Games, stories and fun!
So I made a bunch of pre-gens characters for the con game at Queen City Conquest this past weekend and one of the characters had a piece of equipment that isn’t in the book, an electronic lock pick device. My son said “Whoah! Where did they get that?” I chuckled and replied that you can make any kind of equipment you like with agents. But examples are nice so here it is.
Electronic Lock Pick
Cost 3d
Pool 1d
Technical trait Unlock Doors 2 Steps
It’s really that easy!
The question comes up frequently, can an AI simply copy itself a billion times and make itself more powerful?
By necessity, there would have to be a system in place that keeps this from happening or malicious AIs would just take over everything, just because they could means someone at some point would make one that did.
It’s possible that AIs are actually constellations of programs that really do copy themselves all the time and that’s just how they function.
But how would one prevent an AI from copying itself onto billions of computers? Maybe they operate like crypto-currencies that can be transferred but not copied.
It may be that there are special requirements to copy an AI. It could be that the program simply won’t allow itself to be copied. If that were the only safeguard though, someone would make an AI that would turn itself into a virus.
There has to be something about the architecture of the AI that will not allow it to copy itself. A blockchain validation would fit this bill. There could be something in the neural network that prevents copying too.
In Jump Temp there are dozens if not hundreds of currencies. Shady governments may offer payment in their own currency that they know is almost worthless anywhere else due to bad credit.
One solution is to use a crypto-currency, of which there are many. These currencies are data packages that can be transferred but will not allow copying. Forging a crypto-currency is very difficult and most competent AI’s can sniff out a fake in short order. This makes them very handy for independent operators without a reliable data connection.
One feature that some crypto-currencies have is that they can be traded for a real world thing. Proc Coins are one such currency. They can be traded for the use of a distributed net of AIs. For every money agent die, a character can “rent” time on this AI net to solve or help solve information based challenges. Each money die spent in this way becomes 1d of an AI assistant.
Using Proc Coins this way requires a working data connection and the AI cannot be influenced to do anything illegal. The AI assistant is available until it’s dice deplete.
So if I hire you to take a gold brick across town to the bank, how do I ensure you won’t just run off with it?
This problem comes up in star travel frequently. By definition the cargo has to be at least as and preferably much more valuable than the resources it takes to transport it.
Because of this, many high value shipments require a ship to have a caretaker AI enter their computer systems.*
Caretaker AIs come loaded with some powerful software that can disable a ship and even fight against another AI with dangerous attack programs.
Energy Pool 4d
Trait – Attack Program 8 steps
*Even if a ship does not have a special system designated as a computer, all ships have computers, they’re just unmentioned because their capabilities are limited. A starship would not be able to function without computer control.
The Energy System allows the players to narrate or better yet interpret, what the results of their rolls are. Some players have a bit of trouble with that and understandably so, since in most games they are passive when it comes to narration.
Because of this, I’d like to give the players some simple processes that would help them think through narration (or interpretation).
GMs do narration all the time, they’re used to it. Fill a table with players that have been GMs and I think there would be no problem. Some players think they could never GM. It seems magical to them how this person comes up with all this stuff.
To make the choices simpler I thought about introducing a list of ideas to develop the players narration but it ended up being either too vague to be useful or way too long and overwhelming.
So I need a different strategy. It needs to be concrete as possible for the players to easily absorb the advice.
I actually have a goal for player narration in the Energy System and that is for the narration to explain the dice roll as much as possible. That, I think, is key to this effort.
Of primary importance are dice depletions in this system and so I think that should be the focus of the players “interpreting” their rolls. Encouraging the players to say how each die depletes and why would be a great step forward.
In their early stages, with a player struggling to develop their narration skills, the GM can readily help out at this point. I’m thinking of something akin to Archipelago’s ritual phrases are in order. They don’t have to be as robust, they just have to be functional for the prompting we want to do. If there are phrases that are standardized, they’re less surprising when said, they are much more likely to be supportive than unintentionally demeaning and are probably easier for the GM to recall and use. This also conditions the players to expect GM intervention in their narration which is occasionally needed if the player is narrating something that contradicts known facts (even if it’s only the GM that knows them at the moment).
As the player gets more fluid in their narration, they will need less and less prompting. I can imagine a rules lawyer player using their narration as a weapon to suss out secrets from the GM, but that’s a problem for a different day.
