I'm going to keep this short, as I have a lot more Christmas stuff to do, but here are the links to the Bookmarked versions of Books 1.6 and 2.2. Mad props to my editor and bookmarker, Lilicia. I give her all credit for the fixes, and take all blame for not noticing anything that still needs to be fixed. Bookmarking is a huge task because any time you need to make a change to the files the PDFs need to be recompiled and the bookmarks are undone. I wish you all Happy Holidays and I hope to have some more stuff to share soon.
Book 1.6 - Bookmarked
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?vf8yb6hxtz0dcst
Book 2.2 - Bookmarked
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?67z5c3x2qllxlfu
Tuesday, December 25, 2012
Thursday, December 20, 2012
APOCALYPSE WOW!
You know it's the end of the world when I actually get around to posting DtD updates.
Newest Core Book:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?6rqfsuhbrud8ut3
Newest Book 2:
http://www.mediafire.com/view/?emwo4jdm34xvuyu
Once again, I forgot to go and make a full changelog. However, you're going to want to look at Resilience (which has fixed a lot of problems with size), weapon proficiencies have been largely reworked, missing feats and abilities have been repaired, things that did nothing now do something, Specializations are more balanced, and some classes have been changed around.
I wish everyone a merry apocalypse, and remember that it's not my fault. Definitely not my fault.
Friday, November 16, 2012
NaNoWriMo Halfway Point
This is just a quick update to let everyone know I'm alive. I've been very busy with work and writing - nothing hones a writer's skill more than just writing. I didn't want to spam people with updates this year, but here's a link to the file itself. As per OpenOffice I'm just past 32k words (Word rates it a bit lower), and we're about halfway through the book and ramping up towards a climax.
Also, people get stabbed.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i7vl2merxagexod/NNWM2012a.odt
EDIT: Fixed link, I think.
Also, people get stabbed.
https://www.dropbox.com/s/i7vl2merxagexod/NNWM2012a.odt
EDIT: Fixed link, I think.
Thursday, November 1, 2012
National Novel Writing Month, Again
Hey, everyone. It's that time of year again. Something different this year - kind of an urban fantasy thing to see how that goes. I probably won't post this every day, but I'll try to generally keep it all here. Still not sure on the names I've chosen. Might change them later. But let me know what you think so far!
Also, no title yet. God damn I'm bad at titles. Story starts after the break.
Also, no title yet. God damn I'm bad at titles. Story starts after the break.
Monday, October 29, 2012
Hurricane Special Rant
For the last few rambling bits on game design I've posted, I've basically been justifying decisions I'd already made regarding design. For this next bit, I'm going to work on something I haven't touched yet - integrating pilots and mecha. And I'm going to keep a kind of stream of consciousness log as I do it. It should be interesting.
Wednesday, October 24, 2012
Sanity and Guns
Sanity systems have featured in a lot of games. The easiest example is of course Call of Cthulhu, where you're much more likely to go completely insane than actually die of anything. In Call of Cthulhu, beasies and terrible things can strip away your sanity points. It essentially treats sanity as hit points for the mind, save that it's much harder to recover from.
Friday, October 19, 2012
RPG Design Ramble #2
So, as I mentioned on the last installment of "Lawfulnice Rambles On Forever", we've mostly got character creation finished (at least the outline - details like a list of skills, statting out the abilities and so forth are still to come). But that's only a small part of the game - we've still got to figure out combat.
Combat is generally one of the most important systems in a game, if not the most important. Even when combat isn't the focus of the game, whenever you end up with guns drawn on each other, it's instantly a matter of life and death. A lot of games get flak for having huge, detailed combat rules but almost nothing for social situations. But it's the life-and-death nature of combat that makes it needed, trying to put numbers to everything. Munchkins, minmaxers, they try to get every edge in combat, and having solid answers to "what happens if I hide behind cover" and "what happens if I run on ice" speeds things up in a tense situation and heads off a lot of arguments.
Combat is generally one of the most important systems in a game, if not the most important. Even when combat isn't the focus of the game, whenever you end up with guns drawn on each other, it's instantly a matter of life and death. A lot of games get flak for having huge, detailed combat rules but almost nothing for social situations. But it's the life-and-death nature of combat that makes it needed, trying to put numbers to everything. Munchkins, minmaxers, they try to get every edge in combat, and having solid answers to "what happens if I hide behind cover" and "what happens if I run on ice" speeds things up in a tense situation and heads off a lot of arguments.
Wednesday, October 17, 2012
Game Design Rambling Part 1
I don't think I've ever written about how I design a game, except in general terms. I don't know of many RPG projects in general that really have running documentation from start to finish. There are a lot of decisions and personal biases that come into play when making an RPG, and even ones in development that include a detailed changelog (like Pokemon Tabletop Adventures) rarely take time to explain why every decision is made. And there are a lot of decisions to make!
