharing a little bit of what you’ll find lurking inside the book. Specifically, here’s one of the characters that the players may fight against / fight for / share a cheese pizza with over the course of their adventures: Tina Walsh.

Tina Walsh
It’s only a matter of time before Tina kills someone.

She knows this. She’s okay with it—at least, that’s what she tells herself. After all, the system killed her sister and stole her dad, and someone has to pay for that. If that price is paid with blood, then so be it.
Tina and her family had been homeless for a year when they joined the “Urban Occupiers,” a local movement dedicated to taking over foreclosed buildings and turning them into communal habitations. The occupiers gave them a place to stay while she and her father saved what they could from part-time jobs, and in return they helped prepare other buildings for occupation.

Unfortunately for Tina, the group had no rights to the buildings they were occupying. When the banks who owned buildings realized what was happening, they sent in an army of riot police to clear out the squatters.
One of the occupiers was a psychic and a Loyalist. He unleashed a mental blast that held the police at bay for a few minutes. In the process, he and also opened the minds of Tina and her father (though they didn’t realize it at the time). Despite the Loyalist’s efforts, several occupiers were shot and killed, including Tina’s little sister.
In the aftermath of the raid, Tina and her father joined up with the Loyalists to lend their righteous anger and telekinetic powers to the cause. They served as muscle, using their minds to disarm security guards, protect protestors from bullets, and sabotage corporate infrastructure. They had a good run until six months ago. They fell into a trap, and Tina’s father was captured by the Agency.

Now Tina is on a mission of vengeance. In her efforts to get her father back, she’s become a weapon in the Loyalists’ hands. She will take on any mission against any enemy, no matter how dangerous, if there’s a chance it’ll bring her one step closer to freeing her father.

Tina Walsh, Angel of Vengeance
Urban Survivor, 4 dice: Tina’s lived on the street most of her life. She knows where to find food and shelter, and where the true dangers lie. (Strides confidently into the scariest parts of town, but cringes in the more upscale areas.)
Frenzied Fighter, 3 dice: She’s never had any real training in firearms or fisticuffs, but makes up for her lack of guidance with pure, terrifying aggression. (Short-tempered, goes on the offensive if given a chance.)
Telekinesis, 3 dice (Hair floats around her head when she’s angry, which is often.)
Forcefield, 3 dice (Not intimidated by enemy weapons.)
Attack 3 dice, Defense 3 dice, Hit Points 21 (survivor mentality), Psychic Pool 5
Quote: “Look down. That’s 15 stories to the street. Nothing holding you up but my patience, and my patience is running out. So before I get bored and just walk away, tell me when’s the shipment getting here!”

photo by: Fey Ilyas

Going the Distance

You want to learn more about how psychic powers work in Mind Strike. How do I know this? Because I READ YOUR MIND.

When I first started thinking about Mind Strike, I realized I didn’t want to handle “range” for psychic powers in the usual manner — you know, “‘You get 50 yards of range for every point of power” or something like that. Look at the comics, the movies, the books with psychics in them. It just doesn’t work that way.

In Mind Strike, the default range of any power is line of sight. If you’re trying to read a dude’s mind, it doesn’t matter if he’s across the room, driving down the street, or duct-taped to your left arm; it’s all the same so long as as you can see him.

Using a power on a target outside your line of sight is harder. As you’d expect, there’s a penalty for doing so. As you might not expect, that penalty is not based on the distance between you and your target.

Well, in a way it is, but it’s based on emotional distance rather than physical, spatial distance.

This means it’s a lot easier to strike up a telepathic conversation with your mom or a teammate — no matter where they are in the world — than a stranger you know only by the photo thrust into your hands. (It’s not impossible to link up with complete stranger, but it’s really hard. You’ll probably have to push yourself and run the risk of backlash.)

Of course, there are other risks when linking with those close to you. Once you start telepathically chatting with your mom, you run the risk that she’ll start leaving messages on your phone complaining that you never “think at her” any more.

