Archive for July, 2009

Vote at www.ennie-awards.com! If you’re looking for other indie products nominated, check out www.summer-revolution.com.

Hey! This Just In…From GenCon, the live podcast show that Paul Tevis & I did twice daily at GenCon last year, has just launched the first pre-GenCon episode for 2009!

Check it out at: http://thisjustinfromgencon.com/

From the kick-off episode:

Ryan kicks off this second year of This Just In with his co-host from last year, Paul Tevis. But this year, we’re changing it up! Since Paul will be working at the IPR booth this year, Ryan will be grabbing co-hosts from all across gaming podcasting for each show. A bevy of hosts indeed!

They talk a bit about this year’s show and about some plans they have, from Ryan’s yearly pilgrimage to the Fantasy Flight Games booth to the podcasting & media track set up by Don Dehm of Pulp Gamer (including the Podcaster Meet & Greet and Inside the Game Designer’s Studio). They’re also going to be at The ENnie Awards this year, as another show of theirs, The Voice of the Revolution, was nominated for Best Podcast!

Ryan will be back in a couple weeks alongside another guest host to bring you a second GenCon preview episode.

- Ryan

Ever since the ENnie Awards in 2007,  I have been chief among those given a special honor: playfully jabbing at my good friend Paul Tevis’ Gold ENnie Award for Best Podcast.

“Oh, hey, it’s ENnie Award Winning Paul Tevis!” etc.

He has been eagerly awaiting an opportunity to turn the tables on me, and it looks like it’s possible this year.

But Master Plan and This Just In… weren’t nominated this year, Ryan! you say. And you’re right, they weren’t. But listen, silly rabbit, I don’t do just two shows. Oh no, I do three.

And that third show, the one I produce every month for IPR, The Voice of the Revolution, has been nominated for the ENnie Award for Best Podcast. This makes me happier beyond belief, as it’s a labor of love — working with Paul & Brennan is a joy, and even when technical issues color that with frustration, at the end of each month I have something I’m proud of and am happy to have my name attached to.

So, when voting time comes, I ask you: consider voting for The Voice. It’s the only way Paul will get to have his revenge on me.

Of course, that’s not the only product I’m involved in. Along with my editing The Voice, I also edited Evil Hat Productions’ Don’t Lose Your Mind — which, in my opinion, is one of the most badass books that conveys setting without being explicit about it. (I now understand the weird joy of seeing a book you edited be up for a “Best Writing” award. Not that I’m claiming “Hey, I earned that,” because that sweet, sweet writing was all the talented Benjamin Baugh. But the sense of being a part of someone else’s awesome, helping them achieve something wicked — that kicks ass, people. That’s why I do this thing.)

Finally, and while it goes without saying, it never should: Congrats to the other nominees! I am humbled (even if my prose doesn’t sound it, since, hey, media personality here) to be in your company.

- Ryan

P.S. HOLY CRAP! I’M UP FOR AN ENNIE!

In my D&D 4/e game, two of my three (yes, I only have three!) players are leaving in September. When I heard this, I told them that I’d like to see what paragon is like, as I’ve only seen lower-level Heroic. They were level 2, so we were going to level 11. We were also about to go on a three week hiatus thanks to mismatched schedules, so session before that was built as a chapter close — they were the City Watch, but the city was overrun by the undead, and they had to flee and fire-bomb it from airship.

For those familiar with my dragon-halfling war idea, the PCs were on a Halfling Flagship called Bahamat’s Doom — but they didn’t know the airship they were getting on was a Halfling ship, or the name of it. All they knew was “Man, we need to get to the Dragon Empire, where our new friends are!”  Two of there were (willingly and happily) psychicly bonded to a gold dragon traveling in a water ship below them, the Emir of Light. And they were on the ship that has killed dragonkind. They had a nice “oh, shit!” moment at the end of the session.

Now, we all knew the action would take place back in the city they came from, as they went to go kick a god’s ass and deal with the evil Eladrin mayor. But, I didn’t just want to say “and now you’re back!” or anything like that. I wanted to model a bit of a feel like “hey, you really just spent 9 levels being badasses in the Eastern Continent — what happened?”

So I came up with this Montage system. It’s simple:

• I have an index card for every level with a situation on it.
• Each player has 6 six-sided dice.
• I describe the situation that happened.
• They each describe something they do.
• All of them roll their dice, totallying them up.
• The highest gets to endcap the narration, and in the case of PvP (two people saying they’re doing opposing things), they decide which one actually succeeded.
• The winner hands me one of their dice, so they have fewer going into the next one.

The result was better than I had hoped for. They had a rich story of what happened, with new plot threads and hooks that wouldn’t have happened if I just simply asked “hey, what did you guys do there?”

I’ll describe all nine situations, for those interested in how I used this specifically. After that, I have a question, one prompted by a discussion I had with Leonard Balsera regarding what it means to “play” Fourth Edition.

Read the rest of this entry »

While hanging out with two of my three local Race for the Galaxy crew on the 4th, I had a weird idea for a hack. We played it last night, after playing two disappointing games of Race (disappointing to everyone, including the winners) and one okay game. (I’ll get to the disappointment later.)

The hack comes from the Eastern Front expansion for Memoir ’44 — the Russian player has to play his orders in a queue, so that on any given turn he’s playing whatever orders he placed last turn and playing orders for the following turn. This causes all manner of chaos in a game, because while you know what your next move is, you don’t know what other people will do before that turn is played and how that will change what you’ll do with the orders you’re about to play next — and if what they do completely invalidates or makes impossible that move.

In a word: exciting.

I wanted to see what happens with you take that to Race. The hack works thusly:

• Each player takes all the phase cards for their color, including the two-player cards
• At the beginning of the game, after you have your initial hand of four cards, place two phase cards face down — one at the edge of the table and one just further in towards the center.
• At the beginning of each round, reveal the further-in phase card as your play for that round.
• At the end of each round, put the phase card just played back into your hand, push the remaining face-down phase case further  in towards the center. Then place your next phase card face down in the just-vacated spot.

We played with this variant, and within a couple rounds I found a new joy with Race — it was this sense of beautiful chaos that left us playing a game more based on hope than on reading each others’ faces and situations to draft off their likely choice. “I have no idea what any of us are doing! This is awesome!” I exclaimed. My comrades felt a similar sense of excitement.

This isn’t the sort of thing we would play often, but it seriously took me out of a funk with the Race games we played earlier that evening, giving it a refreshing feeling and making me rethink habits I’ve fallen into with the game. If you’re looking to mix it up a little, try this variant — and see how it reveals things about how you play Race that you night not have otherwise done.

One of the players, Aaron, said something interesting about this variant after we played. We’ve become so used to playing the game as a competitive display of mind-reading and predicting that by engaging in this variant, he felt like it became a true solitaire game again. We were playing so strongly to our next draw because we couldn’t really predict what someone else would play. I would agree, at least with the first time play — not dissimilar to first times playing Race. What didn’t feel like solitaire was the shared sense of awe and chaos that we all felt, and since we all seemed to enjoy that to one degree or another, I accepted that the mutual sense of bewilderment we all had made it feel less solitaire, and more of a “we’re all in this crazy mess together” sort of experience. Take that how you will.

(Onto the disappointment. We decided to pick starting worlds from the nine rather than do a random draw, and because of that we wanted to focus our play in a particular direction. Naturally, our card draws didn’t support that, so we all felt disappointed by the game. After that, we played a game with random draw and the game felt a little better — cleansed some of the funk from our earlier games.)