Thursday afternoon, day off tomorrow and flexitime to finish early today. Boss is at a meeting, co-workers have all vanished for the day, leaving me, alone, with the internet. Bwahahahahaha ... ahem.

I discovered ficlets, via Wil Wheaton's blog, which are short (1000ish characters) stories used to inspire sequels and prequels. Pretty fun, and a nice idea especially when you see the network of stories inspired by yours grow. 

But by far the best bit is the "inspirations" page, which has a first line/last line generator. My favourite combination so far is:

FIRST LINE: the monkeys told me I'd find you here ...

LAST LINE: BOOM!

I'd like to see one of those full of scene openers for an rpg. That'd work quite nicely for Six Bullets I think, where it doesn't necessarily matter how you've started a scene as you have done, especially the epilogue, because it's meant to be explained as the game progresses.

One of the things that has come out of the past few playtests is the need for information about the antagonists and revelations to be presented clearly to all the players.

The revelation map was the first way of presenting this information, alongside all the information about a given scene, but this got confusing at times.

In the Spodley playtest I also introduced an antagonist sheet for each antagonist, divided into chapters to keep the information clearly laid out.

One comment was that the antagonists only used a small bit of their sheet, if any at all, so Malcolm suggested it be combined with the revelation map. I didn't quite go this far, instead rolling all the antagonist information and scene information into a single sheet. The protagonist has their own sheet, and the revelations have a sheet of their own, along with space for reward dice.

For the game I ran last week, I made a fancy protagonist sheet, antagonist sheet and revelation map, designed to be shared by all the players. They worked well in the game, and were used by all the players, so I'm pleased with how they've turnd out. Let me know what you think!

I playtested Six Bullets for Vengeance with my mid-week group last week and, to be brutally honest, it went rather badly. The game never really clicked, for a variety of reasons, and left me frustrated. But, every cloud and all that, it has proven to be a very useful playtest, as bad playtests tend to be, with plenty of food for thought and areas that need addressing highlighted in my mind.

I've posted a thread dissecting it quite brutally here. If any of my players are reading this, please don't think I'm singling you out or levelling any criticism at the group! The only person I hold responsible is myself.

So over at the Forge my Six Bullets playtest report from Spodley has sparked an interesting discussion with Ron (Edwards) about how much setup the game really needs.

Ron is arguing that I'm putting too much setup into the game, and that much of the fun comes from it being the ultimate blank-sheet game.

Those of you in the game at Spodley will recall that I was agonising over the other end of the spectrum, that the game didn't have enough setup and that I was leaving things too wide open. I'm thinking in terms of the genre, setting, locations and characters here.

So now I'm agonising about how much should be left to the game itself, and how much should be decided before the game begins.

So how much setup is too much setup? Should you literally be able to sit down and start playing and things like genre and protagonists emerge in play, or is it a good idea to talk about the setting and who is playing what upfront? Or is there some sort of happy medium?

Epilogue

The epilogue is one of only two scenes that the protagonist gets to setup and narrate, and is best thought of as the final scene of a movie. In past games it has showed the death of the final villain, but in this one it didn’t.

Malcolm narrated the closing credits: “James Pilgrim returned east and opened up a successful practice in New England.”

He then described the town in silence, with everybody huddled behind closed doors, and a small column of smoke rising from the mine entrance up on the mountainside. Pilgrim then appeared, walking purposefully through town with a rifle in one hand and a doctor’s bag in the other. He places it by the dead tree in the centre of town (which we added to the revelation map) and continues walking.

Chapter 5

The protagonist gets to choose the order he’ll fight the antagonists in, and logic dictated that the final antagonist would be the company boss, Thomas Deacon.

At the start of the chapter I grabbed 2 dice per player to use to create scene attributes and npcs, handing 3 to James and 2 to Jan and investing the remaining dice into the attributes “old mine equipment” and “darkened tunnels.” I also had my own dice to use for creating attributes for Deacon.

I began outside the mine, with Deacon telling one of his men, Mason (who James played) to stay outside the mine, and ordering the other to follow him into the mines. James had Mason hide behind a boulder ready to spring an ambush when Pilgrim showed up.