Ah, well. Power has its price, right?

Mind Your Powers

Mindstrike is all about psychic powers. The two biggest powers (to no one’s surprise) are Telepathy and Telekinesis. They are, after all, the foundations of most psychic powers in sci-fi media. In the game, they form the foundation of all your other powers in a system of prerequisites. In order to get the Teleportation power, for instance, you’d need to start with Telekinesis (moving stuff with your mind) and Control Density (since you’re dispersing the molecules as you move them, obviously).

“You mean like a skill tree?” you may ask.

“Yes, exactly like a skill tree,” I answer. “But it’s upside down, see?”

See? Upside down. Completely different.

Mindstruck

Ah, Thanksgiving. The harbinger of food comas, patron saint of road trips, and the sharpened stake above the heart of any “write a novel / design a game / finish your screenplay” in November efforts.

Not that I’m complaining, mind you. Not really. Spending time with family and the ritualized consumption of poultry flesh is more important than these other pursuits — at least until NaNoWriMo and NaGaDeMon start handing out actual prizes. No, it’s just a matter of time management, and keeping in mind from the start that a holiday-shaped black hole is looming somewhere around the end of week three.

So is this the blog entry wherein I confess that I have failed to produce Mindstrike by the end of November? Of course not! This is America! This is the blog entry in which I lower to bar until I can just eke over it, and then declare “Mission Accomplished!”

Okay, the game’s not done done. But it’s done. And while I won’t be able to run an actual adventure before the clock strikes midnight on Friday, I will have a character creation session, and two out of three random game designers on Facebook agree that counts for a NaGaDeMon win.

And you haven’t seen the last of Mindstrike. This thing’s got a truckload of potential, even if I didn’t have time to fully flesh it out during November. I’ll be hammering away at well into next year, I’m sure, and I’ll be sharing my progress here for anyone who’s interested.

Unleash the backlash!

Oh sure, psychic powers might SOUND great, but when you lose control of your telekinesis during final exams, blowing out all the windows and hurling your classmates into a whirling psychic vortex the news later calls “Hurricane Steve” (because your name is Steve), you might wish your psi-switch had never been flipped. Also, that you weren’t named Steve.

The idea of psychics losing control of their powers is a pretty common trope in science fiction, and one I’ve always wanted to emulate in Mindstrike. Using the power and controlling the power are two different things. You might have a truckload of raw psychic energy, but if you can’t bring it to bear safely, terrible things can happen.

We call these things “backlash.”

Okay, we’re going to dive into some geeky game mechanics here, so if you’re just in it for the cool backstory of the psychic underground, I’ll have to ask you to be patient. I’ll have more goodies for you next week.

The game system for using powers (and dealing with backlash) goes like this:

Power Score: Each power has a score, which is how many dice you roll when you use it. To see if you successfully use a power, roll its dice and add them up. Compare the total to a difficulty number to see if you succeed. The higher the total, the more powerful the effect.

Psychic Pool: Characters have a psychic pool, which is how many “shots” you can use of a psychic power per day. In order to use a power, you must spend at least one shot.

Here’s the kicker: For each shot you spend, you add a die to your roll.

For example, I’ve got Telepathy 2, so I roll two dice. But in order to use the power, I must spend at least one shot, which gives me an extra die, so I’m rolling a minimum of three dice. If I want to really pump it up (say, to make a mental link with a person miles away whom I’ve never met, based solely on a photograph my captors handed me while holding a gun to my head), I can spend two, three, or more shots — each of which gives me an extra die.

More dice are more better, right? Higher rolls, more power — what could possibly go wrong?

Here’s a hint: It starts with “b” and rhymes with “flack-cash.”

When you roll, see how many dice come up 1s. If this number is greater than the base score of your psychic power, you get backlash.

