Category Archives: Write – Design – Program

TTRPG Design Mastery — The Impossible Road

Welcome to a guest post, here on Rising Phoenix Games. Kim Frandsen is here to talk about the difficult road TTRPG designers have to walk to becoming masters of the craft. Enjoy.

Hi everyone! Rodney asked me to share some thoughts that I’d been having recently about the TTRPG industry.

In most creative industries, such as tabletop roleplaying game publishing, there are — at least to me — seemingly three levels of “achievement” a creator can reach:

  1. Apprentice
  2. Journeyman
  3. Master

Cruel Trinkets

The Road to Mastering RPG Design

To give an example of what I mean, let’s compare the TTRPG industry to the film industry. Hollywood’s movie business is well known and has similar requirements to our own, in that it requires a lot of creative input and technical knowledge to achieve a coherent and appealing final product.

So an apprentice within the TTRPG world is someone who is just starting out. They may be self-publishing or they may have a few years of experience working as a freelancer for smaller publishers. In the film world, these are the folks putting out their first films, or who are just out of film school. They may have acquired some technical knowledge along the way, and they may have great creative ideas, but they still need a lot of help executing their ideas to a level where an audience can understand their work.

Masters are of course at the other end of the craft. They’re the ones who do the work that you always hear about. Within the gaming world, they’ll be people like Chris Perkins, Owens KC Stephens, Jason Buhlmann, and Skip Williams. They’re exceptionally capable and experienced designers who have had their hands in hundreds of projects. They not only have creative vision but also the technical know-how to realize that vision.
In the film world, these are people like Alfred Hitchcock, Stephen Spielberg, and Francis Ford Coppola for direction. They may be the Chris Evanses, Ryan Reynolds, and Scarlett Johansson for actors. They could also be the “invisible” people like John Williams, known for the soundscapes that complete the film experience. These are the creators that everyone has heard of,  and who have staying power.

In between these two, you find the journeyman level. For films, these are the people who can live off their work but haven’t become famous. They might be the supporting actors on big-budget films, they may be the camera or sound crews, or they may be the director that does documentaries for the BBC — people that those in the business have potentially heard of, but who aren’t well known to the public.

And here comes the question: where is the journeyman level in the TTRPG Industry?

Making a living off your work in this business, even if you have multiple years of experience and projects behind you, is tough. In my case, I started in 2016 and at this point, I have more than 100 projects behind me as both author and editor, and I’ve started dabbling in layout, but I cannot make a living off what I do — even though I’d love to. (Editors Note: Kim has multiple credits for Paizo, including Pathfinder and Starfinder work. He was also an alternate in the top 32 for RPG Superstar, Season 9. Kim also wrote Heaven & Hell for Pathfinder Second Edition.)

DriveThruRPG.com

The figure that you need to take home to live (please note I said “live”, not “survive” — there is a difference) varies by where you live of course. Generally, if you live in the West, things cost more. That’s just how it is.

But how big does the RPG industry have to be to support the Journeyman level folks? Nobody knows how much money is in the business, and the few who have an insight into that are really not interested in sharing that information. The fact is though that there are only a few companies out there that are big enough to supply more than a handful (5) employees full-time. This includes the juggernaut Wizards of the Coast and all the way down to smaller companies with permanent staff. Even just finding out who belongs in that category is difficult. (Truth be told, the industry really isn’t doing itself any favors on this, by being so opaque, but I digress).
Unfortunately, until we know what the business is worth in total, and where it has been in the past, it’ll be difficult to say where the “break” point in size is for the RPG industry, but there is one factor that we can comment on.
We’d like to see more people make a living by making TTRPGs, wouldn’t we? After all, it allows us to see more people progress to the master level, so we’ll eventually enjoy the stuff they put out. And it’d allow others who have the skill and knowledge to live off their earnings from roleplaying games too.

Do I have a personal stake in this? Yes. Of course, I do, and I’m obviously one who’d like to reach the Journeyman level. But more than that: I’d like to see my friends remain in the business. I started at a time where I was connected with something like 20 or 30 other people. Today, only 2 of them are left, with a 3rd on hiatus and a 4th mostly being too busy with his day job to work away at game design. So many people have fallen by the wayside that I know had the ability to make it, if there had been a future for them. For all of us, it wears us down. And while those who survive the first 3-4 years tend to stick around, I’d really like to see more of the talented newcomers staying with us.

Thanks for listening to my rant.
Catch you on the flip side.
Kim Frandsen
You can find Kim on Beyond the Horizon.


Let’s Write Some Statistically Average Jokes

The AGBIC game jam is fast drawing to a close, and I need to put some statistically average fake band names into the game, because that’s the entirely optional theme for the year, which means we’re doing it! Time for some statistically average jokes!

Like our bad space-themed jokes, these band names will be connected to items you find on the red planet, and we’ll try our best to be funny.

Or at least punny.

