3. March 2010 by admin.

Writing is picking up pace on the truly new parts of GEARS. Work is right now being done on the Systems chapter, which includes ideas and ready-made components for games of any genre or style, and the current section/chapter is Esoterics. that means magic systems, rule elements for psionics, alchemical components, and all sorts of hocus pocus we all know from other games, and movies, and books, and… you get the picture.

This kind of writing is a fresh challenge. The raw rules that have so long been at the center are being turned into something practical. And not just a quick set of usable spells or the like, but a rich tapestry of magic systems, with guidelines for creating magic based in ancient lore, fairytale sorcery, technical training, or any other kind. It is far from exhaustive; I have material enough to fill books upon books with magical goodies. But it is extremely dense (one box describes the construction of over a thousand spells!), and allows a lot of variation, using only the basic components of GEARS already created.

There is still a lot to do, but now we have entered the System chapter, the last untamed land remaining. Things are still slated to go up before everything is written, but this makes it look like more will be available than expected when that happens!

Posted in Game worlds, Design kits, Style, Genre, Magic | 1 Comment »

17. February 2010 by admin.

This is kind of embarassing. This blog started out with me rambling about all those many things meant to be done with gears, and it seems that I have run out of things to say. Fourth Draft will soon start to go up part by part, but everything seems to fit so nicely that there is nothing to really add to the blog! Oh, the curse of predictable work schedules!

I originally wanted to talk about advanced rules in this post, but it seems I have already done that. Then I thought of touching on the idea of the GEARS core book(s) being a kitfor people to easily create lots more material for the game, but I have that covered, too. The rules being written seem, for now, to be smooth as a baby’s bottom, so complaining about problems is out of the question, too.

So my apologies for the blog being a bit thin these days, but it seems what needs to be said has, for now, been said. What is needed is action, and that action is blossoming fast, with Fourth Draft lurking right around the corner.

And with that, a new set of playtests will commence. Now that should be worth rambling about later!

Posted in Design kits, Fourth Draft | 1 Comment »

14. January 2010 by admin.

Roleplaying characters come in many variations, but one challenge is common throughout any game that does not either A) use solely the real world as the game world or B) provide absolutely everything in the game world premade (in the original book or supplements). That problem is truly weird characters. Alien races, ghosts, demons, magical entities,computer intelligences, etc., are all strange enough to push the boundaries of a rules set.

Things like extra arms, non-physical bodies, transformations, and even stranger ideas should theoretically be possible in any system meant to be truly flexible. But what does such an ‘extreme’ character mean in terms of character creations? GEARS is being tuned up to handle things stranger than just odd people, and questions like this are beginning to crop up. The current method is to use the existing character components creatively, or a few added and fairly streamlined creation rules to simulate the weirdness wanted. The challeng, of course, is that people can imagine some of the strangest things, and catching up to that is hard for anyone trying to design rules.

What I want from GEARS is a toolbox that allows others to put together the basics to allow further expansion. With non-physical characters as an example, the exact nature of being intangible can be defined by someone willing to truly contemplate the topic. From that, a basic use of base components can be put together to recreate what that intangible aspect might mean in rules terms. Others can then take that basic design and create variants and expansions on it to simulate different kinds of intangible, like energy beings, ghosts, astral projections, etc., etc. GEARS provides tools, users (possibly in GEARS supplements!) put them to strange new uses, and from there, well, the sky is the limit.

So for now, the challenge is to make the basics of the game flexible enough, and at the same time plant the seeds of creative use and expansion. Not easy, but the way GEARS is turning out, it is becoming easier and easier to produce the little additions that make streamlined, flexible use possible. And that is a promissing thing!

Posted in Design kits, Fifth Draft, Abilities, Races, Aliens, Character creation, Fourth Draft, Superpowers | 1 Comment »

6. January 2010 by admin.

Writing on Fourth Draft is furious. Much of it is the long promissed ‘design kits’, most of that being streamlining of things transfered from old TAYDS material and notes made from playtests since that was written, methods for creating adventures and running games, for designing worlds and handling players, and of course the question of what kind of Narrator you want to be.

I don’t mind that. I like updating my old work to match new experiences and concepts within RPGs developed since. But I find it difficult to adjust to one aspect of this writing: No rules! The guides are just that, guides. They contain no character trait explanations, no simulation of game world realities, no streamlined dice use, and it just feels… weird.