Backlash scales. So if you only go over by one (say, I roll three 1s and have a score of 2), it’s bad, but not horrible (your head hurts, everything smells like ammonia, maybe a nosebleed). But if you go over by three or more, you move into Hurricane Steve territory: You’re overwhelmed with psychic noise and fall to the floor whimpering for 10 minutes, or blast a memory of your last birthday party into the minds of everyone in a half-mile radius, or give the gift of amnesia to the target of your telepathic touch.

Every time you use your psychic abilities, you risk backlash. That’s the price you pay. And that’s one of the themes of Mindstrike — what price will you pay for power?

No Mutants Allowed! Or, a Few Thoughts on Genre

At first glance, the world of Mindstrike might seem familiar: “People with amazing powers, eh? Oppressed by overbearing authorities, you say? Sounds like one of a dozen Marvel comics with an ‘X’ in the title.”

But Mindstrike is not a world for superheroes. Wearing a cape, mask, or flashy bodysuit is a good way to get yourself killed. There are no supervillains, no high-tech secret headquarters, no elaborate 12-step plans for world domination — and none of the other characteristics of the superhero genre.

So what genre is it?

The world of Mindstrike is that of the thriller:

The heroes are being hunted by forces too large to face directly, and for reasons they don’t completely understand.
It’s a world of mysteries and conspiracies, chase scenes and tense cat-and-mouse encounters, secret societies and cover-ups.
Violent confrontations are brutal, and tend toward quick hit-and-run skirmishes rather than elaborate set-piece battles.

All that being said, you could run Mindstrike as a supers game if you really wanted to. It would be grittier than your typical four-color fare, with lower power levels and higher body counts, but hey — if that’s what your group is into, no one’s going to tell you you’re playing it wrong.*

One way of looking at it is what makes the characters interesting in the two genres. Superheroes are defined almost exclusively by their powers — what they can do. Thriller heroes are more defined by what they are willing to do when faced with great adversity.

Heroes in the comics are powerful. Heroes in Minsdtrike are desperate.

*Unless you post about it on online forums, of course. Then you’re just asking for it.

Mental Mechanics

Like pushing a live moose into a trailer house, designing a roleplaying game system is a lot harder than you’d think. You’ve got the antlers of combat, doing their best to gore you. The mighty hooves of task resolution, zeroing in for lethal crotch-shots. And the terrible jaws of character progression, trying to bite your face off and shut down this painful metaphor far too late in the paragraph.

I’ve written RPG systems from scratch. It’s hard finding the proper mix of mechanics to bring the thing together. And after that’s done, you’ve still got the tedious task of applying these rules to every situation the players might encounter: fighting in the dark; defusing a bomb; shoving a moose. Not to mention the endless lists of equipment (“Moose-pushing shovel, $25, does 1d6 damage or moves a moose 1 space away from the user”), skills, and (if you’re really lucky) magic spells.

Enter the Warp

Which is a long and moose-centric way of explaining why I won’t be rolling my own system for Mindstrike. Rather, I’ll be using the WaRP system. This is the system used in Over the Edge, the classic, rules-light RPG of conspiracies and freaky weirdness. Atlas Games recently released the system under the Open Game License, which means anyone can use it, so long as anything they make with it is likewise free for everyone else to use.

The best feature of WaRP is its versatility. You aren’t restricted to classes, levels, or even skills. Just whip up a handful of “traits” to describe your character (like Private Eye, Keenly Observant, or Tough as a Moose) and you’re good to go.

Each trait gets a number of dice. When you want to use it, roll those dice and add them up; if you rolled high enough, you succeed.

WaRP comes with its own system for “fringe powers” which I’ll be adapting into the psychic power system for Mindstrike. What’s there is good, but too broad for my purposes, so there will be tinkering. Just as well. It’d be a shame to come out the far side of National Game Design Month without doing some actual game mechanics.

No, really. Enter the warp.