Pun and Games

Here are the newest additions. The words in bold are the statistically average band names:

  • You pick up a bottle of lactate- concentrate. The label reads ‘Moo Gourd, rich in Calcium, the other Vitamine C’.
  • You discover a crumpled copy of Football Scoundrel. The cover story reads ‘Tottenbacon’s Runaway Season’.
  • You find a stash of rolled-up Flamboyant Lifer magazines. Rich humans sure know how to live.
  • You pick a thin cardboard sleeve out of the dirt. It appears to contain an audio recording of the Ferry Destroyers. By the picture on the cover, it seems they dislike barbers as much as crossing channels.
  • You find a dusty magazine entitled Apes Spanks. Thinking it better not to ask, you quickly atomize it for parts.
  • You find a jar of Nut Rebuild, but it’s empty.
  • You find a card depicting a gloomy castle. It has Strength 10, Vitality 12, and Endurance 17. Apparently, you’d need more of these to play Fortification Addict.

space rocket travel

    • You recover a copy of Dunk Racket from the dirt. This audio-visual ‘comedy phenomenon’ stars Wes Haroldson and Woopy Pipes.
    • You pull a small, hair-covered jacket from the dirt. It appears made for an Earth-pet and the label says Ensemble Basset in Earth-glyphs.
    • A newspaper clipping lies in the dirt. It reads ‘Naturalization Loan Rollout Begins’.
    • You find a pamphlet for ‘Safari Ski Holidays in South Africa’. The tigers really look like they’re enjoying the hot cocoa. The sales blurb promises ‘Extravagant Thrills‘.
    • You pick up a postcard depicting a human male and female riding in an expensive-looking air vehicle. It says ‘the all-new Clove Beamer is a ride of a lifetime.’
    • You pick up a well-worn issue of ‘Impostor Smut‘ from the dust. Humans are into some weird things.
    • You find a small plastic card labeled ‘Hedonist Credit, redeemable in stores nationwide’.

Well, that was utterly ridiculous. I hope you’ll join us for more, soon.


Convert a String to a Variable Name in JavaScript

Is it possible to write code that doesn’t use its own variables, but still works? It is! You can convert a string to a variable name in JavaScript using eval, and here’s how it works.

Convert a string to a variable name

Our Usecase

Say we’re building a text-based game where we want the player to be able to interact with the resources they’ve collected. In Mars and Crafts, this means typing “atomize [resource name]” into Discord and hitting enter. For example: “atomize dirt” or “atomize concrete”.

There are potentially many variables we’ll need to access, but the user is giving us the name of the most important variable in their input string. So, rather than using many “if-else” statements, can’t we just use the input string to get the variable?

Convert a JS String into a Variable Name

This node.js code loads data from a JSON file into variables, then uses eval to access them with a string. This is useful because the user can type in the variable’s name and get its value, all we need to do is ensure their string is formatted correctly.
// Load Game
const fileSystem = require("fs");
const saveData = fileSystem.readFileSync("saveData.json", "utf-8");
const saveObj = JSON.parse(saveData);
console.log("Loaded save game.......");

//Resources
var iStone = saveObj.iStone;
var iWater = saveObj.iWater;
var iSludge = saveObj.iSludge;
var iParts = saveObj.iParts;
var iElectronics = saveObj.iElectronics;
var iFuel = saveObj.iFuel;
var iPower = saveObj.iPower;
var iMetal = saveObj.iMetal;
var iConcrete = saveObj.iConcrete;
var iDirt = saveObj.iDirt;

function atomize (arg) {
    // Convert arg string to resource variable name
    arg = arg.toLowerCase();
    var sResPrefix = "i" + arg.charAt(0).toUpperCase(); 
    var sResource =  sResPrefix + arg.substr(1, arg.length);
    console.log(arg + " => " + sResource + " = " + eval(sResource)); 
}

// Some tests
atomize ("dirt");
atomize ("Water");
atomize ("CONCRETE");
atomize ("Stone");
atomize ("sludge");
atomize ("FUEL");

We can figure out which variable the user wants with some educated guesses. In this case, we know our variables all start with “i” and a capital letter. We then do a fair bit of work with the strings, which we could skip if the variable names were simply the nouns (“sludge”, “water”, “stone”, etc.).

Here’s the saveData.json file:

{
"iStone":3,
"iDirt":2,
"iWater":0,
"iSludge":0,
"iParts":0,
"iElectronics":0,
"iFuel":0,
"iPower":0,
"iMetal":0,
"iConcrete":0
}

Some Security Considerations

Using eval is like opening a back door for all kinds of deviancy, which is why you’ll still need to restrict which variables are accessible and ensure that only those variables are accessible. Read and understand the eval docs, and let us know if you have a better way of doing this, in the comments below.



Why It’s Good to Suck (At Something)

I suck at skateboarding. I’m terrible at it. But you know what, it’s good to suck at something. Here’s why…

(And yes, there will be an RPG angle to my story.)

There are a bunch of things I can get cocky about. I’m not bragging though, because I still have far to go, but I’m a fairly competent writer and editor, I know a deal about design and layout, and my puns are perfection. When it comes to skateboarding though, I suck.

Just how bad am I?

I’m a fearful person, and I’ve got the coords of a drunken goat. I can’t jump, and I nearly killed myself for a stupid trick (that’s hyperbole, but it still hurt).

But all the suckage is a good thing. It keeps you humble. It teaches you. It gives you perspective.

Humility and Real Motivation

So we’re going to talk about game design a lot here, and we’re going to talk about motivation too. Motivation’s the fuel that gets game design done, that pulls game devs through the tough times.

Motivation fascinates me.

People say our minds are like a computer, so then understanding motivation is like learning to hack our brains. That’s tastily cyberpunk.

But the motivation I’m talking about isn’t the Tony Robbin’s flavored shlock you find in a lot of self-help books. I’m talking about understanding what makes your brain think like it does, then knowing how to deal with those thoughts.

