A number of people have been using my XP hack for Dungeon World, and Nora Last, looking to DM some Dungeon World at JoshCon, wanted to take it for a spin. As I listed off the options, I found myself saying “Let’s not use Aid/Hinder. It’s pretty weak.” So we didn’t.

Two characters had Converse highlighted, and after one of the fights, one of them wanted to Parley with the other to get him to do something. The details are fuzzy thanks to copious amounts of scotch[1], but what I remember was this:

The target of the Parley wanted to do an opposed roll, which we said was Hinder. I started thinking “man, he should be able to highlight tha…DUDE THAT’S CONVERSE HE SHOULD HIGHLIGHT THAT.”

I cannot recall if I was as loud as I imagine. Again, scotch. Anyway, I said “Mark XP. That’s totally converse,” and filed the thought away.

Then I emailed the co-creator of this XP hack, Colin Jessup, when my findings, to which he celebrated. It meant less work on our parts to make up new moves for Aid/Hinder in a hack we’re tinkering with.

Which means the new rule is:  When you Aid or Hinder another PC, and the move you’re affecting is covered by one of your highlights, mark experience.

Then shit got interesting, because Nora took the hack in a different direction. Colin & I have build the idea as “moves have concrete highlights. X is Attack, Y is Defend, etc.” Spells and other “sub-moves” are split up appropriately.

Nora said “nah, I’m gonna interpret that on the fly.” Sometimes when Ben Demonslayer, my still-not-dead halfling fighter[2], did some crazy shit because Stunt is highlighted, Nora would check my intent. Sometimes, she would tell me that I wasn’t stunting, but defending, which I didn’t have highlighted. And that brought up some interesting thoughts.

I’m not sure if I like “open to interpretation,” partly because it means one more decision that has to be made in the flow of play. But it’s one I hadn’t considered until Nora did it. (Thankfully, I can tell Colin “you decide”. Design partners are awesome!)

She also challenged me, being a third level fighter, by not highlighting my Attack in one of the games I played. Which worked for me, because Ben had a good chance of surviving crazy shit. Level 1 characters are, by contrast, sweet sweet tasty death magnets.

That made me think about going easy on highlighting level 1 characters, so they have a chance to level. After that, change it up. That also supports the idea of platforms and tilts in stories, a la improv. It also goes into Carl Rigney’s philosophy on games where the first thing the players do should showcase competence, if the game is about that, as that first action will color expectations of that game & play session.

Finally, she did some awesome stuff with putting monster damage rolls in Dungeon World. That added some Push Your Luck style excitement, and I’m totally going to roll[3] with that later.

Thank you, Nora, for being my guinea pig. Next up, getting crazy with Technoir…

- Ryan

[1] Hi, Jeremy.

[2] Hi, Nora.

[3] Hi, attempt at comedy.

Relevant Annoucements

I talk about hacking games on the Podge Cast! Also I hit on David. A lot. And I’m apparently an accidental dubstep DJ when my Skype goes to pot.

And you only have a couple days left to get your submission to me for Don’t Hack This Game! The pitch window closes on this Wednesday, January 4th, 2012. 11:59PM Pacific Time.

Back to Dungeon World

The way Dungeon World works in combat is interesting, because it puts everything on the player’s roll. If you do the Hack and Slash move, on a 6- you get fucked, a 7-9 you hit & get hit, and 10+ you hit without getting hit in return (or can boost damage in exchange for getting hit).

When a player damages someone, they roll damage dice. But when they’re hit, the DM just tells them the amount they take in damage. And the more I think about that, the more that feels flat. Recently in looking at board game mechanics & terminology, I have a better vocabulary for articulating that:

That removes a great deal of the Push Your Luck vibe that D&D and other games inherently have with random damage rolls. If I can determine whether or not I know getting less than 10 on 2d6 plus my stat will kill me for certain, there’s something uninteresting there. Like the way crap skill challenges can be run.

