10. April 2010 by admin.

The first transfer and assembly of files is now officially underways. Roughly one half of the material for Fourth Draft has been ported into a rough draft file and is now being given basic layout. That’s 75K words, roughly 100 pages of pure text, with another 25K words coming very soon (the Ability List being a big part of that). That’s all just the first part of Fourth Draft, making up around 70% of the wordcount of the finished version. The rest is in the works, with complete setting outlines and content creation tools and ready-made content being written bit by bit.

The readable edition of this first part should be available in less than a week.

Posted in Fourth Draft | 1 Comment »

10. March 2010 by admin.

Sorry for the silence, but efforts right now are on setting up the first full Fourth Draft playtests, and we are running out of people with no prior experience with GEARS. So that’s what I’ll be dealing with for some time. Expect a period of low posting volume until that gets settled

Posted in Fourth Draft, Playtests | 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 »

9. February 2010 by admin.

Writing is progressing. It’s in the tough parts now, the things that need work and the things that need serious thought. GEARS in its entirety has been the product of intense work, but what is being done now is not just the structure of the game, but all the scaffolding that holds it together; it’s what will take GEARS from a detailed idea and turn it into an actual game. The plan is that, because this takes longer than the previous draft work, parts will be posted before the full Fourth Draft is put together. Changes in wording and outline are making the game mechanics far easier to understand and use, and small pieces are fitting so nicely they are opening up whole new realms of possibilities (I am looking at you, ‘character aspects’!). So even though everything is chaos, layout-wise, there is gold in this mine, if I may be so self-indulgent! And since the second major round of playtest is being put together now, along with the first serious (but still limited) push into public spotlight, things are looking mighty heavy for the coming weeks!

For the time being, here is the cover designed for Fourth Draft. As in the previous two covers (First Draft had no cover), the theme is “Work In Progress”, but the very simplistic logo-and-textlayout is now being transformed into something a little more interesting. Of course, clearly still WIP!

Posted in First Draft, Dice Mechanics, Layout, Fourth Draft, Character creation, Playtests | 1 Comment »

1. February 2010 by admin.

It’s been a long time since there have been really tough decisions on GEARS. Tough work, sure, with all the rules that have to fit snuggly together and make sense! But tough decisions are a different beast altogether, and one essential decision has been showing its teeth these last few days.

It relates to the last post, really. I’ve been a bit psyched about the Intransigent Design setting, especially with some very positive commentary arriving from playtesters. It’s a complex world, with a lot of deep philosophical choices and concerns. It’s provocative and makes you think. But in the end, those are not necessarily good traits for a game world. For an intellectual debate, perhaps, but game worlds are not pensive documentaries.

The main setting for GEARS has always been Alice 2.0. This has not changed. The question is, is GEARS going to be the source of all the game is, or is Alice? Is this about a new kind of game rules, or about a new kind of game world? Which will be on top?

It might seem a bit redundant. After all, if both are made and both are published, who cares what the intented focus is? But the decision is rather serious, simply because it will influence both the publishing model and the later supplement line. As mentioned before, GURPS is a big inspiration for GEARS, but GURPS also had what some would perceive as a problem, namely that it had game worlds made left and right, with little cohession and followup. Its 4th edition put a multi-world setting at the center, but the philosophy still seems unchanged. Is that what’s ahead for GEARS? Or should the game simply stand up and proclaim that the rules are solely there to flesh out Alice 2.0?

Lord knows Alice allows anything to be used, and poses the kind of challenge to the system that GEARS was made to tackle: Diversity, flexibility, coherence, all the goodies. But Intransigent Design was not made in Alice’s image. If everything is about the core setting, that could be considered a problem, or at least a divergence from the bigger plan.

So… What do we want? A set of rules to rule it all, or a settingfor the rules to serve? Divergences are still possible, no matter what the choice, but the exceptions to the rules (no pun intended) cannot be what carries the system.

I am leaning towards making Alice the focus, and creating the best possible rule system to flesh her world(s) out. Intransigent Design is still in my heart, but I can actually see it as ‘the rebel’, the one setting that defies the mischievous mayhem of Alice and Babylon, by being deep, dark, and foreboding. The sinister cousin of the lovable rogue.

Yeah… I can imagine that!

Posted in Game worlds, Intransigent Design, Genre, Fourth Draft, Alice, Playtests | 1 Comment »

27. January 2010 by admin.

Rules are still being crunched, verbalized and streamlined for the upcoming Fourth Draft. On the downside, there is so much that it sometimes seems impossible to ever get done. On the upside, a lot has been done in a short time, and things are looking so good there are whispers Sixth Draft might be the last draft before a true First Edition rolls about! Nothing for certain, but things look better and sturdier than expected, so hopes are high…

What is looking pretty sure now is a line-up of what the first roll-out of GEARS settings will be, and they are looking juicy, very juicy…

Alice 2.0 remains the default ‘core setting’. Using it will be optional, but it binds all other settings together very nicely. As is already in Third Draft, Alice arrived to our world in 2007 in an explosion of the coast of Morocco, and promptly swam, ran and commandeered transportation to get her into the Saharan desert, where she founded Babylon. Now, Babylon is a mysterious city, full of secrets, madness and intrigue, the center of worldwide conspiracies and espionage, and very secretly home to super-scientific Resurrection Machines and portals to other worlds. Nobody knows who this Alice is, what she wants, or how she does what she does and knows what she knows, but the world is watching her, and the Iron Ring barricade the UN tries to keep from imploding at the edge of Babylon. And wouldn’t you know it: The player characters are smack in the middle of it all! Lunacy ensues!