In skateboarding, sometimes the most unnatural movements are the right ones. Take dropping in.

Credit: Tania Ferreira Lourenco

Dropping in is where you have your skateboard’s nose up, then lean forward so that you and your board’s nose come down, onto the ramp. Your body’s natural instinct is to pull back, but this always fouls up and could put you on your bum. Ultimately, you have to trust the physics and lean into it, fighting through the fear.

You quickly realize that fear’s keeping you back. The only way to hack your brain is to fight the fear. So how do you fight fear?

School of Hard Knocks

We all know how to run, but riding a plank, that’s odd. You might be lucky to have learned it as a kid, but otherwise it’s an alien activity. In this way, skateboarding is a perfect model for how we learn.

I see it when I compare mini painting to skateboarding. Both take practice, and practice pays off for both hobbies. The best synonym for practice is “baby steps”. You learn to master mini painting by focusing on one new step at a time.

Gamemastering? Same. Writing games? Same. Nobody ever learned all the rules of D&D before running their first game, they learn enough and add to that knowledge later.

Knowing you suck is the only way to improve.

Why I Almost Quit the TTRPG Industry

The table-top roleplaying games industry is notoriously tough. Keep your ear to the ground and you’ll hear, now and then, the hasty footfalls of an RPG designer rushing for the door. Burnout is usually the cause. I was at the edge of that precipice, and I almost quit the TTRPG industry, and I’m here to tell you my story.

I’ve worked in the TTRPG industry for five full years now. Some of my time is spent on other work, but I’ve picked jobs carefully to build my career with experience that’ll feed back into RPG design and writing. These years were only possible because of another five years spent preparing to go full time. So why, if I’ve fought so hard for this, would I be ready to let it all go?

Cruel Trinkets of the Mad Gods

An Honest Picture of Success

To understand that, we need to talk about success. What does success in the TTRPG industry look like? Is it working for Wizards of the Coast, or having your name on a hardcover? Maybe it’s earning enough that you can quit your day job?

In my view, success is all about sustainability. Does your work support you? This isn’t just about money, although money is a big part of it. Sustainability includes the actualization of your goals. It answers questions such as “Will I, one day, have my name on a hardcover?” Your sense of worth is also important; “Do I make great content that people enjoy?” Then there’s fair remuneration; “Is my hard work being adequately rewarded?” Rewards include money, buzz, positive feedback, and players sitting down to play your games.

Ultimately, is all the graft, the grind, and the stress, paying off? If it is, then your work is sustainable and you’re successful. If not, then the job will eventually beat you down, you’ll cut your losses, and beat an expeditious retreat.

Hard trials are going to come along, no matter what you do. If anything, I didn’t always have the maturity to face those trials and pull through, so each hit became a personal burden (or grudge) that grew heavier and heavier with each setback. On top of that, as Freddie sang, “… bad mistakes, I’ve made a few.” This reached its ugly head when I had a run of flops with products I really believed in.

It has taken me months to recover from burnout and get excited about producing RPG content again.

But I’m committed to learning from my mistakes and doing better.

How much better to get wisdom than gold,
to get insight rather than silver!
— Proverbs 16:16

Last night I was reading a Batonga story to my kids about the dung beetle. In it, Butterfly tells Dung Beetle that if she doesn’t try, she’ll never succeed, but if she tries, she might (When Lion Could Fly and Other Tales From Africa).

So I’m sticking around because I know I can do better. Even after five years, there’s still so much to learn, and I’m enjoying being a student of game design and the TTRPG industry. Even my many failures are not a loss, because they give me something to build on that I didn’t have when I first started out.

The name of the company makes a lot more sense now too, doesn’t it? I hope you, too, can rise like a phoenix from whatever setback life has thrown at you.


Let’s Write Space Jokes for a Game!

It’s Game Jam Friday, so that means I really should be working on my little game. Why don’t you join me…

This month we’re making Mars and Crafts, a game about mining Mars to build Martian defenses against the oncoming human invasion. Part of this will involve tentacles. Another part will involve lots and lots of digging in the red Martian dirt.

Every now and then, you’ll discover random junk, much like if you were beachcombing. This junk gives you machine parts (which can be used to build things) and also tells the game’s story. When is the game set, how do the aliens you play perceive humanity,  what happens when you build war machines out of dirt and goo? That sort of thing.

It also needs to be funny, because life’s too short to forget about the lols. We’ll hit the space jokes pretty hard, and throw in plenty of references to popular media.

So let’s write some.

“Very funny, Scotty.”

  • You pick at the end of a piece of thread. As you pull, more thread rises from the Martian sand. Keep this up and you’ll unravel the whole thing.
  • You pick up a strange toy that resembles a human. Oddly, its head is far bigger than a real human’s head is purported to be, though its vacant stare implies it isn’t very clever. Maybe the humans worship dumb people who look smart?

