'30 Days of Gratitude- Day 28' by aussiegall on Flickr

1. It’s a huge, open playtest, the first of its kind so early in the design process. Thousands of people will be publicly providing feedback on a game’s design, which will be improved and re-published for testing every month or two.

2. That design will go through designers. This isn’t an attempt to crowdsource rules; it’s an attempt to get lots of feedback. People complained about lack of playtesting in 4E, so why complain about an open playtest now?

3. It’s a new approach to rules. The core will contain basic rules, with plenty of optional rules modules to let players add specific flavors to the experience: tactical combat, enhanced skills, diseases, etc.

This means that GMs can build a rules-light, old-school dungeon crawl experience; a more expansive 2E experience; a gritty, detailed 3E experience, etc. Players can create very detailed characters or simple ones.

4. Options let different players play together. Ever tried to get a non-gamer to join an existing D&D 3E or 4E game? Tried to coach them through character creation? Found yourself saying “It’s actually not that bad…”? Imagine giving that player only a few choices that completely define a character.

The RPG market remains tiny; we need new players to keep the market alive. We need innovation, and Wizards of the Coast is providing it.

Will it work perfectly? Nothing does. At least they’re trying.

Wayne Foundation charity pack

What You Get: Several dozen RPG products, including systems, adventures, worlds, and artwork, normally costing a total of $220. Price? $25.

Why We’re Doing This: All the profits will go towards the Wayne Foundation, which fights child prostitution. That’s a pretty damn great cause.

Why I’m Talking About It: I’ve put a handful of my products in here, so if you’re at all interested in my own output, you can get everything I’ve ever sold in this package.

How To Get It: Buy the 2^nd Annual Wayne Foundation Charity Pack on RPGNow.

As a GM, how can you encourage your players to role-play more fully and effectively? That’s the trick, isn’t it?

Let me introduce you to a tool called Drama Time.

Come up with a term that will mark a switch in your game into intense storytelling mode. I call it “Drama Time.”

Discuss this with your players. Explain your desire for deeper role-playing. During the game, when you feel it’s appropriate, announce “Drama Time” and hold your players to it. If someone starts joking, frown at him or her, and continue with the immersion. If players start to derail, say “Come on, guys.”

Does that require a firm approach on your part? Yes. This is a situation in which, if you want to change player behavior, you have to be the alpha dog. You have to be firm–not loud or harsh, but calmly definitive–about the kind of behavior that’s inappropriate.

Of course, don’t expect perfect adherence starting at the first moment. But when I’ve used Drama Time, players quickly grew serious and worked to immerse themselves.

Worth a try.

Microscope is a game of world-building. Grab a couple of friends and some index cards, and you make up a world’s history (or a significant chunk thereof). The game provides a helpful structure for keeping the players focused on world-building. If that sounds like fun, read on.

The Basics of Building a World

'Leave it all.' by nathanhayag on Flickr

The group begins by brainstorming the Palette, which consists of two lists: Yes (all the elements you definitely want to have in the world), and No (all the clichés and other elements you want to avoid). Pretty self-explanatory, and this is the most chaotic part of the game.

The group then defines a beginning Period of play, and an ending Period. These each get an index card. Written on each card is the name of the Period and a white or black dot, the dot indicating the relatively positive (white) or negative (black) direction of that Period’s history.

From there, the game proceeds in rounds, with each player getting a turn. One player in each round is the Lens, and starts the round by announcing the round’s Focus. The focus can be anything: a person, a place, a theme, a moment in time, an item, etc. The Lens then creates a new Period and an Event within it, or a new Event and a Scene within it. The Lens describes these to the players, and each Period, Event, or Scene gets an index card.

Each other player gets a turn, in which the player creates one Period, one Event, or one Scene that relates to that round’s Focus. Anything can happen as long as it fits the Focus, includes nothing in the No list, and fits with pre-established history. This new Period, Event, or Scene gets its own index card.

Microscope includes some extra rules to help with Scenes. Each Scene starts with the current player asking a question, such as “Why was the prince exiled?” or “Who was responsible for destroying the lab?” By the end of the scene, that question must be answered. Moreover, the rules encourage players to role-play out Scenes, with each player grabbing a character.

Also, each Period and Event gets a dot: a light dot indicating that the scene was an overall positive direction for history, and a dark dot indicating a negative direction. This is subjective, but helps the players think about the consequences of each Period and Event.

I’m not sure why Scenes need this much help. I assume this is a problem because Scenes are specific, and players can easily get stuck coming up with details. It also keeps players from creating “too much” in one Scene. The game should be collaborative, and I imagine would-be novelists could turn each Scene into a half-hour short story.

That’s about the entire game. Play continues until the players run out of time or are satisfied with the history.

Playing Microscope Online

Several Stewards of the Assembly have been playing Microscope online this week, and it’s been going well so far. I created a shared document, into which I typed a quick summary of the rules in gray italicized text, and created an empty Yes list and an empty No list. I invited people in, and we started filling things out, typing commentary and discussion below the lists.

After a few days, each list had about half a dozen items, and we’d run out of steam. So, I took on the mantle of Lens for the first round, announced that the Focus would be dragons, and laid out a schedule. Each player had a specific day to play, though other players could go early if they worked that out with the current day’s player, and a late player could similarly catch up after checking with the current day’s player.

I then added an Event (The War of Claw and Fire) and a Scene (The turning point of the Battle of the Vongthul), and we were off!

The first round started well, but soon real life intruded and players got behind. After some discussion, we came up with a better solution:

Each round takes one week. One player is chosen as the Lens, and chooses the Focus. Players can add their material any time in the week. Players won’t clobber each other, because the shared document shows changes as they happen. All you have to do is open the document to see if anyone else is adding their material right now. It’s working well so far.

