Since the whole idea behind Cinemechanix is that you use the core rules to create the kind of game you want to play, it seems like it might be a good idea to go through a sample campaign design. I keep going back and forth on whether I want to continue the Sample of Play Theater examples in the book beyond the rules section, in part because eventually things boil down to the GM figuring things out. Unless I want to write awkward monologues, the whole script/play format breaks down and framing everything with “and then Bianca decides…” gets tedious fast (I know, I tried it in So You’ve Decided To Run A Role-Playing Game). So for now, instead of trying to figure out if/how to include a detailed design example in the rulebook, I’m going to do it here and see if it turns into anything useful. Since I still need to write the Elevator Pitch for Guardians of Aetheria, the game used in the SOPT examples in the books, I can kill two birds with one stone. Or kill one bird and just leave the other here because it’s unpublishable. Whichever ends up working. 

The first step in designing a game is coming up with a premise. The initial premise for Guardians of Aetheria came from frequent Hex writer/artist Joshua LH Burnett (of Funkadelic Frankenstein on the Mean Streets of Monstertown and Leopard Women of Venus fame). Years ago, he proposed a QAGS game based on He-Man style cartoons from the 80s. The hook was that your character’s Gimmick (as in the QAGS stat) had to be based on the action figure gimmick (as in the special whatever that made kids want to buy the toy). So Ram Man’s Gimmick would be “Spring-loaded Legs” or whatever. Josh got some writing done on the game, but eventually lost interest and moved on to other things. Some time later, Leighton and I decided we needed to to more games like Laser Ponies and got Josh’s blessing to maybe steal the basic idea of the He-Man game at some point in the future. That didn’t happen either, at least until I decided that it would make a good sample game for Cinemechanix.  

Josh’s initial idea was (I think) going to be a straightforward He-Man “homage,” but I was a more casual fan (I watched the cartoon, but didn’t have any of the action figures) and there are a lot of other things I like that are He-Man adjacent enough to cram in, so I decided to start fresh with just the action figure Gimmick thing and see what I came up with. The first round of refinement of the “He-Man Gimmick and other things I like” premise came while I was writing the first Sample of Play Theater. I’m going to just cut and paste that. Basically, Bianca is me brainstorming the game and all the other characters are me second-guessing myself.

Bianca: Ok guys, I’ve got a lot of ideas floating around in my head for a fantasy game, but it’s kind of a mixture of different things and I haven’t entirely worked out how they fit together, so I’m not exactly sure where to start. 

Jesse: Start with the simplest you can boil it down to and we’ll go from there. 

Bianca: 80s science fantasy cartoon meets high fantasy as imagined by Frank Frazetta and Ralph Bakshi. 

Zoe: Who? 

Luke: Frazetta’s an artist, Bakshi does animation. Have you ever seen Heavy Metal? 

Zoe: The one with the big green orb? Yeah, I liked that. 

Luke: [handing over his tablet] Well, I don’t know if either of them actually had anything to do with Heavy Metal, but they’re both Heavy Metal-adjacent. Here’s an image search of some Frazetta stuff you can scroll through, and I’ve got a DVD of Bakshi’s movie Wizards that you can borrow if you want.  

Zoe: [scrolling through images] Hey, I’ve seen some of these before! That’s Conan, and I’ve seen this one on some metal CD my brother used to have. So kind of dark fantasy?

Bianca: Kind of. I want the part of the world controlled by evil to be grimdark as hell, and I want all of the action to have that kind of “riding into battle on my dragon while ‘Immigrant Song’ plays in the background” epic feel, but I also want there to be a good kingdom that’s almost Saturday Morning Cartoon light and sunshine, with a wise and beloved ruler and prosperity and shiny happy peasants holding hands. 

Jesse: Ok, so is the stark contrast between good and evil where the high fantasy comes in, or were you thinking more elves and dwarves and dragons?

Bianca: No. Well, maybe dragons, but the characters are straight from 80s cartoons, with weird powers that can be turned into gimmicks to sell toys. The high fantasy stuff is story backdrop. I don’t want a story about the heroes foiling Skeletor’s evil scheme every week, I want a story that builds toward all-out war between good and evil, with earth-shattering battles and cities in ruins and whole new wastelands created.  

Sparky: Can my guy come with slime? 

Everyone: What?  