Captain Kirk Naked - Space Jokes

  • You discover a gold and black spandex suit with a golden badge pinned to it. It looks like it might fit the human’s odd physiology.
  • You pick up a flat, shiny hexagon. Analysis reveals that it was part of a solar array. Anyway, it’ll look great hanging from your flying saucer’s rearview mirror.
  • Your UMT (Universal Mining Tool) detects something below the dust’s surface. You dig a little and uncover a polyhedral structure with numbers on it. Obviously, this is some kind of portent.
  • You find pile of magnetically attached needles. Your UMT detects a grass-like structure inside.
  • You pick up a tiny marble. It looks like it contains an entire galaxy within. Probably just a trick of the light.
  • You pick up two pie-pans that have been glued together.
  • You find a large black obalisk stuck in the sand. There are no markings on it, but if you vaporize it at least you’ll get more dirt and a single sproket.
  • You discover a glove of a prepubescent five-flanged tentaculared cepholopodian. Those guys never pick up their trash.
  • Looks like someone’s been playing EDM recently, dropped beats litter the place.
  • You recover what appears to be… a toaster.
  • Oh look, you’ve found a skull and gear symbol made of a metallic plastic. It seems ominously foreboding.
  • You pick up a paper cup. It says “Starbucks” in Earth-glyphs on the side, but you’re unsure where you can spend this space currency.
  • You pick up a bubblegum wrapper. It contains a joke, written in Earth-glyphs. Something about why the star wanted to take a vacation, because it needed some space. Earth humor, go figure!
  • You pick up a broken toy rocket. Its faded paint is red and white.
  • You find a newspaper clipping. The Earth-glyphs read ‘Oil Discovered on Mars. In unrelated news, America Plans Trip to Mars, Packs Oil Rig.’

Your Space Jokes Can Help

Have some ideas of your own? Got some space jokes you’d love to share? Drop them into the comments with your name and I’ll add you to the game’s credits. Be sure to subscribe to our newsletter too, because I’ll throw some news about the game up soonish.


Make a Wargame Ep 6 – Design Polish – MM 47

It’s Mini Monday, where we inspire your roleplaying and tabletop gaming with miniature projects. This week we’re looking at some design polish as we finish our game, Dagger Lords. Mini Monday Logo Our game is basically done, but it’s missing all the bells and whistles that’ll make it a complete, marketable game. In case you missed out on what we’ve done so far, you can find the complete episode list here:

Episode 1: Concept and Theme
Episode 2: Initiative and Turns
Episode 3: Movement
Episode 4: Combat
Episode 5: Powers and Playtesting
Episode 6: Polishing the Game

We’re updating the public Dagger Lords game document as we go, so be sure to check in and see what we have so far. Don’t forget to leave a comment too, we love hearing from actual, living breathing humans.

Dagger Lords Minis Game Logo

Handling Scope Creep

Our game is at that critical point where there’s the temptation to add features. Then some more features. Then a few more…

You see where this is going.

Ultimately, we need an idea of what “done” will look like, so we can evaluate the game against that idea.

So what does a complete miniatures skirmish wargame need? Here are some ideas, and it’s probably not a complete list:

  1. Mechanics for activation, movement, combat, and shooting
  2. Rules for terrain
  3. Races/heritages (elves, goblins, dwarves, drow, humans, halflings, orcs, and so on.)
  4. Mechanics for weapons
  5. Equipment list (listing dice, miniatures, tape measures, terrain or maps, and other necessary gaming gear)
  6. Magic system and spells
  7. Powers

There are a bunch of “nice-to-haves” we might consider too:

  1. Solo rules
  2. Campaign rules
  3. Missions
  4. Rules for larger models
  5. Setting lore, to further sell the idea of the campaign world
  6. Hero profiles

Your own game might prioritize some elements over others, and you could certainly argue for moving things between the two lists. The point is that “done” is going to depend on your vision of the game, so a solid vision is important.

Once you have a plan, you’ll need to stick to it too, unless you have a very good reason for adding something. For me, solo gaming is important, it’s even a core part of our business, but we might have to exclude a solo system from Dagger Lords if we just can’t get it to work. Plans have to adapt, but you have to consider those changes carefully and understand their ramifications.

Rules With Flavour

Rules by themselves are pretty boring, so another thing we’ll want to do is add some appealing flavour text to things like spells and powers.

Consider this power:

Dagger Lords Ambush

By itself, not very interesting. Here’s one idea:

Dagger Lords Ambush with flavor text

The words we choose are what’ll sell the concept of the game, so we’re looking for short, evocative sentences for powers. The game can include longer-form fluff too, as you’ve probably seen in some of the games you’ve played.

Reusing Rules

You might have bits you can reuse from other games you’ve worked on. For today’s post I added Breaking Eggs, a solo mission I’d written up for another game. It took a little bit of tweaking, but now it’s in Dagger Lords. Reusing rules is especially great for building out new prototypes.

Where to Next

Game design is iterative, so even though Dagger Lords is complete, it’s not nearly done. In a way, the real work is just beginning. We do, however, have something to playtest, and that’s important.

When it is ready, a game like this would go from final draft to editing, then final manuscript, layout, and then a final proof. These may have different names, but essentially the game’s text is check, re-checked, and then checked again in various forms until you end up with a pretty document, all ready for printing.

Then there’s marketing and all the other business activities that go with selling a game, but that’s for another post.

Ultimately, it takes a lot of work to turn a game into a good one, and even more work to make it great. Dagger Lords, as we’ve got it now, is just the start of things, so I encourage you to take a look and watch how the game is growing.

Start To Be Great
We, we love corny motivationals.

Our Early Access Alpha Playtest on Itch.io

You can grab the latest export of Dagger Lords on Itch.IO and, as always, in our public development document.

Things are getting real when you put work into the cover.

That’s it for the series, so give Dagger Lords a try and let us know if you’ve got any suggestions, in the comments below.

