What's another name for magic?

I have a game in the works that is about warriors who must share their mystical energies while fighting the forces of tyranny and darkness. I'm drawing inspiration from a few places, mostly from console games and anime. As you can imagine, I'm at the early stage where I'm working through key concepts in the setting as well as some core rules. My head is running over with statistical models and dice!

Also high on the agenda is the setting itself. Although it sounds like a minor detail, one part of the puzzle is what to call the magic of this setting. I could call it magic and be done with it, but I want more flavour. It should be something evocative, something memorable. It's at the heart of the world, so it'll be something that the characters will talk about. I want my players to be able to say the word and feel the importance of it. That means it also can't be clumsy, unpronounceable, or cheesy.

I started brainstorming and put this list together. It's a list of all the magic-esque words I could remember from other settings and stories. Magic, magik, chi, qi, mana, focus, power, spirit, psyche, charm, the force, glamour.

I thought about using Scrabble tiles of these words and pulling them out of a bag to see what words came out. When I did this, I ended up with the most ridiculous options. Really, you don't want to know. So… scratch that.

This time I went to German (as you do). There's a word that the German philosopher GWF Hegel used: weltgeist. It means "world spirit." I like the "geist" part, as a word for spirit. I also like the word uber, meaning "over." The ubergeist would be the overspirit, the power that a team of mystic warriors could share, in addition to their individual heists.

And then back to English. Perhaps there's nothing wrong with merely using "spirit" or "ghost" for this. By imagining the table talk, the answer becomes clear.

"I take a die from the ubergeist pool to boost the spell."
"I need something from the overspirit to succeed this roll."
"I use one from my geist, one from the ubergeist, and two from my ability."
"I cast the spell, using two from my ghost and one from my ability."
"I boost the spell with another die from the spirit pool."

Ghost has a nice ring to it.

How about you? What's your favourite word for magical power and which game or story is it from?



Image credit: Magic, by Cruenta

Another game idea in the works

Things have been quiet on the blog but not in the creative engine room. 

Another game is in the works. I plan to release it as a crappy PDF by the end of November. But it ought to be fun to play!

Inspiration is coming from RWBY and games like Final Fantasy. Make of that what you will. 

It's time to play

After a flurry of posts in the first few days, a brief post in week two, it is now time to complete the final phase of Nagademon 2013. Play it.

That's right, tomorrow night I'm taking this little game to my regular gaming group to see how well it works with them. As usual I have a few things that I'm looking for from the game. Most of all I want to make sure that it's a fun or engaging game. The idea seemed to make sense to me but I really want it to be fun for other people who don't live inside my head. All those homunculi enjoyed it, but they're not real. Apparently.

I'll let you know what happens.

Solo Playtesting Tells the Obvious Secrets

I ran through my rules again today to make a documented play test, a solo test if you will. I made characters, wrote tribal values, rolled dice, collated results, narrated results of rules. The end result? A shaky game. A wobbly, uncertain game. A lumbering journey through a short story.

But it's a story and it's a game. There's a story game in there, lurking beneath the surface of those bullet points and ideas. That's the first, and the biggest, obvious secret I learned tonight.

Buried deep in the die rolls, however, were several other secrets. Who gets that +1 you mentioned? Does that failed roll really exile the character from the tribe, and from the game? What kinds of things make for a worthy raider?

All of them are the obvious errors and omissions from my notes. They're the big, easy corrections. They're the kinds of things that really need to be cleaned up well before any encounter with actual players. I was tempted to fix them on the fly, but I committed myself to playing the rules as written. That's an important part of play testing. Play what's written, not what you think would fix the problem that you think you've found.

And now, to fix the obvious problems I just found.

The reason why they fight

I mentioned that my Nagademon 2013 game had a problem in the area of audience empathy. I think I may have solved it. Important to the setting (and therefore the story) is the value that the character's identity is found in the tribe. I hadn't really integrated this as fully as I could into the game but I had expected the players to drive their characters along that path. After a day or two of thinking about it consciously and subconsciously, I found my answer.

In the first iteration of the game I created a phase for the players to define the values of the tribe, and later had a phase in which the players had to play out their attempts to resolved personal tensions between the characters. Although this sounded like a good idea at the time, it didn't really connect the characters into the importance of the tribe itself and as a result didn't support what the game is about. This game is about characters who are willing to kill and die for the sake of the tribe. If I insisted on a phase in the game that concentrated on the interpersonal relationships, I think it would have been a distraction. Instead of that, the phase has been replaced by the opportunity for characters to embody the values of the tribe.

And now I'm going to give a little context for all of that. I hope it'll make more sense this way.