There’s nothing to say you can’t push the randomness back in. Give monsters variable dice. Don’t say that a monster hits with four points. Roll a d6, d8, d4+2, 2d4, whatever works. This is the sort of thing that could be tailored by level, naturally.

One of the elements to DW (and its predecessor Apocalypse World) has is that only the players roll dice. Now, I can take or leave that in design, so I don’t really care if it’s the DM rolling damage or the players forced to roll their own pain. Either way suits me fine enough.

Now that we’re rolling for damage, we’ve introduced Push Your Luck. Say you’ve got 5 hit points left, and you’ve discovered that the monster does 1d8 in damage. Well, now you can choose whether or not you’ll risk another straight-on Hack and Slash, or if you’ll try something else. If you know for sure that the monster does, say, 6 points of damage, you know you’re dead — there is little interesting choice there[1].

The other way makes sense when you have a game with six hit points, three of which are “and you’ll eventually get better on your own”. Not so much for a game of increasing hit points.

Anyway, once dice are added, if you want to add a bit of chaos, you could have monsters have custom hard moves that are triggered upon how those dice react. Like, say, having a giant slam a character across the field of battle when a 1 is rolled on damage. There is still the fiction-in-fiction-out elements: the giant is attacking & inflicting harm on the character, and the character is being hit across the field. The only thing added here is a sense of a critical effect against the character.

Maybe that’s too much to the hack, maybe not. I’m curious to try it out. As with many hack brainstorms, some ideas are shittier than they appear. But trying tells you something you didn’t know before about game design.

- Ryan

[1] Some will argue that “what about setting up a meaningful death”? Sure, but that requires actually setting something up. And using dice doesn’t remove or add to this element anymore than a fixed, known amount does.

In Cortex Plus Drama, Stress is how your characters deal with setbacks and defeat. It hits them in the moment when they lose a contest, and it stays as lasting consequences until they get some stress relief. Stress is a key piece of your Lead as you play, since you want to gain Stress in order to get your Growth pool. And because people dealing with Stress are interesting.

(This article also applies to hacking conditions in Lady Blackbird and similar games — in fact, it was in hacking Lady Blackbird last year that I stumbled across this idea.)

The five original Stress Traits—Afraid, Angry, Exhausted, Injured, and Insecure—are perfect for a Drama about young adults finding their way in a world…and they happen to have superpowers. There are a lot of different forms of Stress your Drama game can take, and a few different ways you can change Stress in your game.

A Menu of Stress

Here are over thirty different Stress Traits. The meaning of most of these will be obvious. Some will make you stop and think. But it’s not for me to tell you what Angry or Delusional or Overconfident means. It’s for your Leads to tell us what they mean.

This is far from exhaustive, but it’s a good start to get you thinking.

What’s in a name?

The names you use for your Stress Traits will have a huge impact on your game. Choosing them wisely makes the difference between a good Drama and a fantastic one.

In supernatural horror, it makes sense to have an Afraid Stress Trait. But the word “Afraid” doesn’t sound quite right for a game about mind-shattering knowledge and monsters made of tentacles and ichor. Terrified or Horrified has a much stronger ring to it. It that sort of game, saying you’re dealing with d10 Horrified feels like it has more weight than d10 Afraid, even if it seems like the exact same thing. Those sorts of words are more primal and are in keeping with the genre. Alternatively, using a word that allows for an added taste of competency under horror (for your “operatives against the supernatural” story), try Unnerved. That suggests a different way to play out how your Leads handle the Stress.

Anytime you can see a word your characters would use in the fiction, that’s a signal that it could be a good Stress Trait. In a paramilitary drama, Sloppy might be one you’re interested in adding, but the name sounds comical, downright goofy. If your Leads are meant to be sharp, strong individuals in extraordinary times, another word to use is Undisciplined. You can imagine how the characters in this story would talk, and they would throw that word around at and about each other

Sometimes you need a little extra oomph to set something apart as a Stress Trait. In many settings, Suspicious is fine. But in very conspiratorial Dramas, everyone already is (or had well better be). That would be like having Breathing as Stress. To kick that up a notch for those stories, use Paranoid.