Since WaRP is open-source, you can use it for any of your games, whether commercial or just for your home system.

You can find the official SRD (that’s System Resource Document) at the Atlas Games website. Rob Donaghue, designer extraordinaire, has put together a prettier version of the same document on his website.
And I’m in the process of assembling a copy of the SRD in RTF format. It’s all the same information, but it’s easier to work with. I’ll post a note when that’s ready to go.

If you’re looking for a rule-light RPG system, or (like me) need a simple base system to hang your particular world on, check out WaRP. It might be the moose you’re looking for.

Striking back – with your MIND!

Imagine, if you will, a drumroll. An ironic, self-deprecating drumroll because, well, it’s me we’re talking about here — but at the end of the drumroll there’s a cymbal crash and a curtain goes up, revealing the game I’m working on for National Game Design Month: Mindstrike.

I wrote a first draft of this game almost 20 years ago, as a thesis project for college. It’s been gathering dust in the back of my mind since then, but as I wrote last week, this seems like a good time to pull it out and give it an overhaul

The Concept

Mindstrike is a tabletop roleplaying game about psychics in the near future fighting for survival in a world that wants to control or destroy them.

The World

Telepaths, telekinetics, “brain-bursters” — psychics are real, and everyone knows it. After the incident at Blake University left over 600 dead, there could be no denying that psychics exist, and they’re dangerous.

The government has stepped in to help control this new threat to homeland security, and offers “assistance,” in the form of drugs, therapy, and more drugs, to those afflicted with this new psychic disease. Those who reject this assistance are labeled “terrorists” and “enemy combatants.” Unless they want to end up indefinitely detained in secret CIA holding cells, these psychics have no choice but go underground.

The Characters

The heroes of Mindstrike are psychic guerrillas, sneaking through the high-tech jungle of 21st century America as they wage a shadow war on the forces that seek to control them.

Some are passionate revolutionaries, ready to sacrifice everything for the cause. Others are mercenaries, more calculating and concerned with their next paycheck than any sort of rebellion. Still others use their powers to help advance science, protect others, or try to subtly gather power through their own counter-conspiracies.

The psychics of Mindstrike have left their normal lives behind. They’re hunted by both the state and their own kind, rejected by society, and forced to make terrible decisions in order to survive. In hopes of getting ahead, many use their powers to undertake dangerous, illegal operations — either to aid in the struggle against their oppressors, or just to keep food on the table.

The Players

In Mindstrike, the players take on the roles of these psychics, and must use their gifts not only to survive, but to fight for freedom in a world where freedom has been traded away for the illusion of security.

No Nano, Yes Naga

Clearly I’m an idiot. Or maybe insane. Or an insane idiot, which means I should probably be running for office. Whatever the case, my obviously damaged mind has decided that I don’t have enough on my plate, so it’s tackling a whole new creative project for November.

No, it’s not NaNoWriMo (National Novel Writing Month for the uninitiated). Not this year. Instead, I’m taking part in National Game Design Month, which has the much cooler, more-pronounceable acronym NaGa DeMon.

The rules for NaGa DeMon are basically the same as NaNoWriMo, but instead of writing a novel in November, you’re supposed to create a playable game by the end of the month. This can be any kind of game — board game, video game, tabletop roleplaying game, drinking game, that weird fur-suited live-action dungeon-crawler you’ve been dreaming of — so long as you can get it playable — and actually play it — before December 1.

How hard can it be?

Coincidentally, I was recently thinking about designing a new RPG. I had a basic game world sitting around from a project I wrote back in college. And the system I would want to use just went open source. The pieces were in place. All I needed was an excuse to sit down and do it.

Well played, NaGa DeMon. Well played.

So who’s with me? November starts tomorrow. We’ve got a month. Sign up on the NaGa DeMon website (or don’t; it’s not like there are prizes or anything) and join me for 30 days of insanity, idiocy, or some unelectable combination thereof.