Broken Pattern is a post-apocalyptic world set after technological marvels became humanity’s fall. Society did not explode; it imploded, tearing itself apart when we could no longer govern ourselves. The cities are still there, and our technological remnants are fought over greatly, especially by those who gain their power from applying what can be salvaged. In the desolate and destroyed New World, technology like battered exosuits and fickle AI is not a forgotten artifact, but the key to True Power! Broken Pattern is gritty and harsh, but at the same time shows what kind of hope can be built from knowing your past…

Hybrid Elite, set in a far future, has powerful aliens holding Earth in a military/diplomatic deathgrip as humanity accepts their new overlords, getting in return powers beyond belief. Galactic superhumans maintain the seemingly benevolent alien rule, while rebellious powers try to find their way in to deal a much needed blow against the new ruling class. Combining dark, ultra-powerful superheroic adventure with breathtaking transhumanistic ideas, Hybrid Elite is a setting of tremendous powers, to those willing to fight for their species’ survival in the name of another race entirely.

Stone Sky Kingdoms is GEARS’ contribution to the fantasy genre. But it is not fantasy as you may know it; it’s both darker and grander, as powerful sorcerers try to make the stars fall to the ground and build mighty cities around them, draining the power of these fallen pieces of the ’stone sky’. A power so great that few dare go too close, and the lands around the fallen stars warps with magic only tapped by the most insane. Stone Sky Kingdoms explores fantasy as a large and bewildering tapestry of magics, faith, arcane torment, chaos, and immense beauty and heroic values that may be the last defense against those who want the sky to truly fall!

Ectopia, “the outer place”, is a cyberpunk world of the near future. But something is wrong. There is something lurking in the artificial realms our technologies have created. ‘Ghosts’ seen only through bionic eyes and in data archives, entities wanting to reach out to us, for reason we cannot, perhaps dare not, understand. And as material greed and carnage claw at society, in a world that has not come to terms with the power it has attained over such a brief age of progress, something new is being born in its blind angles…

These five will all get a treatment in GEARS Fourth Draft, and presumably in the final First Edition. The following two, however, are slated as the first settings to get separate treatment as supplement:

Intransigent Design, where our world is rocked to its very core in a not so distant future. As humanity looks on, God returns, bringing with Him the armies of Heaven, a civilization of unimaginable power, loyal to a Plan so far beyond the understanding of humanity that we have, inadvertedly, strayed from it. The loyal and devout will submit, the rebellious will fall. But God has adversaries, both human and other, and as the realms of Heaven and Hell and the intricacies of the human soul becomes the stage of the greatest battle faced by either of those fighting, the world is changed forever.

Reich X is picked as perhaps the truest of Evils, a world in which Hitler claimed victory and subdued the world… by magic, alien saucer technology, mythical creatures and advanced inventions. Inside Neuropa, brains in jars plan the war of a Third Reich armed with sorcerers and cyborgs, ravaging unconquered lands with vampires and werewolves, and hunting Qabbalist rebels with saucers before the spirits of the slain Hebrew people can give the Underground a foothold in the glorious Nazi empire.

Posted in Intransigent Design, First Edition, Hybrid Elite, Broken Pattern, Ectopia, Stone Sky Kingdoms, Sixth Draft, Game worlds, Reich X, Magic, Superpowers, Fourth Draft, Races, Aliens, Alice | 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 »

12. January 2010 by admin.

Roleplaying is about stories. But roleplaying games are also about numbers. GEARS is an odd mix of rules light and rules heavy; there are a lot of things to use, but they all use a very, very small set of actual rules. There is only one real dice mechanism, for example: Roll the number of dice and check how many roll ‘good’. There are only two fundamental things a character needs to have: Abilities and cash. And anything else is built like those, such as Disabilities working just like a standard simple check or Relations being basically just the Abilities to get someone to help you out.

There is one ‘rule’ that is less notable, however, and yet it is pivotal to game balance. Game balance, of course, is the idea that a player (or Narrator!) cannot make something insanely powerful, or end up puny, by simply choosing one Ability or the like over the other. Once the game starts, everything else being equal, you get what you pay for. ‘Minmaxing’, the dreaded ability of math-skilled players to figure out how to make something far more powerful than the allotted CCP should make it, should be non-existant. The rule that much current debate revolves around is the unwritten “1/10″ rule.

Now, the 1/10 rule is in place to make GEARS easy to handle and easy to remember. Throughout GEARS, either something is handled straight forward, with 1 of something meaning 1 of something else (every Ability level is 1 CCP for 1 level, for example), or 1 of something is 1/10 of something. The obvious example is Talents, which provide 1/10 of their level as a bonus to certain other rolls. But Relatios also have a Base built on 1 level equalling 10 CCP put into the Relation, and Income is 1/10 of the point-to-cash rate per CCP. 1/10 is found in several places throughout GEARS. The current debate is, is 1/10 the right number?

