Michael S. Miller

from the Anthropological Survey: Cetus-Four: Unauthorized Colony head surveymanager: Wunfife Aye-fortree

The surveyteam's insertion went exactly according to protocol. While in transit to Cetus-Four, each team member engaged hyperlearning techniques to master the indigenous languages, as had previously been decoded by the surveyrobot stationed in orbit two years ago. The team prepared itself to endure and dissect the planet-bound, indigenous culture through clothing its bodies in replicated indigenous clothing and rehearsing plausible rationales for unknown humans traveling freely in society.

For the benefit future action of Singularity human resources on the surface of Cetus-Four, it should be noted that physical resemblance to the indigenous population is achieved very easily. Evolutionary divulgence from the basic genestock of the Singularity has been minimal in the 3,542 years since the planet's illegal colonization.

The rationale for unknown humans to be wandering is far more challenging. In the end, this surveyteam decided to capitalize on the fact that the indigenous peoples still use surfacecraft to traverse the planet's many oceans. Our rationale involved washing up on shore after a storm. We explained our presence as survivors of a shipwreck.

The difficulty faced by more plausible rationales lies in the most central and peculiar of Cetus-Four's social structures. The presence and strength of this structure caused continual confusion among this surveyteam, as well as excessive overtaxing of archival, obsolete anthropological sources. One tangental majorityopinion was to marvel at how far humans can devolve in three-half short millennia of isolation. In the time since these criminals defied Singular will and colonized here, the indigenous people have resorted to living in families.

To Be Continued...

from the Miscellania Galactica, compiled by Gase Trimagus

Based on this author's decoded readings of the venerable Proceedings of the Eighth Stalwart Conclave, as well as other sources, both ancient and contemporary, the enigma that is the Stalwartian glaive shall now be made clear.

It is well known to all learned persons that a Stalwart's physical prowess derives from her complete and utter self-command. While even a novice might display feats astounding to the undisciplined crowd, such as slowing of the heart, focusing of the fist-strike to shatter ferrous alloys, or leaping distances seemingly impossible within gravity wells; the powers of self-command gained by better-trained Stalwarts boggle the imaginative faculty itself.

The will of a trained Stalwart—one who has passed his Rite of Ordeal—has been so focused by his exposure to and understanding of the very energies that make interstellar travel possible, that the exercise of that will can affect the very cells and molecules of the Stalwart's physical body. Through repeated mental exertion, the Stalwart is able to draw the very iron and carbon from her blood and flesh and shape them into the form of their glaive. Over weeks and months, these weapons grow from a seed crystal invisible to the unaided eye to the modest dirk-sized glaive of a young initiate. As years pass, a Stalwart will repair, shape, and enhance his glaive, as the weapon serves as physical symbol of the spiritual path the Stalwart has traveled. It is not unknown for accomplished master Stalwarts to wield glaives taller than their own bodies.

As for the seemingly miraculous relationship repeated observed between Stalwarts and their glaives, its dynamic spark lies in the method of glaive craftsmanship divulged above. A Stalwart's glaive is sprung from her own body through application of unyielding will and Interstellar energies. Even after it is forged, on a spiritual level, it remains a part of the Stalwart's body--still subject to his will, still connected to the quickening of life within his veins. Thus, summoning a fallen glaive to hand is as simple as matter as raising a hand in celebration.

This, of course, is but the least of the mysteries of the Stalwarts. In my own travels, my own senses have beheld no less than—

Remainder of Fragment Irrevocably Datacorrupt

From the Miscellania Galactica, compiled by Gase Trimagus

Much has been written about the bond between a Stalwart and his glaive. Mystics and scientists, debunkers and demogouges on a hundreds of worlds have expended thousands upon millions of words probing the pressing questions: Why does an order devoted to inner peace arm itself with the weapons of war? Why are their weapons so antiquated--why a glaive rather than a plasma rifle? What craftsmen could turn out such detailed workmanship? What factory could create each glaive unique to its owner? Older Stalwarts wield larger, more intricate glaives--why do they change their weapons throughout their careers, or do the blades actually grown and age along with their wielder? And what of the miracles that Stalwarts have been known to perform with their glaives? How can a skilled Stalwart summon the hilt of her blade to her outstretched hand from vast distances, even across the dead vacuum of space itself? How can the touch of these sharpened implements of combat also bring healing and rejuvenation to those in need?