 

Make a Wargame Ep 5 – Hero Powers – MM 46

It’s Mini Monday, where we share miniature projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’re rounding off our tabletop skirmish wargame with hero powers. We’ll also touch on playtesting one last time, because it’s important. Mini Monday Logo Dagger Lords won’t feel like a complete skirmish game without some hero powers, so let’s look at building some today.

Episode 1: Concept and Theme
Episode 2: Initiative and Turns
Episode 3: Movement
Episode 4: Combat
Episode 5: Powers and Playtesting
Episode 6: Polishing the Game

We’re updating the public Dagger Lords game document as we go, so be sure to check in and see what we have so far. Don’t forget to leave a comment too, because it gets lonely here in the lockdown.

Dagger Lords Minis Game Logo

Final Thoughts on Playtesting

Before we jump into the mechanics we’ll be developing, let’s look at playtesting one more time, to get the bigger picture.

Throughout our project, we’ve created mini prototypes, which we’ve tested and iterated on. These small games help to pick out the fun and broken mechanics, which we can then keep or fix. It’s like getting to hold and feel your ideas, which does a lot for knowing if you’re on the right track.

One of the hardest aspects of game design, for a small studio or a hobbyist, is getting enough playtesting in. Now especially, with lockdowns and Covid still impacting the number of face-to-face games, it can be hard to get players in front of your work, especially when it’s new, buggy, and not connected to a well-known IP.

This is one reason why we made the game’s work file publically accessible, to allow players to check out the game and provide feedback as this series continued. Online virtual tables, like Tabletop Simulator and Roll20, provide another way to reach fans across borders and time zones. Still, people only have so much time, and you can’t expect people, even good friends, to set aside a few hours to play.

Ultimately, you often need to try the game for yourself, as often as you can.

For Three Stone Stories, which is currently nearing its final draft, we set a rigorous in-house playtesting schedule to check every one of the campaign threads that’ll be included in the book, testing each multiple times. GunStars, also in development, has had multiple playtests focusing on various core mechanics, even though it’s still only in its early days of development. Finally, my home RPG sessions are usually focused around whatever content I’m creating at the time, like our undersea campaign that tested a lot of the content for the Undersea Sourcebook series. Apart from that, we try to keep the lines of communication open between ourselves and the players that buy our books, so we can keep improving.

Why is any of this important?

Because making a good game matters, and the only way to ensure that a game is fun is to play it.

By the Power of…!

A game just doesn’t feel complete without some showy powers to deploy against your opponent. Powers also give us an opportunity as designers to showcase the core mechanics and the theme of the game.

Here are a few examples:

Dagger Lords is about fantasy street gangs. Think Gangs of New York, but with goblins and dwarves. Powers that showcase the gang element might have names like Backstab, Cut Throat, For the Brotherhood, Betrayal, Brawl, Club to the Noggin, and so on.

We can tie these to the Reflex Point mechanic easily by making powers cost a number of Reflex Points, but we can also have powers that influence Reflex Points. Ambush, for example, might let you roll a die to steal Reflex Points at the beginning of the game.

Powers give us a good way to prototype racial/heritage abilities and class abilities, which we can later bake into the stat blocks for the various units that populate our game. We can also test weapons as powers, which gives us a lot of modularity.

Let’s jump into the prototype, where we’ll see some initial ideas for powers.

Dagger Lords — Prototype: Street War

The objective of this game is to destroy all of your opponent’s units.

Setup and Rounds

Each player controls 4 gangster miniatures, with the player representing the gang boss. A game has two players. Any miniatures can be used, and for these rules, only close combat weapons are considered because of powerful magic influencing the battlefield. Each mini has 2 Reflex Points, 2 Reflex, +2 Brawl, and 3 Hit Points.

Before the start of the game, each model can purchase a power from those listed below. A model must meet all requirements of the power to be able to use it:

Dagger Lords Powers 1

The game is played in a number of rounds, and each round has three phases:

  1. Initiative
  2. Activation (Combat and Movement)
  3. Top-Up

1. Initiative

Each player rolls 1d10 for their gang. Each miniature can spend 1 of their 2 Reflex Points to add +2 to the roll. Play proceeds in order from the player with the highest total to the player with the lowest total.
Dice off for ties.

2. Activation

Each player then acts in initiative order and can activate their miniatures in any order they wish. At the start of the player’s activation, their models gain a number of Reflex Points equal to the following equation:

Activation Reflex Points = (Remaining Reflex Points x 2) – 1

The minimum number of Activation Reflex Points a model gains is always 1.

To activate a miniature, you must spend a Reflex Point to make an attack, use a power, or move 6 inches.

To make an attack against an enemy model within 2 inches of your model, you roll 1D10 and add your Brawl modifier. The target rolls 1D10 and adds their Reflex modifier. You can each spend a Reflex Point before you roll to add +2 to your total roll. If you equal or beat the target’s score, you have scored a hit. The target loses 2 HP.

Any model can interrupt another model’s attack to attack instead by spending 1 Reflex Point. The order is decided in the order of declared interrupts, so it’s possible for a model to interrupt another model that is interrupting it, the player only has to declare their interrupt after the interrupting player does, and spend the required Reflex Points to do so.

3. Top Up

After all the models on both sides have activated, each model that isn’t destroyed regains 1 Hit Point and Reflex Points equal to their Reflex ability score. A model can never have more than their starting amount of these points.