Sometimes the word fits exactly right, but you need to still note down what it means because of your genre. That’s okay, too! Say you’re setting up a Drama set in Louisiana, where humans live in a turbulent peace with other creatures of the night. It would make sense for Leads to have Hungry. As long as everyone is on board with knowing that’s talking about people, not steak, you’re set.

Genre-specific Stress like Hacked might be better served in your game by using in-world slang. Pwned, Trojan'd, or R00t3d are along from our real world. What’s it called in yours?

Die Rating & Granularity

Most people playing Drama have a sense that d6 Afraid doesn’t feel like d12 Afraid. Sometimes, you’ll want to use different words for those different ratings. Do that by adding a little granularity to some of your Stress Traits.

To start with, pick an overall name for that Stress Trait, which you’ll use in rewriting any Distinctions or otherwise referring to it mechanically. Then come up with names for it for the d6, d8, d10, and d12 rating.

For a war drama game about paratroopers in WWII, you might want a bit more detail in Injured:

• d6: Flesh Wound (Injured)
• d8: Bleeding (Injured)
• d10: Crippled (Injured)
• d12: MEDIC! (Injured)

Or for our supernatural horror above, with “Horrified”:

• d6: Unnerved (Horrified)
• d8: Afraid (Horrified)
• d10: Horrified (Horrified)
• d12: Lost in Horror (Horrified)

It’s important to keep in mind that no matter what you call these, at no point does the name of a Stress Rating mean a Lead cannot act. The only time where a Lead cannot act significantly is after being Stressed Out. Your secret operative with d12 MEDIC! and d12 Lost in Horror can still fight the good fight and give it all for humanity.

If you do this, limit it to one or two Stress Traits rather than all five. That’s a lot of work for everyone to keep track of.

Changing Stress in your Game

Now that you have an idea of how to do different Stress, it’s really easy to change it. Once you’ve got all your Leads made, you have one last step. Come up with what five Stress Traits you’ll use (either the Gamemaster alone or as a group, though as a group is always better).

The Rule of Five

Stick with five Stress Traits. Too few and each one will come up too often. That’ll get boring. Too many and they won’t hit often enough to be interesting. Someone who is, for example, Afraid constantly is a one-note character. Someone who only gets Afraid once never shows us anything interesting about he or she deals with fear. You want Leads that are Afraid sometimes, so they can play that out in different ways at different times.

If you want to break this rule, know that you’ll change how Stress feels.

Reworking Distinctions

Once you have your Stress, look at the Distinctions people have taken. Many key off of increasing or decreasing Stress Traits, either their own or others’. If a Lead has a Distinction that applies to a Stress you aren’t using, work with the group to decide how to rewrite that Distinction (or maybe decide that Distinction doesn’t fit the Drama either).

Different Stress for Different Leads

Once you know how to tweak Stress Traits for your game, it doesn’t take much to realize you can tweak them for each Lead. This can put even more personality into your Leads. You’re already coming up with what they believe in, who matters to them, and the notable things they can do. To say how they’re vulnerable, how they deal with setbacks and defeats, adds even more story mojo to your game.

Your Box of Traits

When coming up with your campaign, you have two choices: Playing with the Big Toy Box or Focusing the Pain.

Playing with the Big Toy Box lets everyone pick from any Stress Traits.  This gives you all sorts of options to come up with interesting characters that you might not expect.

Focusing the Pain means narrow down the list of available Stress Traits down to between eight and twelve.  This allows you to craft a more consistent theme in your game, while still allowing room for flexibility.

Neither one’s better than the other; it’s all about what you and your game need.