Sparky: My toy gimmick. I want a character that comes with slime.  

Bianca: Why not? Actually, doing character creation in action figure terms might be a good idea. Every character could have a toy gimmick and a piece of equipment that comes with the toy. 

Jesse: You said you want to build toward all-out wars. How far in does the game start? Are the characters marching off to meet the evil armies, or are we still safe and secure in our Hobbit holes? 

Bianca: Somewhere in between. There’s been an uneasy peace for generations, so there aren’t even any real rumors of war yet, but the PCs are heroes of the kingdom.

Sparky: What are we heroes for? If there hasn’t been a war with the evil empire lately and the kingdom is all sunshine and rainbows, it doesn’t sound like there’s much hero-ing to do. Is “hero of the kingdom” a hereditary title or is there a prophecy or something? 

Bianca: Good point. I think the PCs should be heroes who have been tested, but you’re right that there needs to be some kind of conflict for that to happen. How about this? There’s a big no-man’s land between the two kingdoms that was decimated in the last war. There’s powerful magic and sci-tech buried in the destroyed cities, so there are always agents from both sides as well as scavengers out there looking for useful artifacts. There are also monsters and mutants lurking there that occasionally raid the edges of the kingdom and need to be hunted down. So let’s say that the PCs are part of whoever does that kind of thing. Maybe a knighthood? 

So yeah, king of contrived and there are a few outright lies there for the sake of providing a good game example (I knew about the toy gimmick going in, but making it seem like Sparky’s idea better illustrates the design goals of Cinemechanix), but it gets the basic point across and gives us a starting point. 

For most games, the standard seems to be for the GM to come to the table with a reasonably (and sometimes extensively) fleshed-out idea and the players to build characters that fit in with whatever the GM gives them. In my experience, though, the best games are ones like in the example where the GM has only a vague concept and the players help build it up. It gives everyone a sense of ownership and generates a wider mix of ideas than the GM is likely to come up with on her own. 

The next Sample of Play Theater in the book moves directly into character creation without any attempt to pin down the Ficton in more detail, and in my experience that’s the best way to go about it. Character creation will answer some of the questions left unanswered in the initial brainstorming session, raise some new questions, and give you a good idea of what kinds of things you’ll need to focus on for the game you’ll actually be playing. You don’t necessarily have to fully create the characters--in fact, you may not be able to if your game will need “crunchier” character creation rules--but you need to have a good idea of who the PCs are, what they’re doing, and how they fit into the game world and the group. Once you’ve got that, you can start defining your ficton in more detail. We’ll get to that next week. 

Before this weekend, I hadn’t run a complete playtest game of the current version of Cinemechanix. Part of the reason is situational. I live in the armpit of the Midwest a solid two hours and change from anything resembling an actual city, so there aren’t a whole lot of gamers around in the first place and most of them play D&D, or maybe Pathfinder if they want something exotic. There are a few who will try new games, but since I spend 10 hours of every weekday either at or driving to and from work, my availability is limited to the weekends when everyone has other things to do. The weekends are also my only chance to spend a decent chunk of time working on Hex and Brainfart projects and I don’t like to commit to anything that could cut into that time. 

The other reason I haven’t run any playtest games is because a playtest game run by the game designer isn’t very useful. I already know how the game is supposed to work, so all a game I’m running can reveal are fundamental rules breakdowns and maybe some minor practical glitches that work better on paper than in actual play. It doesn’t tell me anything about whether the rules as written communicate how the game is supposed to work or whether there are rule that are easily misinterpreted or overly vague or otherwise difficult to use without me in the room to explain how they’re supposed to work. I need people to read the rules, play the game, and tell me where it’s broken. My ideal scenario would be for a group to start a campaign, play it a while without any input from me, and then let me watch a few sessions to see how closely their use of the system matches my intent. The limited number of local players I might be able to convince to do that is another reason I’d rather not prejudice anyone in my immediate geographical vicinity by running the game for them myself.

Convention games have some of the same baggage mentioned in the previous paragraph, but a three-or-four-hour con game is less “corrupting” than a playtest campaign run by me would be. A lot of the rules will never come up and, aside from the core mechanics, most of the rules that do come up won’t be used very often. Con players who decide to help playtest are still going to rely pretty heavily on the rules as written to run the game. Also, while Hex has its fair share of regular con players who are familiar with QAGS (and therefore a lot of the design goals of Cinemechanix), cons give me the chance to run the game for at least some complete strangers. Since they don’t have any kind of personal relationship with me or the other Hex GMs (even if that relationship consists entirely of playing a game or two with us once a year), complete strangers are more likely to be brutally honest if they see something they don’t like, which is very useful playtest-wise. 