Here are some prompts to help the players interpret the events connected to their rolls.
What made it go that way? – Prompting the player to start off a description.
What mistakes were made? – When the player hasn’t described a depletion.
Keep going – When you want the player to add more narration either because they’re doing well or they’ve stopped before fully explaining the roll.
Think of other ways – When the player uses the same description again.
That can’t be – When the player contradicts facts that they may or may not be aware of.
I’m not sure if these are the best phrases to use, I’ll try using them in our next session and see how it goes.
I realized today that relationships in the ES should be their own agent. This gives a relationship actual mechanical power in the game. It could be rolled against by any person in the relationship and like any other agent, it can be depleted.
This makes things really interesting because you can use the relationship to influence the people in the relationship, but using it too much (abusing it) can make it fall apart.
It could also be used to explain what happens if an NPC has their energy depleted via social attacks. They would essentially be “reborn” as a relationship to the player character.
The GM could bestow a relationship agent to a character if they think the situation warrants, the players could also use an advancement phase to build their own.
There’s a bunch of different types of relationships that would be interesting. Love interests could be used to fight aggressive actions. If you had a Hate relationship, it could help with tests of endurance when going after your enemy.
You could even model a Mentor relationship with this because the mentor can help with training rolls but when the relationship depletes the Mentor has taught all they can, or all they’re willing to teach.
I’m debating if I should formalize this in Jump Temp. On the one hand, it really should be a function in any game, but I’m not really sure if it fits in the Jump Temp story.
I got my first hard copy of Jump Temp! Woooo!
Getting a hard copy always helps with figuring out what the finished product should look like. For example, some of my image placements need to be moved to the other side of the page so they’re not in the crease of the book. At least one picture needs to be moved to another page.
Another thing that becomes obvious is that since a color print is needed for the star maps and most of the art is black and white, there needs to be a lot more color on the pages from layout elements.
So far I haven’t run into typos yet, but it would be a rare thing to have caught them all by this stage.
Jump Temp is nearing completion. It’s illustrated and has a cover. Now I’m cleaning up typos and trying to clarify text. I originally thought to keep Jump Temp and Protector together but there’s been a lot more interest in Jump Temp from elevator pitches and the book is getting big all on it’s own (80 pages). The thing that pushed it forward while Protector languished is I found a style that I liked for the book. I haven’t figured that out for Protector yet. The art is kinda mis-mashed.
I’m putting the book out for playtesting and we’ll see what comes of it.
I’ve been following around the OSR (Old School Renaissance or Revival depending on who you ask) community for a little bit now. At first, the movement in the RPG community seems like a rejection of anything modern and it is to some extent. It’s easy to be against things, what’s more interesting to me is what the OSR works toward. That’s why I liked Matt Finch’s booklet “A Quick Primer for Old School Gaming” it summarizes some reasons why people enjoy an OSR title in what he calls Four Zen Moments. He then explains four Taos for the Game Master.
Some of these Zen moments I like some I don’t, some I think are better achieved through different means. I’d like to approach them here and attempt to discuss them objectively from a design perspective.
I’m not going to rehash the whole text that Mr. Finch wrote, the booklet is free. Briefly though, the idea here is that the referee (or GM) uses the rules and the players use descriptions to interact with the referee. The referee is like a judge that must rule based only on a constitution and the arguments that are presented and possibly a few tests (that’s how it sounded to me anyway).
This one seems a little less focused to me but I understand the grouping. The main idea is that you are your character’s mind. You’re able to do whatever you could with common knowledge in that situation. Usually that doesn’t include knowledge that would be situationally inappropriate like how to build an airplane in a medieval fantasy. However, if the player is clever with their use of knowledge, it’s ok for them to do things that would seem inappropriate for their character, like a big dumb barbarian that keeps coming up with brilliant plans.
It also includes the idea that the game doesn’t revolve around the PC’s stats. There are monsters that the players just can’t take on and it’s their job to be able to tell that.
This Zen moment is the most revealing that OSR is a specific flavor of RPG. Mr. Finch explains that OSR games are about taking an average person and building them into a hero.