Thursday, July 12, 2012
Dungeons the Dragoning Updates Incoming
A lot of the comments on my previous entry going over what I had been working on were, naturally, wondering if I was stopping work on dtd. No worries there. Actually, things have taken an upswing there. I have someone helping me with the next version, and it has been nice to get another pair of eyes on things.
Expect the new version soon, with some big changes!
Sunday, June 17, 2012
Update - Still Alive, Triumph, Portal References, Etc.
Hello, Everyone!
I know it's been a while since my last update here. I've been hard at work on, well, way too many things. I have been putting three games together, and while none of them are anywhere near done, I wanted to tell you about them partly just so you all knew I was alive.
RUN N GUN
I've spoken about this one before. Run N Gun is a fast-paced action RPG that is designed to be tactical and encourage system mastery without putting ivory tower design or dead ends into the game. I'm hoping to get a playtest together for this soon. I just need to get up to actually doing it.
Basic Game Fluff:
"Hear the fame of that one!
Alone he rushed into his enemies
and saved his country.
Hear the fame of that one!
He ran, destroying everything he touched."
RNG is a game of running, jumping, and shooting, in the classic fast-paced style of old-school platformer games like Mega Man and Metroid. It's designed to be fast and tactical, owing more to split-second decisions and maintaining speed and momentum than positioning. Not just what to do, but when to do it.
In the world of RNG you're a person in a suit of Armor. That's with a capital 'A'. Armor is the most advanced weapons systems on the face of the planet. Or any planet. It's a combination of alien technology and human know-how, every suit unique and made to the specifications of its user.
Armor is the only efficient way to defeat Armor. Elite teams are sent to take down rogue armor wearers and hyperpowerful cyborgs and aliens. Bounty hunting, assassination, these are the things Armor does best. Someone wearing Armor can fight through an army to reach their target.
A brief history of Armor
It wasn't that long ago that humans were confined to a single solar system. It was only a hundred years ago that the first permanent extrasolar colonies were founded, a short time ago on the large scale of things, but more than long enough for the human scale. Generations have grown up, lived, and died away from Earth.
Space travel has become a normal thing, thanks to a little gift from the vastness of space. A certain long-period comet, long noted and then ignored, became a focus of the scientific community when it was determined it would strike Jupiter in the space of only a decade. Telescopes were turned to study it, and what they found with that closer look was impossible. It was no comet, but a wrecked starship. An alien starship.
It was the most amazing find in human history, and it was going to crash right into Jupiter. An international effort was scrambled to find a way to correct its course, to study it in what time was left. A small craft latched onto the ship and gently corrected its course, slowing it and bringing it past the orbit of Jupiter to rest between Mars and the asteroid belt.
Human science was advanced centuries in mere decades. The energy crisis was solved in short order and even the lightspeed barrier was cracked after a few unsuccessful tries. The future looked bright.
The first few alien races humans encountered were older races. This was very lucky for us. They helped humanity correct some very major flaws in their starship designs and gave much-needed help in terraforming and colonizing worlds. While they remained somewhat distant and aloof, they worked with humanity and are by and large our allies.
That's when everything started to go wrong. Some had wondered just why the powerful and peaceful elder races only controlled a few planets each. It started with space pirates. They raided colonies, razing everything just for fuel and valuables. This was humanity's first encounter with Armor. Armies were smashed by small, elite teams. Fotresses fell to single men.
The first human Armor users appeared during this time. Gifted by our alien allies, prototypes developed from captured pirate samples, relics found in ruins. And that's where you all come in...
Hen Ogledd
Hen Ogledd was settled about seventy years ago. It was, according to the myths of the other races, once used as a prison planet and dumping ground by the Tizona, a species that is little more than legend now. And that was more than enough to get the Galatine Corporation to fund a colonization effort based around promoting and supporting archaeological digs.
Little or nothing was actually found, though rumors spread about the anticipated cache of technology and artifacts that the locals becan to dub the Thirteen Treasures. Rumors soon circulated, triggering a second wave of fortune hunters and worse, attention from space pirates and the dark empires at the fringes of known space.
Despite the massive influx of people, Hen Ogledd was largely unexplored when things started to change for the worse. Space pirates ravaged the colony, looking for relics that simply didn't exist. Most of the population was forced to retreat, defend themselves, or die.
After the pirates left after failing to turn any kind of profit, and things had more or less returned to normal, Arondight arrived on the planet under a pretext of exploiting the planet's abundant mineral resources. This was a boon to the locals, providing an influx of supplies, products, and materials for expansion. Trained, educated specialists were sent to the planet and huge mining equipment was deployed. Of course, covert archeological activities were the real reason Arondight is on Hen Ogledd. They were looking for the Thirteen Treasures.