Common Ground

Once you know what Stress Traits are available to the Leads, you can come up with each one’s when doing the finishing touches. You have some other choices you can make here: Free for All, Common Stress, and Heritage Stress.

Free for All is simple. From the list of available Stress Traits, pick five that feel right for that Lead, that would be fun to see that Lead have to deal with. This is great if you want a looser drama, where Leads come from many different backgrounds and have very different roles in the story. You might even consider changing these as you play, possibly one per Tag Scene.

Common Stress is a little more involved, as you have to come up with two or three Stress Traits that everyone in the campaign should have, leaving the remaining ones open for a Free for All.  This unification allows for a tighter story about characters that are similar. It’s a great way to explore how such characters still differ in that tight story space. In particular, a “humans versus supernatural menaces” or “military dramas” game will be will-served with a few common Stress Traits.

Heritage Stress is a variation on Common Stress, for specialized character types like different races or species, or characters with very different walks of life—whatever your Drama game decides are Heritages. A game with elves, dwarves, and humans might have all three with their own set of Common Stress Traits (and possibly even having some special Stress Traits the other races can’t take!). Likewise, a game where you have disciplined military or law enforcement personnel alongside untrained civilian scientists could be reflected in two different sets of Heritage Stress.

Stress In Action

Now that we know all sorts of ways to change Stress in our games, let’s take a look a few examples:

The Future Savior of Humanity

You’re a family like any other. You get up, go to school, get home, and fight against killer robots from the future. Your mother has been training you since birth to be a great leader of a future resistance, your “uncle” was sent back in time to aid you both, and your “cousin” a reprogrammed killer robot. Oh, and next week is show and tell!

• All Robots From The Future have the same Stress Traits: Damaged, Hacked, Revealed. (The group decided that Robots should feel very similar and only have three Stress Traits.)
• All Humans have Paranoid and any four other Stress Traits that Robots don’t have.

(Inspiration: Terminator: The Sarah Connor Chronicles)

No One Knows We Save The World

Back when the Bureau of Unnatural Containment was first formed, the world was in chaos. Germany was marching across the earth with Powers Unknowable. It’s been years since their defeat, both temporal and supernatural, but their dark legacy lives on in secret. The Bureau was shut down a few years ago, but evil continues to discover and wield Nazi magitech. So you and your pistol continue the Bureau’s good work in secret, one kept even from your husband and children.

• Everyone has: Distracted (specifically by the Lead’s home life), Exhausted, Horrified
• Everyone choose two more from: Afraid, Delusional, Depressed, Injured, Intoxicated, Overconfident, Paranoid, Shaken, Sloppy

(Inspiration: Delta Green, a toned down B.P.R.D., various spy flicks and shows)

We Few, We Proud, We Brave Soldiers

Never before has something so grand been attempted by individual men and women. Taking Planet Haxith will be difficult without boots on the ground. Ion cannons will take out large dropships, but you three hundred will drop solo from high orbit in pods too small to be targeted, land, and make our beachhead. Our success depends entirely on you. Welcome to Fall Brigade.

• Everyone has the same six Stress Traits in the game: Afraid, Blissed (due to the combat drugs), Hacked (their jumpsuits & other gear), Injured (using die ratings & granularity), Insecure, Tired.
• The group couldn’t choose which one to drop to make five, so they’re trying all six to see what happens. They’ll see if one should go away after the third session. They had five until someone suggested Blissed and explained it.

(Inspiration: Starship Troopers meets Band of Brothers)

Predators Alongside Prey

Vampires, werewolves, ghosts, and sorcerers, oh my! The world got a lot weirder a few years back when the vamps outed themselves and try to live among us, but life’s still more or less normal. At least, until that new guy came into town to reclaim his family’s lost estate. They say he’s trying to live “off the vein,” but I fear everything’s about to change.