All those piles of words, and the only bit useful of them is the questions, never the answers. So it is with most things. But, herein, gentle reader, I shall divulge that most sacrosanct of Stalwarts' secrets: the true nature of the glaive.

To Be Continued...

I find myself thinking about setting detail for By The Stars. Specifically, space travel. The biggest decision is: More authentic relativistic slower-than-light interstellar travel vs. more sci-fi faster-than-light travel. Maybe I should puzzle out some of the pros and cons.

RELATIVISTIC INTERSTELLAR TRAVEL
--Pros--

• It's rooted in reality. c is the universal speed limit, as near as we can tell, and thus what real space travelers are going to have to deal with some day. There are many sources of hard, scientific speculation about what such travel will be like.


• It's counter-intuitively rare in gaming, and pop-culture sci-fi in general. Mostly, they mumble about trans-whatsis-drive and get to the blasters and aliens. Novelty is a selling point, and I always like breaking semi-new ground.


• It makes an epic time scale easy. When a single trip of a few months' time from the travellers' point-of-view could span hundreds of years for planet-bound folks, having millenia-old cultures and traditions is a snap. Plus, pairing it with a LeGuin-like ansible makes for really interesting slow-travel, fast-talking paradoxes.

--Cons--

• It's hard to wrap one's head around. The science fiction novels that make good use of relativistic space flight are well-pondered on many levels. Putting it in the game demands more forethought from players, and pushing them out of their comfort zone. That's not necessarily a bad thing, but it is something to be aware of.


• It isolates characters. This is a BIG one. Talk about problems of splitting the party! I've taken a trip that will last a month for me and 50 years for you--what does that do to our shared narrative? Relationships outside the ship are going to apply to their own situation only, because NPCs will likely be long gone by the time you come around again. The thought of record-keeping alone makes my eyes cross.


• It sets a standard that I, honestly, don't have an interest in meeting. Choosing the unpopular, realistic option in something as central as space travel implies that other unpopular, realistic options--such as propulsion systems, particle shielding, power sources, transhumanism--are fair game and should be considered. But I'm not a guy that finds strong appeals in the hard science speculation.

HAND-WAVING FTL TRAVEL
--Pros--

• It's common to most popular sci-fi. Everybody "gets" the whole "making the jump to lightspeed" thing. It mimicks our own understanding of travel in our day-to-day world. Although the physics make no sense, the aesthetics are easy.


• In-game problems and adversity are harder to run away from. Chases become reasonable actions.


• The hand-waving can be interesting in its own right. Fading Suns' jumpgates have always fascinated me--to have one choke-point where everything must pass is just plain cool. Who guards them? What other duties do they perform? How would information travel without FTL radio/ansible communications?

--Cons--

• It's common enough to be ... boring. It's expected that there will be FTL travel, and that journeys between stars take a few days or weeks. It's run-of-the-mill.


• Space loses its wonder and granduer. It becomes little more than a metaphor for oceans. Things are too close, and place doesn't matter.

AFter typing all that out, relativistic space travel has some very high negative points. It looks like the best solution is to put a unique spin on the fantastical FTL travel. But I'm not yet 100% certain. I've never claimed that setting design is my strong point. Is there anything I've missed?

There are some thoughts swirling aimlessly in my head about BTS that I haven’t been able to articulate for months now. This is my first attempt. They may very well be understandable to no one but me, but that’s what rough drafts are for. At least they’ll be down and out of my head!

One Scene to Rule Them All

I have a very tight focus for the game I want to create this time. I want to emulate the Luke-Vader duel scene from The Empire Strikes Back. Just as WGP... sprung from the Thanksgiving dinner scene of Spider-Man, the duel will serve as BTS’s guiding light. But what makes the duel so special? Why does it still capture my imagination nearly 25 years later? Let me list a few features, and then I’ll talk about my ideas for putting them in a game.

"I am your father." -- Sudden Character Redefinition

This is the thing that had everyone talking from the time they saw Empire until Jedi came out. "No, Luke. I am your father." The duels starts out with Luke, the Avenging Son, coming to face down Vader, the Sire-Slayer. Luke’s lack of a father--as well as his desperation to follow in that unknown father’s footsteps--has defined his character up until this point. To suddenly learn that those footsteps lead directly to one of the greatest cinematic villians of all time shakes Luke’s character to its core.