Winning and Losing

A gang member is destroyed if they lose all their Hit Points. The winner is the first player to destroy all their enemy’s units, or who has destroyed the most enemy units when the time is up.

That’s it for today. Next time we’ll be polishing off the game, so give Dagger Lords a shot and, if you have any feedback, be sure to let us know.

 

40 for 40 Sale

I turned the big Four Oh this month, and to celebrate we’re running a bunch of sales all month long.

40 for 40 promotional imageOn our store, you can use the coupon code “40for40” to get 40% off your cart’s total value at checkout. You can use the coupon as many times as you like, until the end of the month.

Many of our products are 40%-off on Drive Thru RPG. This includes many titles for fifth edition fantasy, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and stand-alone titles. We also have a few Pathfinder Second Edition and Starfinder Roleplaying Game titles.

On the DMs Guild we’ve got a massive bundle worth over $60 going for less than $16. This bundle includes many of our best-selling titles, so if you’ve bought them already you’ll pay even less to fill out your collection.

Build a Minis Game, Ep. 4 – Combat – MM 45

It’s Mini Monday, where we share miniature projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’re drawing our daggers and charging into combat! Mini Monday Logo Blades out, everyone! Dagger Lords is a skirmish game, so expect lots of stabby stabbing.

Episode 1: Concept and Theme
Episode 2: Initiative and Turns
Episode 3: Movement
Episode 4: Combat
Episode 5: Powers and Playtesting
Episode 6: Polishing the Game

We’re updating the public Dagger Lords game document as we go, so be sure to check in and see what we have so far. Don’t forget to leave a comment too, because it gets lonely here in the looney bin.

Dagger Lords Minis Game Logo

Sexy Simple Systems

Movement, activation, and combat are all systems. Many games that fall into the tabletop gaming hobby are made up of many different systems, often built around a core mechanic such as rolling dice or drawing cards. Dungeons & Dragons and Pathfinder use the core mechanic of rolling a d20 and adding modifiers to it. Combat, skills, and saves — all separate systems — all use this core mechanic.

As a game designer, you have to balance the number of systems well and reuse the core mechanic wherever you can, otherwise you risk creating a system that’s too complicated. Reusing systems is a great way to keep a game manageable, even as it grows. For example, if my combat system and my magic system are essentially the same, I can spend less time explaining it in the rules and players can jump into those rules with less cognitive effort.

This, by the way, is one reason why I hate objective cards in Warhammer 40,000. Give me a table and make me roll for it, please. And don’t ask me to roll dice in Magic: the Gathering.

Of course, each system covers a different aspect of the game and needs to be tailored to those specific needs. Our goal is to keep things as simple as we possibly can. This is the essence of all design: to find the simplest, most elegant solution to a given problem.

We’re covering hand-to-hand combat today, but you could extend these rules to cover shooting, magic, and other systems, with a little work.

Dice

Choosing which dice to use has a big effect on our game’s mechanics. Die sizes impact the roll ranges, probability of a result, average rolls, and the totals we can expect from a die. For example, rolling 2d6 will give us a result of 7 much more often than a result of 12, while a roll of 1d12 has an equal chance of giving us a 6 or 12. Dice and dice probability is a huge topic that’s worth understanding, so do your own research if you’re serious about game design. We’ll just cover some basics needed for our own game of Dagger Lords.

Certain dice map neatly to percentages. A d10 gives you a range from 10%–100%, in tens. A d20 gives you a range from 5%–100%, going up in fives. Put another way, you have a 5% chance of rolling a nat 20 on a single d20. This gives us a useful benchmark. If we know that most champion boxers land 20% of their punches, then we can map this directly to the dice: hitting requires a 9 or more on a d10 (the probability of getting a 9 or 10 is 20%).

We’ve already got our Reflex Point mechanic and our initiative system, the latter of which includes rolling dice. Previous versions of that system used 2d6 for initiative rolls. Let’s change to ten-sided dice, across the game. This is an important decision because a game is a sum of its parts; the better those parts sync, the better the game will play.

Viking

Developing Hand-to-Hand Combat Rules

Let’s break down combat into its component parts.

Core Mechanic

I do like my d20 systems, it’s true, probably because I spend a lot of time developing rules for d20 games. Stealing from what you know is a good way to start out, so let’s steal from D&D. We can always modify things as we get further into development.

Our core mechanic, then, might look something like this:

Roll = 1d10 + Ability Score + Modifies – Penalties

Abilities

We’ll need to decide on abilities next then. We could simply have a Brawl ability that works for attack and defence. We might want a more complicated system including Brawl, Dodge, Strength, Damage, Armor Penetration, Armor, and so on. Some of these will be tied to weapons, but they still describe the abilities of a single model.

Think of it as a continuum, from super simple on one side to extremely complex on the other. We need to find the best balance of complexity for the game we’re making. Part of this is about knowing your audience and the level of complexity that’s right for them. For a skirmish game, we might choose a level of granularity that’s more complex than a large wargame, which has hundreds of miniatures, and less complex than an RPG, which has a single character per player. If our players are teens, we can ramp up the complexity, while very young players might only handle three abilities, at most.

Tying things back to Reflex Points, we could have the following abilities:

  • Reflex: Determines your reaction speed and ability to dodge. Your starting Reflex Points are based off this ability. Reflex is 2 for our prototype.
  • Brawl: Your ability to fight in hand-to-hand combat, both with and without weapons. We’ll set this to +2 for now.
  • HP: How much damage you can take before you die.