• Vampires have: Hungry, Injured
• Werewolves have: Feral, Injured
• Ghosts have: Bound, Incorporeal. (They intentionally don’t have Injured.)
• Sorcerers have: Exhausted or Overconfident, Injured
• Normal humans must take: Crippled (They’re much more delicate that everyone else), Enthralled.
• Of the remaining three Stress Traits, the group says “get your emo on!” Choose from: Afraid, Angry, Cold, Depressed, Insecure, Shaken

(Inspiration: True Blood, Anne Rice-type stuff, World of Darkness)

The Mysterious Case Files

There have been thirteen instances of reality deviation in Manhattan in the last month alone. Naturally, this is a cause for concern. The local authorities can’t handle this. This is a case for you, the Luxmas Group. You have the expertise and resources to handle this before we have another Incursion. And Ms. Cranston…we have evidence that suggests your deceased husband is behind all this.

• Everyone has: Distracted (specifically about something from their past), Stumped (in an investigative Drama, this is a fun Stress)
• FBI-trained characters have: Restrained (meaning dealing with bureaucratic red tape)
• Scientist characters have: Obsessed (the Luxmas Group tends to recruit a certain sort of gifted individual)
• The remaining one to three Stress Traits are open.

(Inspiration: Lie to Me meets Fringe)

- Ryan

Kevin sits down with Ryan Macklin, John Wick, and Eddy Webb to discuss the pros and cons of drifting the rules in RPG’s. It’s a good discussion, and fair warning, the last 10 minutes or so are actually a tangent on the realities of being an internet microcelebrity, and how people act vastly differently to said celebrities when they meet them in person rather than how they talk about them on internet forums. Still  a pretty interesting conversation, but if you’re here just to hear about drifting, you might wanna skip the last 10 minutes.

The episode clocks in at just over an hour. It was really fun to do, and to hear Eddy, John & I mostly agree but use very different language and experiences to back it up was pretty fascinating. The last bit, which started with Kevin making a joke about how he grabbed the of the most hated people in RPG land for this round table led to a bit of venting about Internet bullshit.[1]

Anyway, worth giving a listen. And to restate a point I state twice in the episode: If you do that “you can drift X, but they you’re not really playing X,” you’re a fucking judgmental cockbite. Even if you’re the designer saying it. (Right or wrong, you’re a cockbite.)

Edit: Judd Karlman has a great fucking response on his bloggy blog. And the comments are on fucking fire, between folks like Rob Donoghue, Fred Hicks, Daniel Perez, Judd & myself.

- Ryan

[1] Which, while we recorded the episode last December, is awkwardly timely today. Or maybe it’s always that way.

(Yeah, I’m tinkering again. And I’ll cover how tinkering is really procrastination in a future Doing The Work. Still, I feel like tinkering today as I recover from the damned plague I’ve had all week.)

I’m not going to use 4/e legalese here, because I don’t think the time for that is this early in the thought process. Also, I don’t follow Dragon much (but I do some), so if there’s something I should follow, please let me know.

High concept: a mixed-power character class, someone who enhances (I would use “augments,” but that’s clearly psychic territory) their martial prowess with spells, but is a force on his own otherwise.

Influences: Avenger, Rogue, Psion.

Gimmick: (All new classes have to have one, right?) The at-will powers are all martial in nature, akin to the Ranger or Rogue’s at-will mojo. The encounter & daily powers are mostly minor actions that alter the next attack this turn the character does — which I call a “spell chain” — by adding damage, typing damage, changing what they attack is based on, shifting before/after, etc. Such chains turn the attack from being Martial to Arcane.

The narrative explanation: these people tried to be swordmages, but didn’t quite have that in them. Still, they had the spark of arcane power in them, and learned a different technique — channeling their innate arcane talent into their attacks with a moment of concentration.