How to do that in an RPG? My concept is for each character to have "open" spots in their character history. Things they don’t know about their own past. Perhaps I’ll put a grand diaspora or two into the recent past of the setting info to explain it. They can grab a bonus die for alluding to this open concept, and putting some constraint upon it. But so can other players. Whenever that happens, the open spot becomes worth another point of payout when it is defined. A player cannot define his own open concept. Only someone in conflict can define your open concept, and they get part of the payout. Kat suggests that you can set it in stone yourself, but only for half the pool.

"Join me. It is the only way." -- Cutting Off Options

Look at the progress of the duel. They fight. Vader attempts to outmaneuver Luke and defeat him with technology (the carbon freezing chamber), and Luke just barely manages to dodge out of the way. Then, Vader overwhelms him with the Force. Finally, he visciously out-duels Luke and (literally) disarms him, driving him out onto a precipice where no other manuever is possible. The only way out is (seemingly) through Vader and by accepting what he offers. The only other choice is stepping off into the abyss. The fact that Luke does choose death before dishonor is the first step of redefining his character in the rest of the trilogy.


How to do that in an RPG? I think that all characters will be able to act in a number of different realms: Technology, Manuever, Melee, Ranged Combat, Social, Psychic Powers, that kind of thing. That happens to be six, so we’ll use d6s. Each one is associated with a single number on the die. During a turn, each character chooses a number/method that they’re using this round. They roll the dice for that method and a success is any die which matches the number of that method. Whoever gets the most successes on their own dice wins that round, and they get a number of consequence points to dole out equal to the matches of all players that round. You use these consquence points to add penalties to your opponents’ traits. But, these are not penalties in the sense of decreasing their effectiveness, they are damage penalties that accrue if the opponent choose that option. And, they’re not just abstract point penalties, they are "cannot" statements, much like in the character creation section of Puppetland and My Life with Master. They restrict your options. But, they can also be spent to give someone options they didn’t have before....

"Father, please!" -- Enhancing the Options of Others

This slides into the climax of Return of the Jedi, which is really a continuation of the Empire duel. Luke has accepted that Vader is his his father, but even though his father has fallen from the path, Luke will not. He stumbles, but rights himself, throwing his lightsaber away before the Emperor. As the Emperor begins his lethal assault, his appeals to his father allow Vader to do what he could not do previously: Strike at the Emperor.


How to do that in an RPG? Just as you can cut off options by heavily disincetivizing them, characters can spend consequence points they gain to incentivize options to others. They’ll get bonus points if they do choose the option that you set up for them. Characters will have Oaths that forbid them from doing things. And they CANNOT do those things that they’ve voluntarily given up, unless some other character has given them this option.


This is where my thoughts drift into more abstract, less concrete stuff. In life in general, I think giving people options is generally a good thing, and cutting off their options is generally a bad thing. I see it as empowerment rather than control--call me democratic rather than authoritarian. Translating that shaky, ill-defined philosophy into game mechanics is tricky, because there will be innumerable counter-examples and players looking to gain advantage without consequence.


Tangent That’s something that drives me nuts in games--advantage without consequence. One of the things I wanted WGP...’s Aspect system to do (that it doesn’t do all that well) was that you couldn’t gain the advantage of an Aspect unless you brought it into the conflict, and thus risked damaging it. It doesn’t work so well in WGP... simply because everybody brings everything into every conflict. ::shrug:: But, in BTS, I want to bring that into play more centrally. If you use something to gain advantage over me, you give me the opportunity to affect that thing and potentially gain advantage over you.


My thoughts are all ragged now. Maybe I just need to do some self-playtesting.
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Over a year I've been struggling with this damn game. Mostly out here, in public, on my LJ. After GenCon '06 I thought doing a weekly update would keep me on track and focused. Instead, it kept me feeling guilty and pressured into producing something, even if it wasn't worth producing. Couple that pressure to perform with one of the most stressful years of my life, and you have a recipe for what I have on my hands with By The Stars: an 80% functional game that I don't particularly like. That's what I've had on my hands all through the summer convention season.

I ran the turn-based version twice at Origins. The first time had 4 players plus me and crashed and burned. The game itself did not give us enough to work with. Plus, all the "clever" fiddly-bits of keeping the turn-based system running were too much trouble to keep track of. The second time had 8 players and went better, although still not real great. Both games at DexCon folded for lack of players. At GenCon, I jettisoned the whole turn-system and rolled it back to the LARP rules. For the GenCon Thursday game, I got 12 players and they had the best BTS game yet! The players even applauded when it was all over (not bad, considering I sat around and did nothing for 3 hours). On Saturday, I had 8 players and it was a rougher, more strained. Both GenCon games had strong critics among the players (often those who were succeeding very well, mechanically.)