Attacking

To make an attack against an enemy model within 2 inches of your model, you roll 1D10 and add your Brawl modifier. The target rolls 1D10 and adds their Reflex modifier. You can each spend a Reflex Point before you roll to add +2 to the total roll. If you equal or beat the target’s score, you have scored a hit. The target loses 2 HP.

Dagger Lords — Prototype Game: Daggers Out

The objective of this game is to knock your opponent off a pillar. Neither you nor your opponent can move, all you can do is stab at them in an effort to knock them off their perch before they get you off yours.

Setup and Rounds

Each player controls 1 gangster miniature, with the player representing the gang boss. A game has two players. Any miniatures can be used, and for these rules, only close combat weapons are considered because of powerful magic influencing the battlefield. Each mini has 2 Reflex Points, 2 Reflex, +2 Brawl, and 3 Hit Points.

The game is played in a number of rounds, and each round has three phases:

  1. Initiative
  2. Activation (Combat)
  3. Top-Up

1. Initiative

Each player rolls 1d10 for their gang. Each miniature can spend 1 of their 2 Reflex Points to add +2 to the roll. Play proceeds in order from the player with the highest total to the player with the lowest total.
Dice off for ties.

2. Activation

Each player then acts in initiative order and can activate their miniature. At the start of the player’s activation, their model gains a number of Reflex Points equal to the following equation:

Activation Reflex Points = (Remaining Reflex Points x 2) – 1

The minimum number of Activation Reflex Points a model gains is always 1.

To activate a miniature, you must spend a Reflex Point to make an attack.

To make an attack against an enemy model on the next pillar, you roll 1D10 and add your Brawl modifier. The target rolls 1D10 and adds their Reflex modifier. You can each spend a Reflex Point before you roll to add +2 to the total roll. If you equal or beat the target’s score, you have scored a hit. The target loses 2 HP.

Any model can interrupt another model’s attack to attack instead by spending 1 Reflex Point. The order is decided in the order of declared interrupts, so it’s possible for a model to interrupt another model that is interrupting it, the player only has to declare their interrupt after the interrupting player does, and spend the required Reflex Points to do so.

3. Top Up

After all the models have activated, each model that isn’t destroyed regains 1 Hit Point and up to 2 Reflex Points. A model can never have more than their starting amount of these points.

Winning and Losing

The first gang member to lose all 3 Hit Points falls off their pillar, and their opponent is the winner.

 

40 for 40 Sale

I turned the big Four Oh this month, and to celebrate we’re running a bunch of sales all month long.

40 for 40 promotional imageOn our store, you can use the coupon code “40for40” to get 40% off your cart’s total value at checkout. You can use the coupon as many times as you like, until the end of the month.

Many of our products are 40%-off on Drive Thru RPG. This includes many titles for fifth edition fantasy, the Pathfinder Roleplaying Game, and stand-alone titles. We also have a few Pathfinder Second Edition and Starfinder Roleplaying Game titles.

On the DMs Guild we’ve got a massive bundle worth over $60 going for less than $16. This bundle includes many of our best-selling titles, so if you’ve bought them already you’ll pay even less to fill out your collection.

 

Build a Minis Game, Ep. 3 – Movement – MM 44

It’s Mini Monday, where I share customizing, scratch building, kitbashing, and miniature painting projects for your roleplaying and tabletop gaming. This week we’ll add movement to the skirmish minis game we’re building and we’ll try out a new prototype of the game. Mini Monday Logo Our little game is coming along, we’ll be half finished with writing it up by the end of this article.

Now, let’s consider how far minis move in our game. We also need to think about everything that affects movement, like terrain, and also the types of movement we’ll allow in Dagger Lords.

Episode 1: Concept and Theme
Episode 2: Initiative and Turns
Episode 3: Movement
Episode 4: Combat
Episode 5: Powers and Playtesting
Episode 6: Polishing the Game

We’re updating the public Dagger Lords game document as we go so that you can see the latest version of the game.

Dagger Lords Minis Game Logo

Actions and Free Activations

Movement might cost something — such as an action or activation point — or be free. There might be penalties (another cost) attached to movement, such as in Warhammer 40K, where some weapons can’t be fired if the model moves. In Pathfinder 2e, you have to take actions like a Stride to move, leaving fewer actions for attacking or casting spells.

Essentially, these costs are saying that it’s important for the player to consider if they’ll move or not, adding a layer of tactical depth to the game.

We might decide that everyone gets to move, and there’s no cost for doing so, but let’s consider our theme. We’re making a game about fantasy gangs fighting on the streets. It might seem great to let everyone move around for free, but then we’ll never have exciting moments wondering if a character shouldn’t have spent that extra action point.

We already mentioned Reflex Points, so why not use them as action points? I’m hoping we can build a more fluid game here than, say, Warhammer 40K or Age of Sigmar, and Reflex Points might be an ideal way to do that. We’ll get back to this in a moment.

Movement

“Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee. His hands can’t hit what his eyes can’t see.”

— Muhammad Ali

How far a model moves affects the game’s pacing. Short movement distances slow the game down, while too much movement will have units zipping around the table faster than bullets. In my gaming experience, most tabletop miniatures games at 28mm scale average around 5 inches of movement per move. Double that for a run. Let’s go with 6 inches for a faster game. That’s the benchmark, and some units will be slower, others will be faster. We can always tweak this value later, but let’s not waste time figuring that out now, I want to play.