Let’s say this is one of your At-Wills:

At-Will * Chained, Martial, Weapon
Standard Action Melee weapon
Target: One creature
Attack: Strength vs. AC
Hit: 1[W] + Strength modifier damage
Increases to 2[w] + Strength modifier damage at 21st level

Then you would have encounter or daily powers that would add or change your At-Will:

• Your next Chained attack this turn does an additional 1[W] damage, and all damage is cold.
• You may teleport two squares before or after your next Chained attack, as part of the attack.
• Your attack is changed to: Close burst 1, Target: two adjacent creatures
• Your next attack has the follow added: Hit: Target is knocked prone; and all damage is thunder.
• Your next attack has the following added: Miss: Half damage

etc.

Thus, if you used an action point or didn’t move, you could put two or even three of these minor actions before an attack, which means your attacks are rather different each time — once you get into paragon tier, at least.

(And yes, I think giving this power to affect basic attacks is too much — or, rather, it’s a Paragon tier feat to make your basic melee attack have the keyword Chained.)

So you can see where I’m influenced by the Psion, but instead of having a set augmentation path, I’m more about the protean nature of magic. You can switch it up each encounter. Which I think might prompt a working title: The Switchblade (I didn’t like Spellblade for this — too much baggage).

The way I see it, this has two basic paths the way all classes start: the Elemental Switchblade and the Dimensional Switchblade — the former getting buffs based on how many different types of damage are on the current attack (making it more badass if it does “cold thunder psychic” damage) and the other more badass based on how far it’s shifted or teleported this attack. Something like that.

I could also see this class being more Ranger-y, in that it could be a class that an also use ranged weapons.

I’m thinking the main stats for this are Strength (or maybe Dexterity, if this was a whatever-weapon class) for the obvious, and Intelligence for the way the path interacts with the class. This makes the Genasi an ideal race for the class, which I like — the protean class for the protean race.

Anyway, that’s the basic idea. Also, I think the name “Switchblade” sucks. I need a new working title.

Thoughts? Fire away.

- Ryan

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.

That was my “warm-up” situation. Simple, straight-forward. Then I turned up the heat.

Section situation: Halfling blocade! — “A Halfling cross-navy (air & sea navy) sits before the port the sought to enter, as the closest port to Bahamut’s Jewel. They are repelling all those who would seek to enter.”  The human decided to rally the human servants on the ship to mutuny and take the ship for himself to charge through the blocade. The genasi (the one who wasn’t connected to the Emir of Light, but was bound to the god they have to kill) wanted to stop that from happening and simply protect the dragon. The half-elf wanted to use gentle diplomacy to get their way through…and won, so she decided part of that “diplomacy” involved the mutuny happening.

The guy playing the human ranger said “Holy crap, I have an airship! Okay, we really got to change the name of this.” The guy playing the genasi cringed. I didn’t expect the PvP element here, but I’m pretty happy with it.

Third situation: Negotiations with the Dragon Empires — “While the Dragon Empires are grateful for the return of the Emir of Light unharmed, they see little reason why they should aid you in reclaiming your Western city.” They did various methods for stating their case, including some strong-arm diplomacy and passionate rhetoric. While the system didn’t favor her mechanically for this reason, it was appropriate that the badass diploamt half-elf won that one.

In her narration, she also convinced the halflings to cease fire, for now.

Fourth situation: God-king Dracolich! — “A port city to the north is suddenly taken by the undead, with a dragon lich commanding them all!” They did various things, from attacking with their airship (still geared to kill dragonkind), to working to subdue the dragon lich, to finding survivors in teh city and helping them escape. The genasi won, and he wanted the dragon to talk before killing it.

Since he was my normal story game player, I turned the tables on him and asked him what the dragon told him about this sudden plague. He said that the dragon lich itself wasn’t part of the plague, but it got the plague from the Eladrin and used it to create an army here. Juicy stuff that just makes them want to take on the Eladrin even more.