Now, I grew up with roleplaying games being mostly a book of rules on everything from battlemaps to race bonuses. I love creating adventures and worlds, and I love teaching others how to do so. What actually pains me is that I am currently putting a lot of effort into teaching others how to create, and it is like talking about surfing or painting; it makes you want to actually do it! I have not had the amount of creative urges I have right now in a long time, ideas just swelling up inside me, wanting to be transformed into creative works. It does not matter if those ideas are on how to cleverly represent some twisted aspect of a literary reality, or if it is the invention of a new civilization for a game world, I just feel a lust to create.

For now, I take constant notes while writing the guides. I jot down ideas, questions, stray thoughts and anything else that comes to mind and wants to get out. The guides are doing their job, making me think and create, but they also need to be written themselves. I can only imagine the things ready to burst from my skull when all the guides are done… and that’s just the basic versions for Fourth Draft; there is plenty more in the pipeline for Fifth Draft!

Maybe that’s also why there have been fewer posts on this blog; I want to get the guides done, and writing here is time I could spend on that

Posted in Design kits, Game worlds, Fifth Draft, TAYDS, Races, Narrator, Fourth Draft, Playtests | No Comments »

19. December 2009 by admin.

With the release (and subsequent adjustments and rerelease) of GEARS Third Draft, I feel I may have left the blog to drift a little. Third Draft took a greater effort than expected, mostly because of the first attempts to do a serious layout (the part that got the most adjustments, actually!).

So with that work pretty much done, there is only one logical thing for me to ramble about today: Fourth Draft!

And there is a schism here, a change of process from the first three drafts to this next one. It is probably not easy to see from the outside, but there is a massive difference between writing rules and writing games! Rules are about making sure as much of the gorund you want is covered as possible, making sure things fit together, make sense, and has a degree of balance (we are still working on the balance thing). Games are about writing something that otherscan easily understand, use and enjoy. That means that Fourth Draft will need better language,better organization, and better layout. Just saying “we need more/better rules” will not cut it!

So the writing procedure has been turned upside down, for one. The first three drafts were written as rules were needed and became possible; first the dice mechanic, then character creation, then all the other things characters might have, and onwards from there. Fourth Draft is about structure. Therefore, the first thing written for it is a complete and detailed layout of all the contents planned for it, set up in a way that seems logical and user friendly. Not surprisingly, the bulk of what is not only in Third Draft, but also what is mentioned but not finished in Third Draft, will all only be part of one section: The Rules

Originally, the core book being written was meant to have three major sections: The Game Engine and The Rules System, hence the name, GEARS: Game Engine And Rules System, and of course the Alice 2.0 setting. As things look now, a more detailed structure will benefit everyone much better, leading to five majorsections:

• The Game, describing how games can be played, how to organize sessions, what the roles and tools are for Narrators, how players tend to think, etc. Half of it is for beginners learning to handle roleplaying games without too many bad experiences, half of it is for skilled Narrators/GMs from other games wanting to get a better game going with less work. The section is about people, real people, playing roleplaying games; how they think, what they want, what they may need, etc.
• The Engine is a toolbox for the Narrator. It describes how to easily produce things from ideas, and how to get ideas when you run out. Methods, tricks and tools are delivered to quickly turn a general idea of a world, an adventure, or anything else pertaining to the game into something tangible and usable. It even goes into how these things can be set up to be shared between Narrators, to the point of how one might professionally publish them. The idea with this section is A) to ease the task of creating breathtaking campaigns, B) to kickstart a creative GEARS community, and C) to actually sow the seeds for writers who will come to write for the game! Most professional writers will already know the information in the section, and much more, but a lot of it will be news to those without publishing credits.
• The Rules, basically what is already in Third Draft, with many of the blank spots filled in. A serious rewrite is going to be done on many parts, for better phrasing.
•  The System, meanwhile is an extension of what is in The Engine and The Rules, providing a lot of different, creative uses of it all to create concepts for the game that have the complexity of ideas from The Engine, but are fully compliant with The Rules, using what already exists to create things like detailed poisons, hacking rules, character ethics/value systems, magic and divinities, and so on. This is both a collection of premade material that goes beyond the basic rules, and examples for how more can easily be made. Focus is on explaining ideas so that creative concepts can be reused and expanded on by others.
• The Settings contains both Alice 2.0 and multiple short world writeups, to get genre games going. Rules are going to be integrated into this, rather than the ruleless description of the Alice 2.0 setting included in Second Draft and Third Draft. The other, non-Alice settings will be picked to demonstrate genre and style creation and modification, giving the new Narrator a wide scope from the start, and an ample toolbox.