New outposts were founded around mining resources. Refineries and large industrial facilities were brought in prefabricated and became the cornerstone of communities. Slave labor in the form of off-world conscripts were brought in as a cheaper option to more expensive mechanical laborers.
Arondight's efforts paid off where the Galatine Corporation's hadn't, and they found traces of artifacts and information that ultimately led to open conflict between the two companies. Arondight was forced to withdraw, for the most part, and the convict slave labor broke free from their camps to terrorize locals, just another horror on the long list that Hen Ogledd has to offer.
It's now ten years later, and rumors say that the first of the Thirteen Treasures of Hen Ogledd has been found and is in the hands of a powerful bandit leader. Teams of elite bounty hunters, armor users, and treasure seekers have come looking.
Outdated Files so you can see where it's going:
http://www.mediafire.com/?v0awcp7xcauhf8p
WARHAWKS
For over a year now I've been tinkering with ideas for making my own mecha RPG. I've seen games that abstracted them well as player characters writ large (AdEva, GGG), games where they felt like machines (Battletech), and games where the rules were so fucked that I don't even (Cthulhutech, Mekton Zeta). I've wanted something that plays with the pace of a normal RPG, but still feels like machines.
Warhawks is going to be my attempt at that. Just as an idea of where this one is going, I'm aiming to capture the feel of the Gundam series... as seen from Zeon. You have weak grunt units, and you're fighting against difficult odds. You have tactical advantage on your side that lets you deploy artillery strikes, sneak attacks, and so forth - but a lucky hit or two and you're rolling a new character.
The basic rules for this game are that every mecha has a damage grid - sort of like the grid in Warmachine, where as you take damage you lose boxes, and losing all the boxes of a system eliminates that system. However, unlike Warmachine, these damage grids will be able to take damage from any direction. I'm currently planning on using a WoD-style initiative, in that the lowest initiative declares his action first, working up, and then it's resolved from the fastest down.
As an amusing note, I'm finally getting to use some headcanon I came up with for my Lego mecha a decade or more ago.
SECTION 27
Yes, this thing refuses to die. I'm still working on it. After watching a certain webseries about board game reviews, I got back into the mood to get on this thing. While its current state is prefectly acceptable and playable (and pretty fucking awesome), I think I can make it even better and more simple. I'm going to get my card/RPG game to work, damnit, even if it kills me.
Anyway, that's what I've been working on for the last few months. Life and work has been hectic. After my promotion, and the huge expansion my division has been under at work, I've had less time than I wanted to work on things. But I love my IT job, oddly, and I've never been more satisfied with my life.
Now I just need to get working on my hobby!
I know it's been a while since my last update here. I've been hard at work on, well, way too many things. I have been putting three games together, and while none of them are anywhere near done, I wanted to tell you about them partly just so you all knew I was alive.
RUN N GUN
I've spoken about this one before. Run N Gun is a fast-paced action RPG that is designed to be tactical and encourage system mastery without putting ivory tower design or dead ends into the game. I'm hoping to get a playtest together for this soon. I just need to get up to actually doing it.
Basic Game Fluff:
"Hear the fame of that one!
Alone he rushed into his enemies
and saved his country.
Hear the fame of that one!
He ran, destroying everything he touched."
RNG is a game of running, jumping, and shooting, in the classic fast-paced style of old-school platformer games like Mega Man and Metroid. It's designed to be fast and tactical, owing more to split-second decisions and maintaining speed and momentum than positioning. Not just what to do, but when to do it.
In the world of RNG you're a person in a suit of Armor. That's with a capital 'A'. Armor is the most advanced weapons systems on the face of the planet. Or any planet. It's a combination of alien technology and human know-how, every suit unique and made to the specifications of its user.
Armor is the only efficient way to defeat Armor. Elite teams are sent to take down rogue armor wearers and hyperpowerful cyborgs and aliens. Bounty hunting, assassination, these are the things Armor does best. Someone wearing Armor can fight through an army to reach their target.
A brief history of Armor
It wasn't that long ago that humans were confined to a single solar system. It was only a hundred years ago that the first permanent extrasolar colonies were founded, a short time ago on the large scale of things, but more than long enough for the human scale. Generations have grown up, lived, and died away from Earth.
Space travel has become a normal thing, thanks to a little gift from the vastness of space. A certain long-period comet, long noted and then ignored, became a focus of the scientific community when it was determined it would strike Jupiter in the space of only a decade. Telescopes were turned to study it, and what they found with that closer look was impossible. It was no comet, but a wrecked starship. An alien starship.
It was the most amazing find in human history, and it was going to crash right into Jupiter. An international effort was scrambled to find a way to correct its course, to study it in what time was left. A small craft latched onto the ship and gently corrected its course, slowing it and bringing it past the orbit of Jupiter to rest between Mars and the asteroid belt.