Looking back, I see that the game structure I've crafted doesn't do much but encourage players to get into lots of conflict after conflict. The attitude and imagination that the players bring to the game determines completely how the game is going to go. I've made noises about possibly polishing it up and releasing it as "By The Stars: The LARP," but I'm not familiar enough with the LARP scene to be able to promote it properly. Perhaps I could format it as a PDF and sell it that way, but it's not top of my priority list. I feel guilty to set aside all the work I've done, and all the great feedback that my playtesteres have given me, but this path is not working out.

Neither are the regular updates. I've let them slide over the summer, and I've seen my game more clearly. The only constant game design methodology I have is "Keep doing whatever works, stop doing whatever doesn't work." Thus, I'll only be posting updates when I have something to report.

However, I have narrowed my focus on the game, have new, fresh ideas, and am working on it. One of the unproductive design goals I'm jettisoning is the "must be playable with up to 12 players." It was seriously tripping me up. And I've regained some badly-needed focus. By The Stars is no longer going to be simply "a game inspired by my love of Star Wars," but will be "a game inspired by my love of the Luke-Vader duel scene in The Empire Strikes Back." It's all in there. I just need some time and thought to tease it out.

Things are changing faster than my pitiful blogging skills can keep up with. Here's the quick and dirty summary.

* Last Sunday we playtested the new turn structure. For the most part, it works well. It makes the game feel more of a table-top and less of a LARP. With just a few tweaks, I have the version of the game I'll be taking to the summer conventions.

* Speaking of those conventions, I leave for Origins in 48 hours! Yikes! Lots of prep to do! I'm scheduled to run BTS twice, but only for 10 players. I'm almost ready.

That's why I need to go now. See ya in Columbus!

Week 42. The answer to Life, the Universe, and Everything. Ten weeks shy of a year. And I've barely touched the game in the last month. Game development tends to go in cycles for me: a few weeks or even months of intense activity, followed by a few weeks of doldrums.

The latest doldrums have been triggered by a swath of Real Life problems. Extreme stress at work, my dad's health, home maintainence, etc. There was supposed to be a tentative playtest this Sunday, June 10. But over half my playtesters have already told me the won't be able to make it. Such is the curse of summertime--everybody likes to do stuff. So I'm going to set up a playtest for June 24. It will be the last one before I (hopefully) run the game for strangers at Origins. Between now and then I need to rewrite and expand the number of characters in both "The Illyrian Crisis" and "The Myth of Planet Earth." And I need to codify a turn structure that we'll be testing out.

The good news is that I'll be camping from June 15-22, so I'll have a little bit of free head-space to think about such things.

It's been a less than stellar week for By The Stars. Due to real life stesses on many people's parts, there was no playtest this past weekend. Carl and Bill came over and we discussed a possible turn structure, why it might work, and how it might be set up. We'll try again on June 10.

Since then, I haven't had much time or brainspace to devote to BTS. The skeletal turn structure looks like this:

1) Opening turn, everyone starts with all their own Resource cards. They must hand out 5 of each Resource (10 total) to at least 4 different people. This will be broken into 4 turns. No player may receive more than 10 cards (We'll mark that with poker chips or something). But you don't just hand people cards--you explain why that character has influence over you. Thus, we build backstory right at the beginning.

2) On a regular turn, all the players will pair up for their conflicts. Normally, it'll be whoever made the biggest bid last turn that picks their fight first, but on the first turn it's random. They'll negotiate spoils and set up their conflict simultaneously. Once everyone has figured out their bid, each pair takes a turn making their bid, describing their conflict, and resolving their cards in front of the entire group. This will allow everyone to know what's going on in the game fiction.

This also opens up possibilities for helping. Players might be able to bid their own cards to help someone else's conflict (and describe how, of course). But I've not yet settled on what they get in return mechanically. Plus, that opens a whole new level of complexity--Where do helping cards go?

So, progress is slow, but the moon wasn't built in a day!