Having reached a natural pause, narration then passed to Malcolm to describe what Pilgrim did. This would be the pattern followed throughout most of the game – the antagonist would set the scene, describe what his character was doing and who else was there before turning to the protagonist to react to the situation.

I’m not sure if this is a problem, or simply the way the game proceeds. Malcolm explained the concept of different types of authority (as he does here) and how this needed to be made clear in the game text.

So Pilgrim climbs up the mountain path and Mason springs his trap, dislodging a boulder to crash down onto him, the first conflict of the game as well as the first problem. Both James and Malcolm set stakes, which in themselves posed a problem. After all, Mason couldn’t actually be successful and kill Pilgrim with his ambush, so instead they settled for the stakes “does the ambush alert Deacon or not?”

We rolled, Mason won and the boulder crashed down the mountainside, its echoes reverberating around the town and causing the townsfolk to flee indoors. Deep inside the mine Deacon heard the sound of the boulder but ordered his minion to “keep digging.”

Ok, so conflict one worked ok, but now that the ambush was sprung there was another conflict brewing. If you recall the previous playtest, we adopted a more gritty, close-up, blow-by blow conflict mechanism, which almost worked like rounds. It worked, just about, although I did feel at the time that we were struggling against the system somewhat. It didn’t work this time round.

Malcolm and James set stakes once again, but yet again Mason couldn’t kill Pilgrim with his shovel, so instead Pilgrim tried to persuade Mason to stand aside and go back into town. The conflict was whether he would have to shoot Mason or not to get into the mine.

Now this was a more juicy conflict with a much more interesting scope. It wasn’t about the inevitable, which was that Pilgrim would get past Mason and into the mines, but instead about how complicated it would be, what sacrifices Pilgrim would have to make. They rolled again, this time tying, which was a grey area of the rules. We decided it made sense that the protagonist should win ties, so Pilgrim talked Mason down and he returned to town.

This is where we took a time out. It became obvious that stake setting was very important, and couldn’t concern the inevitabilities of the game (which is that the protagonist survives til the end, he dispatches each of the villains and so forth) but instead had to concern complications, sacrifices, whether the protagonist had to get his hands dirty along the way. Considering up til now stake setting has a single line in the text, I think this needs expanding into a whole chapter.

The other issue Malcolm brought up was that, because dice are a commodity in the game, spent on dice rolls and traits and gained as rewards for winning conflicts and doing cool stuff, he was being forced to waste dice on dispatching a single mook. This led to the very real possibility that by the time he reached the real villain, Deacon, he’d have used up all his dice and we’d all be forced to fudge things his way. The quick fix was to say that minions only ever take a single conflict to deal with, one way or another. We came up with a much bigger patch later in the playtest, but for now this seemed to make things right.

I resumed narration. Deep in the mines, surrounded by chundering equipment and with his man digging a deep pit was Deacon. Narration handed back to Malcolm, who asked to spend his revelation token (earnt for taking part in conflicts and spent to add stuff to the revelation map) to find a big crate of dynamite. This was just part of the narration, not a revelation, so Malcolm got it for free, describing Pilgrim emptying out one of the tubes and hurling it at Deacon. Deacon did the heroic thing and hurled his henchman at it whilst he dove the other way. No conflict here, it just happened.

The next conflict saw Pilgrim take out the minion and told Deacon that he was here to exact his revenge for the townsfolk, and that he had evidence that Deacon was the reason women and children were dying – revelation token. We talked for a bit, scaring Janos who was sitting between us as we shot vengeful glares at one another, before Deacon laid out Pilgrim with a pickaxe handle, leaving unconscious whilst he finished digging. I narrated that I found a big chest and Malcolm spent another token – the chest was empty.

Whilst Deacon railed and screamed, Pilgrim had got up and had his rifle aimed at Deacon. Final conflict. Not whether Pilgrim killed Deacon or not, but whether Deacon died with dignity or not. He failed, and his end would be very undignified indeed. Pilgrim tied Deacon to the chundering, whirring machinery, tied a tourniquet round his arm and withdrew a huge syringe from his bag.