The key worry is in Talents (or rather, the way they provide a bonus; in Fourth Draft, this is renamed Benefitting, and Talents are just Abilities that are often used for their Benefit). At 1/10, it takes 11 relevant Abilities to make it worth investing in a Talent solely for its Benefit. True, Talents have other functions, but this is a Big One. So if 1/10 is making Talents look useless, should it be 1/5 instead? That would put them back into the game, making them a serious assett to characters built around certain concepts (”a precise and quick-thinking pilot”, “a natural with animals”, etc.). But the 1/10 rule is a very serious concept in GEARS, even if not explicit (maybe it should be made explicit….), so that would mean changing 1/10 to 1/5 throughout the game, or accepting that numbers will become harder to juggle. The latter is definitely not a wanted option, so the former, making 1/10 into 1/5 in general, looks like the only option left.

What would that mean? Talents will become more powerful, but will they become too powerful? Will they unhinge and unbalance the game? It would take 6 related Abilities to make a Talent worthwhile, and Talents have Specifics, too, so the player might make the Talent more relevant to one or two Abilities or situations than the rest. It seems doable, but it is in the end a choice, which way to balance it (fractions like 1/7 or 1/8, or decimal numbers, will be too great a math presence to be truly wanted).

Relations may work with a Base of 1 per 5 CCP the relation is built on. A Relation relies on Base, Loyalty and Availability, so one level in each still makes it seem worthwhile (1 level of each costs 3 CCP, ‘paying out’ 5 CCP in Relation creation).

Income is a bit less clear. 1/10 of point-to-cash rate means it takes 10 weeks for a character to ‘earn’ the equivalent of 1 CCP of Wealth. With 1/5 as a rule, it will take 5 weeks. Will that make Income outshine the prospects of investing in actual Wealth? For the first adventure a character has, it really doesn’t matter; Income pays out later no matter what. But when the characters have 3 weeks of R&R, the character just gets more than half a CCP’s worth of money dropped on it! Does that make Wealth seem useless in comparison? Or does it perhaps make Income just seem more worthwhile?

These questions are not rethorical. This is a serious matter for GEARS, as it pits the balance of minor versus major effects of multiple rules against each other, and pits all that against the ideal of One Fraction To Rule Them All. And there is no easy answer, so the debacle will continue for some time, before it becomes clear whether Fourth Draft will usea 1/10 rule or a 1/5 rule…

Posted in Human Template, Abilities, Relations, Fourth Draft, Character creation, Disabilities, Wealth | 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 »

1. January 2010 by admin.

Christmas and New Years behind us, it looks like the time to get back in the saddle. Not that things have been all that quiet; writing on Fourth Draft has been quite active, much of it being structure and phrasing. The wording of rules from Third Draft are becoming more streamlined, making them easier to read and understand, and also setting them up for a better layout. And on layout matters, a lot of decisions are being made on graphics and text setup. Fourth Draft is going to push GEARS into a more respectable look, hopefully the beginning of making it look visually professional. Content is still the One True Focus, but we are far enough along that looks are beginning to count, if nothing else then because that includes how content is arranged, visually.

But that’s all still abstract ideas and nitpicking, respectively. What has taken center stage for the last week has been the Background trait. Of all the material in existence for GEARS, Background has become one of the more controversial topics, starting out as one of the foremost innovations of the rules and then abruptly slipping into the background (no pun intended), overshadowed by such things as Specifics and Learning Abilities in terms of innovation.

What Background originally did was guide character creation along what is known as ‘life paths’ in most RPG theory. In other words, characters were created by describing the paths they had taken in life, and defining Abilities and such from that. If your character had been a mercenary mechanics, that would produce some Abilities etc., and if a character had been orphaned at age 12, that would define certain character traits. Characters were not so much items picked as lives lived.

The rules now support a ‘pick your skills’ character creation more, but the old Background material is being revised and updated. The point now is to make game worlds the vessel for life paths, allowing some choices to be only available along certain paths. This might be learning mystical martial arts, possible only with enough Background from hard travels; without a heroic journey behind it, your character cannot be taught the Ancient Arts by secluded monks. Whether due to lack of insight, not having proven oneself worthy, or in other ways failing to have done something with his or her life, a character might be barred from certain options. Even advanced military training can require the character to have a certain amount of Background in the right fields!

And issues of Background are starting to show beautiful levels of sybergy with things like races, giving a character of one race opportunities other races lack. If you are not a dwarf, there are paths in life blocked to you. Those paths may hold otherwise forbidden knowledge, or they may simply be advantageous or plain interesting in other ways. Careers, challenges, experiences, associations, connections, they can all be made to tap into Background, with astoudingly easy game mechanics. This is what Background was made for, but the way it fits into the overall flexible GEARS game system is turning out pretty impressive.

Posted in Game worlds, Layout, Background, Human Template, Races, Third Draft, Fourth Draft, Genre, Character creation | 1 Comment »