Okay, time for a consolidation and restatement of my design goals for By The Stars:

1) A game that takes players from "I've never heard of this game, but I'll play" to "That was great! It was my best game of the con" in 4 hours or less.
2) A game that drives and rewards players for creating conflict and excitement.
3) A game that can run for up to a dozen players simultaneously without a game master.

At the moment, I'd give it an D- on goal #1, a C+ on goal #2, and a B- on goal #3. The Camp Nerdly playtest showed me that #1 is faring very poorly. The game is too complex. It's like trying to teach and then play Cancellation Hearts with folks who've never played a trick-taking card game. It needs to be like teaching and playing UNO.

One of the playtesters said, rather enthusiastically, "It's a really interesting game engine and I think if I would play it a second time, I'd really get the hang of it and enjoy it." For a game intended to run 3 or more sessions, that'd be a pretty good place to be. For a BTS, it's a stake through the heart! (But a useful stake through the heart. All this stuff is useful--I'm not discouraged any more, just challenged. "Discouraged" was so last year!)

Why is it more complex than it started out to be?
Well, I've been adding little bits to try to fix the game's other biggest problem: Lack of story development. It's not that nothing happens. It's not even that nothing exciting happens. It's that the story does not build and hang together. I know it's persistent problem because it's structural, but I don't yet have a better solution.

One of my playtest comments did get me closer to an understanding of the problem. One of the playtesters said: "With so many players, you've got a lot of processing power--a lot of creativity. But because the fiction never comes back together, you can't really build on others' creativity."

This is a very, very good point. My players are not building a single story, they're each building their own individual story. And, in every conflict, they find themselves needing to re-orient themselves about the content of the fiction, as well as the motives of the other player, and the needs of their own hands. In some ways, every conflict is like starting from scratch. This is a big, thorny problem.

Diagnosis in Forge-speak
I'm being trumped by the Lumpley principle because the group is never agreeing to anything, just a subset of the group. Thus, the Shared Imagined Space is never synchonized among the group and isn't really "Shared." Thus, to be super-nitpicky, we're not really role-playing, just making stuff up in proximity to one another.

Diagnosis in English
What makes an RPG work is that the group of players all agree (to a greater or lesser degree) on what happens in the fictional game world. In the current structure of By The Stars, the group never has the opportunity to agree on the fictional events, because most of the group doesn't even know about most of the fictional events.

BTS is LARP-like, but LARPs don't suffer from this. Why does BTS?
This is not a problem in traditional LARP because players cannot really affect anything outside of their own characters without the acknowledgment of a game master. What I've added to By The Stars is the ability to describe things outside your character. People blow up starships, hack computers, and break out of jail. But almost like a tree falling in an empty forest, (nearly) no one hears them, so they barely make a sound.

What to do?
A solution that was suggested was to break up the free-for-all nature of conflicts and install a turn-taking structure. I'm concerned that it is going to make the game take too long--but it's currently running quite short, so that's not so bad. I'm concerned that it's going to increase the dead-air time for each individual player. But we'll see how much of a problem that is in playtest.

Playtest is next week. I'm thinking of re-doing the Illyrian crisis with some new and changed charcters, and the new rules. We'll see what happens!

What did I do for By The Stars in the last week?

I playtested it with eight folks who had never heard of it before at Camp Nerdly in Triangle, Virginia. We had a wide gamut of experience with LARPs, gaming, and Star Wars.

How did that go?

Not as well as I was hoping, actually. I got a sense in my gut as I was explaining everything that the game has reached to point of too much. And several of my awesome, generous playtesters made comments to that effect--occasionally when they were trying to say something else, which lends a lot of credence. The Quest Cards barely got used. Betrayal cards got abused early (as I anticipated they would be). Every revision brings new problems.

Problems are fodder for progress. What's the next step?

I'm not sure. It's Wednesday and I've logged nearly 35 hours at work this week. May is always a very busy month. I haven't had much time to wrap my head around the game. I design slowly, so not having any head-space is very limiting. I might have to cancel the May 20 playtest. I'll try to make some time this weekend to ponder on what happened, what didn't, and why.

I wish I had more to report. Work is killin' me. But I'll still be here next week. Same blog channel.

Lot of prep to do for Camp Nerdly this weekend. And every minute I'm typing this us is a minute I ain't prepping.

I will, at some point, be making a version of By The Stars available as a collaborative Google Document. If you'd like to be able to comment on the document, I think I need to specify your e-mail address in the doc (I'm not 100% sure). So, post a comment letting me know to add you. If you're not my lovely and talented wife, don't assume that I'll put you on the "collaborate" list.