At this time James interjected, spending the revelation token he’d picked up earlier, declaring that “the machine has been killing the townspeople.” Both myself and Malcolm visibly recoiled at the idea – it jarred with my view of the game and Malcolm clearly had other ideas. But James had spent a token and his addition was valid, unless Malcolm disputed it with his last remaining token. We debated it for a bit, but both outcomes felt wrong – James’ revelation clearly didn’t fit with Malcolm’s idea, but Malcolm didn’t want to throw out a player contribution.

Instead we tabled the revelation and discussed it, with both James and Malcolm outlining what they were thinking. This should have been the way we handled it in the first place, as it led to a far more interesting outcome. Deacon’s mine was mining silver, using all the townsfolk to do so. The machine was washing the silver, producing mercury as a by-product that was poisoning the townsfolk. In a way, the machine was killing the townspeople.

Malcolm backtracked a little, narrating that Pilgrim filled his syringe with pure mercury and injected it into Deacon’s arm. He then emptied out the bullets from his rifle, from Deacon’s pistol, from his henchman’s sidearm, tossing them all down the pit so that Deacon knew there would be no escape from a slow and painful death. As Pilgrim left Deacon dying, screaming and blubbing and crying in pain and madness, he dynamited the entrance of the mine, leaving a pall of smoke behind him as he returned to town.

Which is of course where the epilogue began.

Questions and comments

Revelation tokens look to work, controlling the flow of revelations and rewarding people for taking part in conflicts, but I’m still not entirely sure whether there should be a mechanism for disputing them. On the one hand, I think there should be a way to counter a less-than-satisfactory revelation. But on the other hand, doesn’t that devalue one player’s contribution over the other. Do you think either are valid concerns?

Saturday afternoon at Spodley Grange I got to run a playtest of Six Bullets for Vengeance, I think for the 5th time. Each time it’s been with a subtly different set of rules and a different group of players, and this outing would be for the first time since I made the changes that arose from the Conception playtest.

Setup

There were 4 of us playing – myself, Malcolm, James and Janos. Everyone except Malcolm had played before, although only me and James had played with anything approaching the current version of the rules.

We brainstormed ideas for the setting and quickly decided to play it straight – ie as a Western. We wanted a subtly different feel though, and after brushing aside the idea of a Western set in Mexico, Malcolm suggested we go for a Pale Rider feel with a cold Western.

We set it in the mountains of Nebraska during winter, Malcolm suggesting a town swathed in snow with characters wearing thick overcoats buttoned up to the neck against the cold and hats pulled down over their ears.

We talked about what sort of settings and scenes we wanted to see and James suggested we go for quite a strong visual feel and have each chapter and antagonist confined to a single locale in town – the saloon, the hardware store, the church and so on.

After we’d settled on the setting, we threw about some ideas for characters. Malcolm opted to play the protagonist, James Pilgrim, a doctor.

We then discussed antagonists and I made it clear I wanted to avoid clichés with characters, so no corrupt sheriffs or the like. We decided instead to go for a town run by the mining company, with us all playing various characters associated with the company.

I was Thomas Deacon, the company boss, Janos was Bill Bishop, the corrupt union official, and James was Douglas Priest, the general store owner.

Because there were only 4 of us, and I wasn’t sure how long the game would take, we decided to play one antagonist each to start with, possibly increasing this to two towards the end. 

After the game Malcolm pointed out that 3-4 players was really the ideal number for the game, with 2-3 of the players taking on a couple of antagonists each, which was so obvious I’d managed to miss it.

After playing around with Everlasting Empires in the morning it became obvious that I needed a bit more structure in the setup, perhaps with some questions to get the juices flowing and give everybody a strong premise to begin the game with.

One of my favourite parts of Six Bullets is also one of the most innocuous – 6 little red dice that the protagonist has, called vengeance dice. Next to the mountains of other dice floating about the table (see here), they’re easy to miss. Yet they’re one of the most powerful – and coolest – elements of the game.

Vengeance dice have been in the game since the very beginning, although they’ve been dropped and brought back a few times since. They started out as an attribute that the protagonist had to have, which got reduced as the game went on, and were meant to represent the protagonist’s consumption by his quest for revenge.

Now they’re an extra pool of dice that the protagonist gets to add to a conflict whenever he wants, although they’re lost once rolled until the start of the next chapter. The idea is that they give the protagonist an edge against the antagonists who outnumber him, an extra pool of dice he can call on to even out the odds.