The point is that the games I ran at Diecon aren’t going to tell me whether the game I actually wrote works the way I think it does, but they were helpful in seeing whether the game I think I wrote works the way I think it does. I ran three games (Guardians of Aetheria, Wet Hot American Monsters, and Team Alpha Force 37) and had players for all of them. One player was completely new to role-playing, a few had role-played before but hadn’t played QAGS, several were Diecon regulars who play QAGS every year, and one was regular Hex writer Ian Engle, author of And One For All, Aces & Apes, and more. 

When I submitted the games to Diecon several months ago, the plan was to use pre-generated characters for all of the games. After all, one of the key ideas of Cinemechanix is that you design the game around a specific game premise (and therefore specific characters) rather than around a more general set of genre conventions or game setting. Since there’s not time to do that properly during a convention game, pre-gens seemed like the way to go, especially for games with more mechanical overhead (like the super-powers rules in Team Force Alpha 37) or with character traits that are defined by the game premise (like the monster templates in Wet Hot American Monsters).  Somewhere along the line, I decided I needed to run some games where the players create their characters, if only to see what kinds of characters people come up with when handed the system and a game premise. Since the PCs in Guardians of Aetheria are 80s action figures, I felt like most special abilities could be handled with storytelling or simple rules adaptations without anyone feeling jilted, so I decided to let the players create their own characters for it. The fact that I haven’t finished the Guardians Elevator Pitch and only have 4 characters for it so far may have also been a factor. 

So of course Guardians of Aetheria was the first game on the schedule, which meant I’d have to jump into creating characters and running the game for the first time all at once. As I sat there waiting for the players to show up, I realized I hadn’t even thought about the pre-game “how the rules work” explanation. I’ve been running QAGS at cons for nearly 20 years, so I can explain the rules in my sleep, so it’s not something I have to give any thought to when preparing for a game. It hadn’t occurred to me until I sat down to run the game that I was going to have to explain a whole new set of rules. Fortunately for me, there are enough similarities between the two systems that I was able to piece something together without sounding completely confused, and the players (even the guy who’d never role-played before) were able to create their characters without any serious confusion or misunderstanding of the character traits. There were a few borderline “does that really work as a Fatal Flaw?” choices that I might have asked the player to tweak if I was running a campaign, but everything was close enough for a con game. By the third game, I had the “How to Play Cinemechanix” presentation nailed down pretty well. 

Overall, everything went well. The players picked up on how the rules worked without much confusion, the combat scenes lasted about the right amount of time, and overall the game rand pretty much like QAGS. Two of the three games even came in right at 3 hours, which is the typical length for a QAGS game (Wet Hot American Monsters was closer to 4, but that was mainly because the players kept introducing new plotlines to keep the game going). And from a playtesting perspective, I also noticed a few things that didn’t quite work:

• There was some confusion about the difference between Concept Bumps and Boosts and which one applied to which die. I think part of the problem is that the words “Bump” and “Boost” are so similar. I caught myself using both generically to mean “bonus” several times. Avoiding that and being careful to always use the correct rules terms will probably help, but I think some renaming that ties the bonus more closely to a specific die might be worth considering. 
• The players didn’t use the “thumbs up” rule to give one another Acclaim as often as I’d hoped. I also fell into the QAGS standard of just handing out candy to players who did cool stuff. I need to remember in the future (and caution other GMs) to put a thumb up rather than just hand out candy so the players will hopefully catch on that they can do it to. There were also a few cases where a “thumbs down” vote probably would have been appropriate, but outright telling a con player that they’re making the game less fun seems like a bad marketing move. 
• The “flip a playing card over when you’ve acted” (I used my Hobomancer deck) mechanic works fine for PCs, but gets a little confusing when you’ve got multiple NPCs who aren’t all generic orcs. In future games, I might use index cards with names written on them for non-cannon-fodder monsters (or mixed groups of cannon fodder). It was also tricky to make sure the cards were positioned where I could flip them easily and the players could see them but that was mostly because I was using a GM screen (which I’m not used to dealing with at all). Since I barely had to refer to the screen (it was mostly cheat sheets in case I forgot the details), I’ll probably leave it folded in the future.  
• One of the playtest groups used a hackey sack so they could physically “pass the Initiative” without having to talk about it. The concept worked well, but I discovered that the item you use to represent initiative is important. Specifically, I learned not to use a ball. Years ago, Marcon made these little stress-ball globes to advertise their WorldCon bid, and I stuck one in my convention bag. Every few years, I open that pocket and find it again, so I figured I’d finally get some use out of it as an Initiative token. Balls bounce and roll when you toss them across the table. I need to get a hackey sack. 
• The con organizers shut down the lawn dart-based ranged combat resolution system almost immediately. I’m probably going to have to come up with dice mechanics for that one. 