See ya on the other side of Nerdly!

The "Myth of Planet Earth" playtest was extremely instructive. I took out the rules for being out-bid by your own Aspect tokens and the game ran way short and suffered for it. This is great! I now know that those particular rules are vitally important for both pacing and excitement. Perhaps the best part to come out of that was the post-game discussion where a number of ideas of how to put these rules back in (while still addressing the reason I had taken them out) were bandied about. Several of them look promising.

I also introduced Quest Cards. They provide a sort of overarching narrative/alternate victory condition to seek out. Players all start with one card which can be bid as a simple +3 if they choose they're not interested in the Quest. If they are, then each card matches with a specific other card out there, to reveal other cards. So, if I have the Port Half of Ancient Starmap and you have the Starboard Half of Ancient Starmap, and we both play our cards together, we get the Oldest Known Starmap Card. If we apply that information to the Original Design Specs of Central Computer card, it gives us the Override Code we need to get the computer to reveal the ultimate goal: The Coordinates of Planet Earth. The Quest Cards need some development, but I think they seem extremely promising.

Also, the "big board" came up in the post-game discussion. And I realized that the reason I kept rejecting it was I kept conceiving of it as a timeline sort of thing. Like WGP's Synopsis Sheet. But when the idea of making it a map was put forth, it seemed obvious how that would help to synchronize everyone's ideas about the game world.

So, I've got my work cut out for me. Camp Nerdly is in a week and a half, and I've got a lot to get together before then. See you in 7!

Here's a confession for ya: When I've got a really tough problem, I talk to myself. So late last week I turned off the radio on my drive home and thought I'd talk about what wasn't working in By The Stars. As last week's entry indicated, I figured I would be discussing "Big Board" solutions to the lack-of-a-central-story problem. What came out of my mouth surprised me (this happens quite a bit--it's the reason I talk to myself about these things to begin with).

"Why isn't By The Stars working the way you want it to?" I asked.

"Because the Oaths are just sitting there. They don't drive play (at least not very hard) and rewriting them is lame in practice," I answered.

through further discussion, I figured out that Oaths were about three simple things, and that these things together had the potential to both form an arc for each individual character AND touch on the monomyth stuff that I had set aside. The simple things are:

• What your character is. The Prince begins the game as a naive youth
  
• What your character wants to become The Prince wants to end the game as a respected leader.
  
• What your character wants another character to become. The Prince wants the Overlord to end the game as a deposed tyrant.

That's it. The Oaths need to be that clear. Your first Oath focuses on getting from your opening state to your desired final state. Your second Oath focuses on dictating someone else's final state. I know more complexity will reveal itself in play.

Speaking of play, the next playtest is on Sunday and I've already got nine players committed to being here. It will be a grand adventure as they uncover "The Mystery of Planet Earth." I leave you with a snippet of the event description:

Everyone knows the saying, but what if it were true? What if all civilized worlds in the universe started from one tiny blue planet called Earth? What if Earth really exists and is as real as the star map in an android's data bank? What would you do to get a hold of it? What would they do to destroy it?

Due to the holiday and some particularly horrid days at work, there was not much concrete progress on BTS this week. However, I have been jotting notes on the game's biggest single weakness: Lack of a cohesive, structured story with a sense of dramatic pacing. Many of my ideas currently revolve around a large central whiteboard that will function similar to WGP's synopsis sheet. No single concept is ready for playtest yet, but luckily, "The Myth of Planet Earth" day playtest isn't for another week and a half.

Looking back on these last few entries, I realize I've been playing a bit closer to the chest than I'd originally intended. So, below the cut are the quick rules handouts I used for both the first and second playtests. Let me know what you think.

( BTS 1st & 2nd Playtest Rules )

This past Saturday, I went to Policon, a small, annual, private convention run by Don Corcoran. This year it was at Don's home in Philly. Kat and I were only able to attend for one day, so I had planned to run With Great Power... and she had planned to run Serial. On Thursday, Don announced that it looked like he would have more attendees than he'd have games being run. So, prompted by my muse-in-wife's-clothing, I volunteered to run By The Stars again. Don asked that I pare the scenario down to 6 players, due to space constraints. So Friday night was spent implementing the rules tweaks we had discovered after the first playtest.