Human science was advanced centuries in mere decades. The energy crisis was solved in short order and even the lightspeed barrier was cracked after a few unsuccessful tries. The future looked bright.
The first few alien races humans encountered were older races. This was very lucky for us. They helped humanity correct some very major flaws in their starship designs and gave much-needed help in terraforming and colonizing worlds. While they remained somewhat distant and aloof, they worked with humanity and are by and large our allies.
That's when everything started to go wrong. Some had wondered just why the powerful and peaceful elder races only controlled a few planets each. It started with space pirates. They raided colonies, razing everything just for fuel and valuables. This was humanity's first encounter with Armor. Armies were smashed by small, elite teams. Fotresses fell to single men.
The first human Armor users appeared during this time. Gifted by our alien allies, prototypes developed from captured pirate samples, relics found in ruins. And that's where you all come in...
Hen Ogledd
Hen Ogledd was settled about seventy years ago. It was, according to the myths of the other races, once used as a prison planet and dumping ground by the Tizona, a species that is little more than legend now. And that was more than enough to get the Galatine Corporation to fund a colonization effort based around promoting and supporting archaeological digs.
Little or nothing was actually found, though rumors spread about the anticipated cache of technology and artifacts that the locals becan to dub the Thirteen Treasures. Rumors soon circulated, triggering a second wave of fortune hunters and worse, attention from space pirates and the dark empires at the fringes of known space.
Despite the massive influx of people, Hen Ogledd was largely unexplored when things started to change for the worse. Space pirates ravaged the colony, looking for relics that simply didn't exist. Most of the population was forced to retreat, defend themselves, or die.
After the pirates left after failing to turn any kind of profit, and things had more or less returned to normal, Arondight arrived on the planet under a pretext of exploiting the planet's abundant mineral resources. This was a boon to the locals, providing an influx of supplies, products, and materials for expansion. Trained, educated specialists were sent to the planet and huge mining equipment was deployed. Of course, covert archeological activities were the real reason Arondight is on Hen Ogledd. They were looking for the Thirteen Treasures.
New outposts were founded around mining resources. Refineries and large industrial facilities were brought in prefabricated and became the cornerstone of communities. Slave labor in the form of off-world conscripts were brought in as a cheaper option to more expensive mechanical laborers.
Arondight's efforts paid off where the Galatine Corporation's hadn't, and they found traces of artifacts and information that ultimately led to open conflict between the two companies. Arondight was forced to withdraw, for the most part, and the convict slave labor broke free from their camps to terrorize locals, just another horror on the long list that Hen Ogledd has to offer.
It's now ten years later, and rumors say that the first of the Thirteen Treasures of Hen Ogledd has been found and is in the hands of a powerful bandit leader. Teams of elite bounty hunters, armor users, and treasure seekers have come looking.
Outdated Files so you can see where it's going:
http://www.mediafire.com/?v0awcp7xcauhf8p
WARHAWKS
For over a year now I've been tinkering with ideas for making my own mecha RPG. I've seen games that abstracted them well as player characters writ large (AdEva, GGG), games where they felt like machines (Battletech), and games where the rules were so fucked that I don't even (Cthulhutech, Mekton Zeta). I've wanted something that plays with the pace of a normal RPG, but still feels like machines.
Warhawks is going to be my attempt at that. Just as an idea of where this one is going, I'm aiming to capture the feel of the Gundam series... as seen from Zeon. You have weak grunt units, and you're fighting against difficult odds. You have tactical advantage on your side that lets you deploy artillery strikes, sneak attacks, and so forth - but a lucky hit or two and you're rolling a new character.
The basic rules for this game are that every mecha has a damage grid - sort of like the grid in Warmachine, where as you take damage you lose boxes, and losing all the boxes of a system eliminates that system. However, unlike Warmachine, these damage grids will be able to take damage from any direction. I'm currently planning on using a WoD-style initiative, in that the lowest initiative declares his action first, working up, and then it's resolved from the fastest down.
As an amusing note, I'm finally getting to use some headcanon I came up with for my Lego mecha a decade or more ago.
SECTION 27
Yes, this thing refuses to die. I'm still working on it. After watching a certain webseries about board game reviews, I got back into the mood to get on this thing. While its current state is prefectly acceptable and playable (and pretty fucking awesome), I think I can make it even better and more simple. I'm going to get my card/RPG game to work, damnit, even if it kills me.
Anyway, that's what I've been working on for the last few months. Life and work has been hectic. After my promotion, and the huge expansion my division has been under at work, I've had less time than I wanted to work on things. But I love my IT job, oddly, and I've never been more satisfied with my life.
Now I just need to get working on my hobby!
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