While the playtest games were fun, the most exciting part of the con happened before I ever stepped into the convention center. Since I didn’t have any games to run Friday night, I met up with regular Hex artist Jeffrey Johnson and we hung out for several hours catching up and talking about our various projects. At some point we started talking about the Cinemechanix cover that Jeff’s been chosen to create. We’ve had a cover idea for a while, and it’s a fun idea and a piece of art I’d love to see Jeffrey make, but the more we talked about it the more we realized it’s not the best cover for the game, so we started trying to come up with something better. We ended up with something that wasn’t so much a cover idea as a general cover aesthetic. I can’t tell you exactly what’s going to be on the cover, but I can tell you that it’s going to be unconventional (at least for a game) and very evocative of the influences, storytelling traditions, and theories about gaming that have gone into creating Cinemechanix and everything that came before. I only have the vaguest idea of what this thing is going to look like, but I’m more excited about it than any piece of art we’ve ever commissioned. 

If you’d like to try a Cinemechanix game at a convention, there are still some open seats for the games I’m running at Gencon. Go sign up. If you want to get in on the Cinemechanix playtest, join the Facebook group. If you want to give me money, click the Patreon banner below. I won’t mind. 

I'm getting ready for DieCon this weekend, so no blog this week. Instead, I've updated the stuff I'm getting together for the con. I'm using pre-gens for Team Force Alpha 37 and Wet Hot American Monsters, so for each of those you can download character sheets for the 8 pre-gens and a blank one I threw in for anyone who wants to make their own. You can download the Elevator Pitches or both games from my site and the current draft of the Cinemechanix core rules for the playtest group. For Guardians of Aetheria, I'm letting players make their own characters, so for it you just get a blank character sheet and a list of sample traits. Finally, since this will be the first time I've really run the newest rules set, I bought one of those customizable GM screens and made some inserts for it (mostly cheat sheets). You can download it all (plus a bunch of other nonsense, if you're so inclined here.  

GenCon update: Nearly all the QAGS games filled up on the first day of registration, but we've still got slots in the Cinemechanix session for anyone who wants to test out our new system!

I haven't created a new random thing generator since Christmas, so this week instead of a blog, you get a web script: The Random Conspiracy Generator! Just click the link and you'll get 10 nutty conspiracies ranging from the almost believable to the completely batfuck. Don't like them? Click the button at the bottom of the page and you'll get 10 more!

Here's a sample set:

• An outlaw gang of robots are trying to steal an unholy automaton in order to desecrate Valhalla
• A self-righteous league of maniacs are trying to design an evil thingamajig in order to decimate Themiscyra
• A fiery cabal of Satanists are trying to build a high-tech god in order to open a gateway to The Tea Party
• The Honorable Coterie of Magicians are trying to manufacture an apocryphal mathematical formula in order to subjugate The Mafia
• A mystical syndicate of sun worshippers are trying to dominate a cyclopean space station in order to defeat The Priory of Sion
• A powerful organization of vampires are trying to dominate a spiritual ritual in order to dominate Mu
• A self-righteous syndicate of villains are trying to materialize a theistic artifact in order to outmaneuver John Malkovich
• An ancient army of dead people are trying to ressurrect an extraterrestrial space station in order to persecute Mount Olympus
• A Hell-bent brotherhood of sorcerors are trying to piece together a Faustian portal in order to blow up The Garden of Eden
• A dedicated society of sorcerors are trying to mentaly project a Norse portal in order to outrage The IRS