On Saturday, there were but five of us, but a great five it was. A big "Thank You" to Kat, Don, Matt Talli, and Scott Lesher for helping to test my game. The game was, once again, fun. Most of the rules changes worked well and did what they were intended to do.

After two playtests with slightly different groups, I can begin to see the strengths and weaknesses of the design. On the positive, it does give people both a mechanical and story-based agenda. Players are kept engaged and active throughout the play time. The mechanics encourage players to create detail and engage in conflicts that they might not on their own.

On the negative side, the multiple-conflicts-at-once aspects means that each person is paying attention only to their own story, and usually missing out on everyone else's. The disjointed nature of the narrative means that the story doesn't build, it just sort of happens, happens, happens, and then ends. Plus, while characters are extremely active, they're not really developed all that much.

This is all very good. The positives give me fuel to continue development. The negatives give me goals to work towards--thorny problems to fix.

In passing, for those of you keeping track of these things, the young Singularity Pilot won the day, convincing his father, the Singularity Overlord of Illyria, to leave the planet in his hands. The Prince proved his courage and, IIRC, stayed on as an advisor to the Pilot. The Pirate gave up his criminal ways to woo the Cyborg Princess, who was also sought by the Pilot. We joked that this would be the kick-off of a romantic comedy in space.

I've got three weeks until the next playtest and a huge list of things to think about. Maybe I'll sign up to run it at Camp Nerdly at the beginning of May.

In any case, I've got a game. The game's got legs. But the race is far from over...

Stefan, our intrepid pilot, posted a fantastic actual play report about our Sunday game. Thanks, Stefan!

We did it! We playtested By The Stars for the first time yesterday. My most heartfelt thanks to Kat, Bruce, Bill, Michele, Stefan, Don, and Jo for taking a chance, helping me out, and having a fun time in the process.

Yes, that's right. Not only did the playtest happen, and not only was it successful, it was also fun! I have pages of notes in my cramped little handwriting for mistakes that were made, ways to fix them, suggestions for improving the game overall. It was the best session I've played in a long time.

From a story standpoint, the resource-rich, gas giant planet Illyria was thoroughly conquered by the forces of the Singularity, killing the rebellious Prince in the process. The Singularity Admiral died in making this, her greatest victory, possible. Her son, the hotshot pilot, ran off to find his own way enlightment. The Stalwart of the Glaive (my space knights), his reputation tarnished, went his own way. The former Singularity Overlord, the Illyrian Princess, and the first Self-Aware Robot joined the crew of the fearsome Space Pirate in search of freedom, adventure, and booty!

I've got lots of revision to do between now and the second playtest on April 22. But the basic token-trading system has a lot of promise and the game is well on its way to something great.

My playtest is in six days and I'm not ready. It's going to be extremely rough and my little panic-voice is screaming "Cancel the whole thing and take up something simple, like gardening or photography." But I shall persevere. No matter how rough the game is this Sunday, WE WILL PLAYTEST.

One of the bits I did work on was a brief setting intro. Initially, I tried to mimic the setting-free approach I had done for WGP..., but science fiction (even space fantasy) is so much bigger than superheroes that I don't feel it could work. The finished product will have details on crafting your own setting, but for starters, I have this. I hate writing setting stuff.
( Setting Summary )

That's it for right now. I don't know if I'll post again before the big playtest. Wish me luck. I'll need it.

It's Monday morning and I should be recovering from a too-full day of too-much gaming fun at NYC's RECESS yesterday. Instead, I'm recovering from a nasty stomach flu that filched most of my weekend from me. I'm frustrated for not being able to go to RECESS, confer w/ the NYC nerds, actually play some games. But it's times like these when it's hardest--and most important--to remember:

Falling down isn't important. Standing up is.

I've got less than two weeks to prepare for my first open playtest. I'll be using the WGP... enrichment process for the core resolution mechanic, but I need something that will force players to take actions that betray their Oaths. But it can't be linked to a random event or a flip of a certain card. It must be clearly caused by their early decisions. I'm thinking of a sort of "favor" exchange system, where you can avoid the consequences of a failed conflict by giving your opponent one of your favor tokens. You'll have a number of favor tokens, and can keep on dodging repercussions, until one of the other players amasses more of your favor tokens than you have and decides to cash them in. Then, you need to do what they ask of you, or destroy part of your own character to get out of it.

Thoughts?