Running

In our last version of the game, our first prototype, a model could move twice if they wanted to run. Let’s formalize this a bit more by nailing down how we want to use Reflex Points. In the prototype, you were effectively getting two free Reflex Points when your model’s turn happened. You could move, attack, or do either twice. What if you got a free Reflex Point when your turn happened, but you could still spend Reflex Points outside of your turn. However, your Reflex Points would do far more during your turn. Effectively, we’d be incentivizing saving your Reflex Points for your turn.

This sounds complicated though. I’m sure we can simplify it.

What if your turn multiplied your Reflex Points. You didn’t need to spend them during your turn even, you could wait to interrupt another player, but because your turn had happened, you got a big reward. To be safe, we could double your Reflex Points and subtract one.

Turn Reflex Reward = (Reflex Points x 2) – 1

Are we making it too complex again? Maybe, but this seems like a good time to stop and try things out.

Dagger Lords — Prototype Game: Paint the Town Red

In this small tester game, the object is to paint your opponent’s minis before they paint yours. If you want higher stakes, turn the paintbrushes into vorpal daggers that send their victims to another plane. The point is that we’re concerned with moving and turn order here, combat is a super simple, one hit, one kill affair, so we can focus on the mechanics we need to test now.

Setup and Rounds

Each player controls 3 gangster miniatures, with the player representing the gang boss. A game can have up to six players. Any miniatures can be used, and for these rules, only close combat weapons are considered because of powerful magic influencing the battlefield. Each mini has 2 Reflex Points and 3 Hit Points.

The game is played in a number of rounds, and each round has three phases:

  1. Initiative
  2. Activation (Movement and Combat)
  3. Top-Up

1. Initiative

Each player rolls 2D6 for their gang. Each miniature can spend 1 of their 2 Reflex Points to add +2 to the roll. Play proceeds in order from the player with the highest total to the player with the lowest total. The player with the highest score regains 2 Reflex Points to share among the models in their gang.
Dice off for ties.

2. Activation

Each player then acts in initiative order and can activate their miniatures, one after the other. At the start of the player’s activation, each model in their gang gains a number of Reflex Points equal to the following equation:

Activation Reflex Points = (Remaining Reflex Points x 2) – 1

The minimum number of Activation Reflex Points a model gains is always 1.

To activate a miniature, you must spend a Reflex Point and can do any of the following:

  1. Move up to 6 inches
  2. Make an attack

To make an attack against an enemy model within 2 inches of your model, you much roll a 4, 5, or 6 on 1D6 to hit. If your attack hits, remove the target from the game — they’ve been painted red.

Any model can interrupt another model’s movement to perform one action from the list above by spending 1 Reflex Point. The order is decided in the order of declared interrupts, so it’s possible for a model to interrupt another model that is interrupting its turn, the player only has to declare their interrupt after the interrupting player does, and spend the required Reflex Points to do so.

3. Top Up

After all the models have activated, each model that isn’t destroyed regains 1 Hit Point and up to 2 Reflex Points. A model can never have more than their starting amount of these points.

Winning and Losing

The last gang with any remaining models in it is the winner.

Image credit: Yuri_b

More Movement Rules

We don’t want to get too big, but we need to be sure we cover enough situations to make the game complete. Following are a few more rules you can add to the prototype. Try coming up with your own rules to replace these, or cover instances I didn’t think about, then let us know what you came up with in the comments.

Jumping

A model can jump 1” up and 1” forward, once, for every 4 inches they move. Effectively this lets a model clear three 1” cubes if they run, for free.

Vaulting

A model can vault over a 2” obstacle, once, for every 6 inches they move.

Flying

Most use one of two methods for flying: minis can “hop” and must land at the end of each movement, or they have a height indicator, which might be constant or incremental.

Let’s think of our theme again though. We’re making a street-level skirmish game, so flying doesn’t make much sense. At most, we’d expect a few characters to drop from rooftops or fly magically for a short distance, but there’s no room for wings between tall buildings, and anyone flying would have to be low enough to avoid cables, so we’ll skip flying for now in our minis game.

Creeping

Since interrupting is a major mechanic, having a way to counter an interrupt becomes invaluable, and fun. Let’s add a creeping mechanic:

Creeping is a move action, requiring a Reflex Point, but you move half your movement, rounded up. If a model is creeping, it can’t be interrupted by a model that can’t draw a line of sight to it. Creeping must be declared at the start of the action.

Climbing

Moving up an incline greater than 45 degrees reduces your movement to half its normal distance. In our prototype, this means models can climb 3 inches.

That’s it for this week’s go at building a minis game. Remember to check out the game and let us know if you have any other ideas to improve on it.

 

Apothecary Class — New D&D 5e Release

Our newest D&D class is an alternative option for the bard: the Apothecary. This class is all about healing and buffing allies by supplementing cleric spells with healing abilities in the form of potion-like concoctions.

As a special offer, we’re giving away 10 copies of the PDF for free, on condition that you’ll play the class during your next D&D session. Sound good? You can grab the book here.

40 for 40 Sale

I’m turning the big Four Oh this month, and to celebrate we’re running a 40%-off sales on many of our products on Drive Thru RPG.

40 for 40 promotional image