I will refrain from going into details about each section’s structure and subsections; that is what writing Fourth Draft is about, after all. But expect to see something much more like an actual game than a carefully crafted set of house rules next time!

Posted in Genre, Fourth Draft, Style, Design kits, Game worlds, Third Draft, Character creation, Alice, Second Draft, Magic, Narrator, Hacking, Conflict | No Comments »

11. December 2009 by admin.

… needed on several accounts, it seems!

The site was down Dec. 10 due to a miscommunication with our new provider. It’s up and running again, though, nothing lost. We do not expect it to happen again.

The other kind of organization is Organizations, large structured groups that characters in a game may be involved with somehow. They may be allies, enemies, bystanders, victims, interests, power factions, or anything else one might imagine them for. And I want creation tools for them, just like we have for characters, equipment and exotic powers! Why? Because with such a system in place, it becomes possible to distribute fully designed Organizations for game worlds and adventures, or modular ones that can be assembled for any campaign. Like a collection of monsters or a set of premade characters for use in adventures (as people encountered by player characters, presumably), such Organization collections would allow immensely detailed game worlds to be set up in minutes.

But also, because proper structure allows quicker and more versatile use in adventures! If an Organization is described well, and there are meaningful rules and guidelines in place, the Narrator can quickly assess what it means when the characters blow up a secret lab, recruits a key expert, affects a vital operation, etc. It makes the Organization a vibrant, dynamic part of the adventure, instead of some nebulous background explanation for where the ninjas come from!

Sadly, the Organiation rules that were ready were made for the Relations rules that were voted out as ‘bland’ during playtest. The new Relation rules are much, much better, thanks to extensive player feedback, but they do not fit into the old Organization rules. So they need rewriting! When they are done, players can deliberately assess how to cripple giant Organizations by cutting out vital operations, they can build and recruit their own, they can join up, infiltrate, sabotage, have dramatic stand-offs with and generally have fun with Organizations, from the local mercenary outfit to the intergalactic alien religion or the secret conspiracy of the Elves! I have an old character, made for a different game, in which house rules were used to design an agent who could call in orbital strikes, if and when he could explain why the act would be absolutely vital to his Organization. Of course, they more or less owned him in return, but tense situations are where adventures are born! I want characters like that to be modelled with the basic rules in GEARS; the advanced rules will take it much, much further…

Posted in Aliens, Relations, Design kits, Game worlds, Dammit!, Monsters, Equipment/Gear, Narrator, Superpowers, Character creation, Playtests | No Comments »

4. December 2009 by admin.

Writing is now dealing with Technologies, for designing a game world in such detail that the advancement of individual categories of items can be felt. Maybe laser rifles are a new invention, still clunky and imprecise. Or maybe they are refined, not just horrifically precise and terribly lethal, but light enough to be snapped into pocketsized concealment modules. But none of that will happen unless non-lethal, scientific lasers (and the kind for light shows) are first invented! Pick your Technologies, pick their individual Progress, and the system does the rest.

This is just another piece in the puzzle that is the, still fairly new,  “creation kit” philosophy of GEARS! I have noted on the concept before, but I feel it is essential enough to repeat: In so far as it is at all possible, the GEARS core rulebook will contain the materials needed to construct anything. Most games have core books that deal in detail with character creation, some of them even only characters of a certain, low level. The GEARS character creation rules have proven far more compact and streamlined than originally expected, so now other aspects of the game are following. Equipment is just one example, another being the creatures mentioned in earlier entries (based on the character creation system used slightly differently), vehicles as an extension of equipment, super powers as an addition to standard Abilities, and so on. And game worlds are now getting the first kick into action. Fourth Draft might actually end up having not just a better structure, but also some design kits for campaigns and adventures!

One design kit that is still a bit up in the air (other than Relations, which, as mentioned yesterday, have run into a few problems) is races. The character creation system, supported by the still-to-be-pinned-down Human Template, will allow some strange creations, but the feel of an entire and at least somewhat unique race is still a bit murky. The exact elements of fantasy and alien races will need some examining and testing before something truly worthwhile can be included. It might end up in Fourth Draft. But it will be made.

Posted in Relations, Races, Human Template, Design kits, Game worlds, Aliens, Fourth Draft, Equipment/Gear, Superpowers, Character creation, Third Draft, Vehicles | 1 Comment »