But they come with an almighty catch … and that’s what makes vengeance dice so cool.

The catch is this. Whenever one of those little red dice hits the table, blood and violence and pain follow in its wake. The narration of the conflict in which a vengeance die has been rolled has to include bloody violence in some capacity, to someone, anyone, in the scene.

If the protagonist wins the conflict, all well and good. Odds are he was intending violence anyway. But if the antagonist wins, the rules remain – he must narrate violence of some kind as part of his narration. To anyone. Including the protagonist, including the protagonist’s allies and companions and friends and loved ones.

They’re the moments in films when the protagonist guns down all his enemies in a blaze of bullets, or cuts down his foe in a single furious sword blow. But they’re also the moment when the protagonist takes a body blow himself, or when his staunch companions get cut down mercilessly by the bad guys.

Vengeance dice are like the ultimate escalation, and in that regard they’re a little like pulling out a gun in Dogs in the Vineyard. Sometimes they can go in your favour, sometimes they can go against you horribly.

I’m writing a game called Six Bullets for Vengeance, a quirky little story game which is best described as a Kill Bill meets Memento. It uses several dice pools as its core mechanic, but it didn’t occur to me until my last playtest, when I found myself buying a brick of dice specially, that it might use too many dice.

Now don’t get me wrong – we’re not talking thousands of dice here, Exalted style, but we are talking some. Maybe 10 per player, plus a few more for fun? And you’re rarely required to roll them all at once. They’re d6s too, and most people have a fair few of them lying around, especially if they play Warhammer.

In fact, part of the reason Six Bullets uses so many is that it uses dice as its counters and tokens, which could easily be replaced with real tokens. I just like the image and tactility of dice as counters, of grabbing those tokens you’ve been using to measure your gun shooting or vengeance or whatever right off your character sheet and throwing them down on the table to resolve a conflict. Truth be told it excites me a little! And for that I’m prepared to stick by my big brick of d6s.

I sometimes have a problem with Godlike and its many many d10s, but I get over that pretty quickly when I remember how cool the system is. Dogs in the Vineyard uses a lot of dice too, especially the obscurer types, but I’m learning to stock up on d4s and d8s now.

Is there such a thing as too many dice? Or tokens or counters or whatever? Have you ever picked a game up and read it and gone “urgh, I can’t play this – it uses too many dice/tokens/weird counters!”?

EDIT: also, new user pic!

Conception was superb, although I'm still absolutely knackered. I'll probably post reports about it piecemeal as the week goes on. The highlights for me were the game of Dead of Night: 28 Days Later I ran on the thursday night, the rather splendid game of Primetime Adventures we played on the saturday (I guest starred as Zombie Crimelord Bob in a Shaun of the Dead-esque series) and the Six Bullets for Vengeance playtest I managed to squeeze in on saturday morning, which turned out rather like Get Carter, or, as we put it during the game, El Mariarchi in the East End.

I've posted a rather lengthy playtest report both on the Forge and the Collective Endeavour, and comments will be welcomed at both sites!

Merry Christmas, happy new year and all that! I've had a lovely holiday, but will post more at some point later. But for now, some games design!

This is an idea that has been floating around for a while now, but which I have only just refined enough to put down on paper. The point is that it's meant to provide a reason for players to tie their revelations and scenes in with what has gone before. It might be good, it might suck, only playtest will tell if it's useful to the game.

Revelation Maps

At the centre of Six Bullets, acting almost like a map or character sheet for the entire game, is the revelation map. The revelation map shows the protagonist and each of the antagonists, connecting them together with events and occurrences, forming a web laying out the intricacies of the story.

At the start of the game the revelation map is blank, save for the protagonist’s name. As the game proceeds players add names, character traits and other details, filling in the story as it is played out. Everything written on the map is called a revelation, even when it’s not actually revelatory in nature.

New revelations are simply written on the map and connecting lines are drawn to other connected revelations. Connections between revelations must make sense and must be narrated – lines cannot be arbitrarily drawn between otherwise unconnected revelations unless some justification has been made.

To encourage players to make use of what is already on the map and to tie their own revelations into the story, bonus dice are rewarded for incorporating existing revelations into their scenes and for connecting new revelations to existing revelations.