There are several phases of play.
   1. Read the tribal values, establish the setting.
   2. Create characters (includes identifying which values your character has broken)
   3. Make restitution to the tribe.
   4. The tribe is raided; with many men killed, and their children stolen.
   5. The characters prove their worth to join the raiding party.
   6. The tribe sets out to rescue their children.

The problem phase was #3, but I think I've fixed it now. Only another round of dummy testing will tell me if I've avoided the problem I found earlier. If only it all survives an actual play test.

Dummy testing success!

I ran some dummy tests last night for my Nagademon 2013 game. The good news is that it was very successful. I found something wrong with what I had.

It's an issue of what makes a good story. I like to think there are three key elements to a story for any protagonist.
   1. What does the character want?
   2. What's stopping the character?
   3. Why should the audience care?

The first two are standard fare for most story games. The last one is about getting player involvement in the game. Players have an emotional connection to their characters and need to share the motivation so that they make the character do something. I've been at game tables with players who've been confronted with The Big Bad Threat and responded with, "Why should I do anything about that? I'm going to find a monster, kill it, and take its stuff."

In my game the first two are clear: get the kids back from the cannibals, but your place in the raiding party is not assured. The third one is where I found the problem. Mechanically it's fine, but emotionally it's not strong enough. There's a good set of obstacles in that part of the game, but I want them to have a stronger connection with the rest of the game.

I consider the dummy testing successful because it found this problem. Now to fix it!

First Blood of the Nagademon

The outline is done. What I have now is a playable game, but only if I'm running it. I had Siege in this format for several plays before I started putting text around it. The rules of Nagademon don't allow this kind of luxury, however, so I need to get the next couple of rounds of play testing completely.

My next immediate steps involve running some dummy tests by myself to see if it works as imagined. After that I need a group of players to try it out. As it happens I know a couple of people who are keen to play, but who have never played a story game before. This seems like an interesting opportunity to see how well it works off the shelf without any gaming presuppositions.

Roll initiative against Nagademon

The battle with the Nagademon has returned for 2013. This year I've started the month with a solid idea and have started the first hack at it. Already I can see influences from Burning Wheel, FU, Fiasco, and Siege. I'm stealing with pride.

Right now, the game itself is a one-shot game in which the players play members of a tribe that suffers a raid from cannibals who steal their children. The characters must earn their place in the raiding party that will go to rescue the children.

I'll keep the title to myself for now because I'm not yet convinced by it. Watch this space for more!

NaGaDeMon Day 23: Play Test Part 2

Last night was the second and final play test for Lego FU, at least within the month of NaGaDeMon itself. The changes I made after the last one seemed to work well, so they're going to be committed to the document.

A surprising emergent property, though, was the replacement of the standard FU Conditions of Injured and Dying with No Legs and Disassembled. The players started the night asking, "I shoot at him. Do I kill him?" and moved to "I shoot at him. Do I disassemble him?"

The scenes of minifigs in pieces on the ground, trying to hop around and reconnect with their legs or trying to roll their heads around to reconnect with their torsos were interesting to say the least. All sense of blood-thirstiness vanished immediately, even though one player insisted on their minifig carrying the head of a captured bounty back to the bounty office.

This time I also remembered the Creationary box. It's hard to build something convincing in 60 seconds, it seems, and worked about half the time. I'll definitely leave that as an optional rule.

NaGaDeMon Day 17: Layout and Art

I'm living the dream. A gaming mate from Brisbane has agreed to work his magic on the layout of Lego FU¹. We had some facetime last night to talk through things and the various ideas he's sent me in email over the past fortnight.

And wow! what a chat. With some of the ideas now on paper (so to speak) I'm even more keen to see this product finished and in the wild.

His website is undergoing redesign at the moment, but you should check out Lovehate Design and send business his way.


Notes
1. As publication date draws ever nearer I feel a growing dread that Lego lawyers will chase me down and insist on a takedown of the PDF or a major edit. Lordy, I hope I don't have to re-brick it as Brick FU.

NaGaDeMon Day 8: Playtest

Tonight, we playtest!

I have my draft printed and ready, and at least one of the players has read it. Another player has played FU before in our regular game and I hear we're having another player as well. I should be able to get a nice cross section of opinions from them.