I’m not sure where the Zen moment is here. This point is just framing the scope of the game. Players start out as average people and you try and build them into heroes. They never become untouchable or immortal, it’s just not in the scope of the game. Maybe the Zen is that this can be enjoyable?
Again, this is pointing to the OSR being a specific flavor of RPG. If you like that scale of progression, then you might like an OSR game. If you’re looking for something different, OSR might let you down.
This was partly covered in moment 2 but is elaborated on. The game doesn’t care what the character’s level or stats are, it’s the player’s job to figure out what they can and can’t fight through.
Mr. Finch also emphasizes moment 1 here, that the players have no right to depend on a rule book[1]. It may have been better to call this moment “You don’t have the right” because that’s what is repeated. It’s brought out that a ref never has the right to tell a player what their character does. More accurately, the ref can never make a choice for the player. In earlier examples given, the ref is repeatedly telling the players what their character does as a result of their choice and rolls.
Basically, find ways to have secondary effects happen in the game. Be imaginative with the player’s choices having consequences. Critical successes and critical failures are intrinsic to these consequences.
This is a way of handling exploration that relies on the characters asking the right questions and knowing what to do with the answers.[9]
This is the idea that it’s the GM’s job to fill in the results of combat creatively or quickly.
This Tao is about resource management. The most useful part of this advice is that the GM should keep a tight grip on how much time has passed in order to handle depleting resources. The big takeaway is that OSR games are heavy in resource management[4] take a step back and own that and you’ll get the results the designers intended.
In the end, OSR games are a type or RPG, they’re not my thing judging from the descriptions given. “Modern” games are often designed to avoid problems that players of old school games had at their tables. I don’t think playing an OSR game would result in table flipping in my current group but it would have when I was a teen.
I was hoping to find some essential core truths about RPGs or why the OSR has such a strong following. I don’t think I see a lot of universal tools here other than “be creative and tell a story” which is mostly the Story Games crowd’s thing. Certainly the OSR group gets there differently. I’ve always played without worrying about game balance. Story Games would have a hard time inducing that kind of experience so there’s lessons to be learned for sure. Neither group have a monopoly on RPG insights.
If anything, seeing that large numbers of people like this kind of experience confuses me. Either there are a lot of really good GMs out there, people are masochistic or they prefer GM control because it’s easer for them. RPGs largely rejected all controlling GMs in the 80’s and keep moving away from them. Then the OSR shows up and goes right back to it. Is the OSR made possible by the older, wiser, more experienced GMs out there? Is it possibly driven by them, their desire to play games like they did when they were young? Is it simple nostalgia? I know all the OSR adherents are screaming at your computers right now.
Games have to talk to your experience in life for them to be really enjoyed. In some ways I’ve experienced the ideas described and in others I’ve experienced the opposite making them difficult to try and enjoy. GM control can simplify play fun can turn into a game of Mother May I. It strongly depends on the GM, their experience level and even their mood. Thats why a lot here is mercurial. It can be good or it can get really bad.
There are some good concepts to be explored here though. I think they have their upsides and downsides. A lot of the ideas put a heavy load on the GM which could lead to burn out if a GM isn’t careful. Each trade off may be better or worse for specific players. Some will find the methods here liberating. Others will find them frustrating and limiting.
It would be interesting to make an RPG out of only words, no math, no charts, just words. Maybe it would be simple and refreshing.
A game like that could easily become just as or even more complex than any normal RPG though. In order to build a world engine that only used descriptions, could end up taking up a huge amount of time to convey.
To circumvent that eventuality, it may be useful to give the engine a direction so that things stay simple. This is what I thought of.
One Rule
Every story worthy element has One Rule. The GM gives the world a rule. Players give their characters a rule. Important (special) equipment gets a rule. An important NPC or maybe a group of NPCs get a rule. Weather can get a rule. A maze can have a rule.
There are a few conditions that make things clearer.
No two elements can have the same rule. This is important so that two unstoppable forces don’t collide and annihilate everything.
A more specific rule supersedes a more general rule. If one player has a character that is “The greatest fighter in the world” and another has the rule that they are “The greatest swordsman in the world” as long as the fighting is being done with swords, the swordsman wins out.
That’s very Amber like in it’s certainty however. A character can always win in a specific contest, a randomizer could be employed, but that doesn’t seem interesting. I’ll have to play with the idea and see if it I can make something of it.