When a player incorporates one or more existing revelations into a scene, he gains 1 bonus die.

When a player adds his own revelation to the map, and that revelation connects to one or more existing revelations, he gains 1 bonus die for each connection he adds.

Keith has delivered the goods once again, this time with the 'heroine' of the piece. I've put heroine in inverted commas as I have a real sneaky suspicion that it's her who's hung the guy. Or is the hanging the act she is trying to avenge? That my friends is a story to be revealed as you play!

This pic is for the backcover, although it seems like a shame to spoil it by covering it in writing. I think I'll keep text to a minimum to avoid this being an issue.

Keith has posted the first piece of artwork for Six Bullets over on his livejournal. To use the word awesome would be an understatement.

When I started writing Six Bullets, and contacted Keith about doing the cover and the interior art, I had a very strong vision as to what I wanted. I wanted 6 villains depicted in Keith's inimitable style on the front, with the hero over on the backcover. Keith took the idea and threw it back at me 10 times stronger, and it's fantastic to see something great coming out of it. I for one can't wait to see the next villain!

Six Bullets is plodding along, although I'll admit I haven't touched it in a few weeks, what with Yesterday's Tomorrow, moving and the new mystery project I'm working on. But ideas have been fermenting in my brain, including the possible development of a "revelation map" (as opposed to a relationship map) and some sort of reward mechanic involving dice/bullets.

Six Bullets had its 3^rd playtest late last night, and its first airing in face to face roleplaying. It was the same group who have run through the material a couple of times online, so they knew what to expect.

We were running it to see if it worked in real life, and how long a game would take. No surprises that a game took far less time to play out than it would have done online, even with more players, but it ran even quicker than expected. I suspect much of this was to do with the late hour and the speed of the scenes.

There were 6 of us, which meant 1 protagonist and 5 antagonists, and we adjusted the Vengeance attribute and number of scenes to reflect this.

The game through up a lot of interesting issues – some solvable, others less so, so I’ll discuss what happened in the context of those. We went for a totally new setting and genre, deciding to go for a Dumas vibe and set it in Renaissance France, with me as the protagonist as some sort of rogue Musketeer, Jan as the evil Cardinal de Pompeii and the others playing his various cronies.
 

We played the second playtest game of Six Bullets last night. This time round we had the right number of players (7), and with a mix of veterans and newbies, we had a good mix to roll along nicely. My regular group games online, so I have the luxury of having an actual transcript from play, which I've posted to my playtest wiki.

Starting out

We decided for a change of setting this time round, and thoughfulwolf suggested a sci-fi, whilst Rob suggested film noir. So we blended the two into a Blade Runner meets Sin City style affair, a perfect backdrop for a gritty tale of vengeance.

Rob volunteered to play the protagonist, Hanigan, whilst Dave got the chief villain, a guy known as Bulldozer. The stage was set, and we were off with a bang!

I ran my first session of Six Bullets for Vengeance tonight, and all in all I think it worked very well. My regular group games online, so I have the luxury of having an actual transcript from play, which I've posted to my playtest wiki.

I'm throwing together an online playtest for Six Bullets tomorrow night, in our usual Nobilis MIRC slot. It'll be at 8 for 830pm, in the #altudia channel of EFNET on MIRC. If you're interested in playing, I'll see you there, or you can comment below. The game can handle up to 7, although for the first outing maybe less is better.

So, anyone up for a little sweet vengeance?

“A man rides into town, a shooter at his hip. In it are six bullets, one for each of his enemies. Six bullets for vengeance.”

A little over a week ago I had a night of insomnia, which means only one thing - I was channelling a game through from the other side. I've now finished the first draft of the game and it's up and ready for playtesting if anyone fancies it. I hope to be able to get a game going in the next month or so.

The game is called Six Bullets for Vengeance and it's a little indie experiment into narration - specifically, the game starts from the climax, and works its way back to the beginning in six discrete scenes. The theme is vengeance, and I think it works quite nicely. I view it as a cross between the narrative style and theme of Memento and the theme and motif of Kill Bill, all set in the Wild West.

If anyone gets a chance to read it (or even play it!) I'd appreciate some feedback before I start to polish it up and expand it into a whole game.