Fifth situation: Assault on Bahamut’s Jewel — “Zealots unable to live in a peaceful world march on crusade and have attacked the capital city of the Dragon Empire.” Here’s another place where the party split: the half-elf did “diplomacy by sword,” the human lead a dragonkin army, and the genasi scuttled the biggest symbol of hate between the halflings & dragons — the dragon-killing airship.

The genasi player won, and suddenly the human was once again without an airship. He was bitter about that.

Sixth situation: The Son of Storm — “An ancient halfling sorcerer, one legend calls the Son of Storm, marches on Bahamut’s Jewel — not to engage the dragons, but to deal with the human who killed his descendants.” This was another juicy situation, as the human wanted the sorcerer’s head, and the genasi & half-elf wanted to talk sense into him and calm him.

The half-elf won and the end result kicked ass: the half-elf diplomacy, beautiful and rare, agreed to marry the Son of Storm as he felt in love with her. They would forge a peace between these two worlds. But before that, she had to finish her business of wiping the sourge from her home,  the Western City of Oceandawn.

(Quick note: This is the halfling sorcerer that Fred Hicks played a couple months ago. He emailed me with the character, saying “Dude, this guy is in your game!” He totally is.)

Seventh situation: The eastern cult of Aeyrholt — “A cult of the god Aeyrholt, the god they are by prophecy fated to kill, has made itself known. Lead by tieflings, it has halfings and dragonkin as members, terrorizing the populace.” I accidentally forgot a bit on this card when I described it to the players, so it turned into a “fight the cult” situation. I meant it to be another social one, but that’s what happens when you forget importnat notes! Still, I like what happened instead, because it told them, for sure, there the temple of Aeyrholt was.

(Oceandown is Fantasy San Francisco, with the Spiral Tower — yeah, the one from the paragon path for Eladrin Wizards — bring where Alcatraz is. And that’s where Aeyrholt’s temple is. They guessed that, but finally had evidence.)

Interlude: Ready, they set back to the Western Continent. Due to their influence, the half-elf commisioned an air armada to be lead by the human, crewed by halflings and dragonkin. Disciples of the Son of Storm travel with the half-elf as her personal guard. The son of the Emir of Light, a Gold Dragonborn, has chosen to follow the human into battle to earn his glory (a fact that I retconed in after the players left, because, hey, potential hostage). And they all set off.

Eighth situation: Challenge of the Sea God — “The sea-god Levithan attacks, knowing one of the PCs to be bound to Aeyrholt, an ancient foe.” Two of the, the genasi & half-elf, wanted to talk. The human wanted to humble the god. The human won (and it sounds more and more like we’re playing Mythender here), and the sea-god agreed to help, bonding himself with the genasi who is also bonded to his foe.

Seriously, the genasi player is on some sort of “collect the whole set” thing with gods. We jokingly retconed that he also bonded with Bahamut. I don’t know if it’s the sort of joke that did or didn’t happen, though.

Ninth & climatic situation: Eladria’s Armada — “Knowing her foes are coming, Eladria, mayor of the now-undead Oceandawn, supposed leader of the cult of Aeyrholt, sends her nay to stop them.” They describe various ass-kicking actions, with the winner cashing in Levithan’s favor by causing the sea to raise on both sides of the armada, turning into two hands and crushing the ships in between them.

So, that’s what happened. Here’s my question:

Were we playing D&D 4/e?

At the surface, you have to say “No, clearly not.” And true, we weren’t engaging in the system. But the same argument is used to say one isn’t playing the game during those sessions where dice aren’t rolled, and lately I think that’s a flawed argument.

I think we were, because we were playing within the context of D&D — they had a sense of what the warforged could do, because they fought one. The threat of the undead was faced first-hand by them. We’ve been playing this game for a few weeks now, and all that context poured into our montage. It’s one of those “setting vs. system” discussions, and while we created a custom setting, that setting is saturated in the D&D context.

But it’s an honest question. If we didn’t, why is context not enough to play a game? If we did, why do you think that?

- Ryan

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.)