Suggestions

Discuss the Palette freely and in detail. This is when you’ll establish your boundaries and expectations, and this is the one time when you can be chatty and completely free-form.

Treat every player’s contributions as sacred. At most, ask a player to expand or explain a contribution.

Enjoy the process. Micrscope spawns wild, complex worlds. Relish it!

'recognize the poison in my heart.' by zephyrance on Flickr

Many players come across a world that’s just begging to be role-played, but for which no system fits perfectly. So, how about grabbing a generic system?

The following systems can be used to model just about any world or genre, and they’re all free (to various extents).

d20

d20 is, of course, based on the Dungeons & Dragons 3^rd Edition system of ability scores, skills, and the core d20 mechanic: roll a 20-sided die, add and/or subtract small modifiers, and compare the result to a difficulty rating.

This system’s been around forever because it works. It’s been stretched and tested and explored in every way conceivable. It can be stretched so far that it breaks, but that usually happens for those trying to break it.

Wizards of the Coast provides the d20 3.5 System Reference Document.

FATE

FATE is an adaptation of the Fudge system–which I describe in the next segment–that was designed to model narrative story flow. FATE excels at modeling characters from literature (from “high lit” to the Dresden Files).

Version 2 and version 3 are freely available and cover all the basics.

FATE gives players a bit of narrative control, thanks to Fate Points and Aspects. Each player starts with a couple of Fate Points, and each character has a couple of Aspects. Aspects are taglines that describe a character’s personality, such as “Never Tell Me The Odds” or “Trust Me; I’m a Scientist!” Players can spend a Fate Point to invoke an Aspect, giving them extra dice on an action, or the GM can compel an Aspect, giving them an extra Fate Point but triggering the negative side of that Aspect (rushing into danger or unstable experiments, to use these examples). Players can resist a compel by spending one of the player’s own Fate Points.

The Fate economy encourages players to play to their character’s actual personality. A character that repeatedly succumbs to weakness builds a supply of Fate Points that can be cashed in later to be awesome.

Fudge

Fudge is different. I’ve heard it described as a toolkit for building a role-playing system, which is close to the truth but not quite accurate.

Fudge has a core mechanic, and provides many character options that use that mechanic. The group decides on the character options to use.

For example, D&D has six core attributes: Strength, Dexterity, Consitution, Intelligence, Wisdom, and Charisma. Fudge lets your group use as many attributes as you want. Same thing with skills; players add points into a set of specific skills in D&D, while in Fudge, players can make up whatever skills they want (as long as the group approves of them). The entire system is limited with a point-buy mechanic, which the rules provide advice about.

All these character elements–attributes, skills, etc.–are represented with a number (usually 1 to 4) which corresponds to the Fudge Ladder. This is a set of adjectives that correspond to each number: 0 is mediocre, 1 is fair, 2 is good, 3 is great, -1 is poor, -2 is terrible, etc.

This works because there’s one mechanic in Fudge, and provided the attributes (or skills, or whatever) have some limit, they will work with the mechanic. Which means you can use any character representations you want, as long as you adapt them to the Fudge Ladder.

'Hanging on at F'B'ULL Speed' by VinothChandar on Flickr

Fudge uses Fudge Dice, which are six-sided dice that have a +1 on two sides, a -1 on two sides, and a 0 on the remaining two sides. Every time you want to do something difficult, you pick a relevant character element, roll four Fudge dice, add them, and add the value of the relevant character element. Depending on the game, you may be able to use multiple elements on the same roll. The result tells you how well you did: If your barbarian with a +2 Strength attempts to grab the bull and ride it to the ground, and rolls a total of +1 on the Fudge Dice, he did a great (+2 = great) job.

The Fudge dice provide a beautiful distribution curve: usually 0, often +1 or -1, all the way to a very rare (less than 1% chance) +4 or -4. This means you’ll usually do as well as your character elements you will.

The adjectives provide a quick-to-graps representation of your character’s abilities. Let’s say your character sheet lists a +2 in Swordplay. So, your character is Good at Swordplay. Boom. You intuitively grasp what that means in the world, and how well you’ll usually do when swinging a sword.

GURPS

I’ve never actually played GURPS, but I have a lot of GURPS source books, and the system is a paragon of flexibility.

It’s a point-buy system, with a few tweaks surrounding the core character attributes. Characters are made up of core attributes (strength, dexterity, intelligence, and health; all of which cost different amounts of points), advantages (which cost points), disadvantages (which give you extra points), quirks (non-mechanical distinctive elements of a character), and skills (which cost points).

One advantage of GURPS: there’s probably a sourcebook for whatever you’re trying to run. There are already GURPS books for Watership Down, The Prisoner, ghosts, gothic steampunk, Andre Norton’s Witch World, Celtic myth, and superhero temp agencies.

GURPS Lite is a free, basic version of GURPS.

Risus

I love Risus. The entire system can be described in a paragraph, and it handles pulp adventures stunningly well. It’s less-suited to other genres, granted, but it’s free.

The system: each player starts with 10 six-sided dice. Each player makes up a character, which is described by a couple of clichés such as “Never Tell Me The Odds,” “I Have A Plan,” “Femme Fatale,” or even “Mob Boss.” The player puts dice in each cliché. Done.

When attempting a difficult action, the player rolls the dice in the appropriate cliché, trying to beat either the GM’s target number. If a player is facing a specific enemy, the enemy will have dice, and they roll off. If the player-character loses, the player temporarily removes one die from the cliché used. If all dice in one cliché are removed, the character’s knocked out.

That’s Risus. Characters are easy to grasp, play proceeds quickly, and at least when I played, we had tons of fun racing through an adventure.

I hope this helps. If you have a go-to generic system, please let me know in the comments.