The experience of others tells me that it's time to get specific about this playtest. In other words, have some specific goals in mind, some specific questions to answer. The good news for me is that I'm writing a supplement for an existing game so there are plenty of things I don't need to test. So here's the list:

• Changes to the FU point economy.
• Rules for building

It's a small and problematic list. Changing the ebb and flow of a reward system exposes the system to imbalance. The FU rules are forgiving on this, though, because they tell the GM to hand out a FU point whenever a character does something cool or funny-in-character (or something like that, I'm working from memory here). My list of how to earn FU points could be taken as making this instruction more specific to the setting. On the other side of the ledger are some new ways to spend FU points. Some of them are just re-bricking¹ the basic FU rules (spend a point to get an extra bonus die) so I don't think I'll run into much trouble there, with the exception that players might question whether it's worth the bother to earn the Lego FU point when the ordinary FU point is more easily available. Others are additions to the ways that FU points can be spent, so I'll watch them closely.

As for the building rules, I'm more than a little worried. There's a good reason that most games avoid these subsystems: they're either too simple to accomplish all the nuances of "real world" design or they're enormously complex and take over the whole game². I've pursued a simple system, in keeping with the spirit of FU. FU has rules for gear and also rules for turning the props of a scene  into gear. Gear gives bonuses whereas props do not. I want to see how well my build rules connect with the gear rules.

After this playtest I move on to revisions and start planning for the last playtest. In that I'll have to test the changes I'll make from tonight as well as see how Lego integrates into another setting. Our normal FU game is a Star Wars game. I'll be adding Lego to it to see if we can play Lego Star Wars FU.

Notes

1. Ah hah! See what I did there?

2. See Car Wars, for example. It's all about the build.

Lego FU Day 6

I made some good progress on Lego FU last night; enough to have removed all the bullet points and replaced them with paragraphs. Next on the list are these three things.

1. Play test. That's right, I've planned not one but two play tests for November. The first is this Thursday night with my regular gaming group. The second will be to add Lego to my normal campaign to see how that works.

2. Rewrite those paragraphs. I took the time to read them again and... uh, wow... some of them are horrid. There's no consistent voice, some have too much waffle and not enough ice cream, others are far too frugal.

3. Add more bullets. Now that many of these ideas have become text they've spurned more ideas. I just need the bullets for now. Paragraphs can come later.

Adjacent to the writing is the layout development work. That's begun in earnest and I'm delighted with how it's progressing. Design and layout belong to a world alien to me, but it's great to see how that manifests itself. I can't wait to see the finished product.

Building the Foundation of Lego FU

I began writing last night. That's a good thing, especially since it was the official start of the NaGaDeMon. Of course, my writing is clumsy the first time around, but I'll revisit and rewrite as I need to. Right now I just want to turn bullet points into basic paragraphs.

NaGa DeMon

I confess! I'll be designing a game for the 2012 Naga Demon. It's a great project to exercise the game design muscles and it looks as though there'll be even more people participating this year than previously.

I've decided (and announced on facebook page) that I'm going to write Lego FU.

FU's a great system that I've blogged about before and which I'm currently using. It's quick, simple and effective (just like pain relief? wha...?). I'm using it with some gamers who, to the best of my knowledge, have never played crunchy systems and they've picked it up beautifully. Now, the system doesn't seem to appear much, but drives us back to being creative with the story.

But why Lego FU? Because I like FU and I like Lego, and because they're a good match. Lego isn't a complicated world. It's full of cliches. Heroes are heroic. Villains are nasty. Characters in the Lego world have simple goals, and FU facilitates that.

I've sketched an outline of the text already, mostly so I don't forget any of the ideas. That's just note-taking, not cheating, right? I mean, they're just notes I wrote in October rather than November. No disqualification here.

:)

Week of Pain Relief

The weekend of pain went OK, but not brilliantly. I hit a snag when it came to art. This is my first game, though, and it's really supposed to be about the game rather than the document.

I want a pretty document, for sure, but not for this edition of this game. Either I learn it, or I pay someone to do it. That'll be a production decision for another game.

Speaking of which, I have two in my notebook for when Siege is done.

Weekend of Pain

To be honest, it won't actually be painful. It will be, however, the final push to get Siege out the door. My plan is to have the last tweaks tweaked (they're mostly grammatical and stylistic) and a PDF created for upload to Lulu.

I'm going to make it available as print-on-demand, just in case someone wants a neat little booklet. I like the booklet format. For me, I want to convey a simple game that can fit snugly in a bag without causing spinal problems for gamers. Some of my favourite games are booklets, or would make sense as booklets.

And also, I have no skilz with graphics or layout, so I'm not going to betray my game with a woeful attempt at sexy packaging. One default Lulu-wizard cover for me.

Early Start to NaGaDeMon

I'm getting an early start to NaGaDeMon. Writing has already started.

Well, technically, the writing started about two years ago. I'm just promising myself to finish Siege and it's a good warmup to the rest of the month of writing. Today's task is an editorial passthrough and a simplification of the relationship rules.