Premise

While reworking one of the Elevator Pitches for Cinemechanix this week, I had to stop myself. I almost spent a lot of time and words on rules that were completely unnecessary. This isn’t the first time this has happened, so I’ve kind of developed a litmus test to apply when I start going into rules tinkering mode: Does whatever rule I’m writing serve The Rules or does it serve The Game? 

Since some of you are probably wondering what’s the difference, I should define my terms. In this context, The Rules are the game mechanics, The Game is what happens when you sit down at the table. Over the years I’ve written tons of game mechanics that looked great “on paper” (as part of The Rules) that I completely ignored once I sat down to play The Game. The ultimate example is Qerth, a game where only a masochist would even attempt to use the rules as written (a fact we point out in the GM section), but since the rules there are part of The Joke (which isn’t really The Rules or The Game), it’s probably not the best example. More typical examples include the various magic systems, chase rules, and to some extent even character creation rules scattered throughout our supplements. The Hex crew might use them if we’re specifically trying to show them off at a convention game, but even then we tend to default to the core rules if the written rules aren’t going to add something to what’s happening at the table. 

Most of us who design games enjoy tinkering with rules. Some might even enjoy using those games in play, but not me. When I’m working on game rules, I tend to forget to think aobut how they’re going to work in the actual game. I only see how they fit into The Rules, which are a thing defined more by a slippery concept called “Elegance” that has more to do with how the rules fit together to form a cohesive whole than whether or not they can be used to play a fun game. Many games that people describe as “elegant” look great on paper but are completely unplayable for one reason or another. The original Deadlands rules combined dice with a very elegant system of playing cards, poker chips, and equestrian events to resolve actions, which seemed like it would really enhance the Old West theme. In reality, it slowed the game to a crawl. Then there’s DC Heroes, which measured everything from Batman’s bank account to Green Arrows penis size in a unit called APs. It was all very elegant until you actually needed to know how APs converted to real-world units. For that, you needed a scientific calculator. The point is that elegance doesn’t necessarily mean playability. 

The best combination of elegance and playability shows up in game that have a few simple core mechanics that can be easily adapted to provide a satisfying level of detail and gameplay value for many different situations. A lot of games have this at their core, but game designers inevitably fuck it up by not leaving well enough alone. D&D 3E (the most recent version I’ve read) is an excellent example. On the surface you’ve got a nice, clean core mechanic, but as soon as you get to the skills section you’ve got a specific variation on each individual skill that turns the whole thing into a big mess of subsystems. These subsystems are great for illustrating how the core mechanics can be tweaked or defined for specific situations, so they fit perfectly into The Rules. Unfortunately, at the same time the create a million fiddly exceptions to the basic rules that would quickly make The Game unplayable if they were used consistently.  Most GMs understand this and only use the specific rules when they make the game more fun or enhance the story; If the details don’t really matter, just make a regular roll and go on. Unless the group includes particularly annoying rules lawyer or the players have a difference of opinion about what “matters,” that usually works fine. 

On the other end of the spectrum is “Story Game” territory, where there are few or no variations to the core rules. Such simplistic rules can make the players feel like they’re making the same roll no matter what they do, which can make the rules feel pointless. Players want to feel like their decisions affect the outcome. If the PCs’ decisions don’t alter the rolls, you might as well just flip a coin. 

The ideal is somewhere between the two extremes. You need special rules for things that are important to the kind of story being told, but you don’t need rules for every single character type, situation, ability, and genre trapping. Mechanics that add overhead without making the game more fun may serve The Rules, but the probably don’t improve The Game. The trick is recognizing it and trusting the players to tweak your elegant core mechanics for the things they think are important enough to merit special rules (but you didn’t). 

Note: Starting next week, the regular blog day is going to be Thursday. But for now, here's a dumb table.

Has your campaign gotten sucky and boring? One way to break out of a game rut is to throw out the status quo so the players are forced into new and unexpected situations. Here's a table of ways you can do that inspired by GWAR song titles. 

1. Happy Death Day: All of the PCs die. Car accident, meteor strike, bad clams. Whatever works. Now they have to navigate the afterlife. If anyone balks at being killed by GM fiat, let them Save vs. Death (using whatever rule makes sense for the system you're using). If they succeed, they survive but are left unable to interact with the world around them due to physical or psychological damage. Give them some headphones and make them listen to "One" over and over again until they're ready for the sweet release of death, at which point they can rejoin the rest of the party in the afterlife.
2. Go To Hell: Same as #1, but it's a really shitty afterlife. 
3. Time For Death: Same as #1, but the characters get stuck between here and the afterlife. Now they have to figure out how to move on. 
4. Have You Seen Me?: The Rapture happens and the PCs are left behind. Now what? 
5. Damnation Under God: The Rapture happens and the PCs find themselves in a dystopian Heaven. 
6. You Are My Meat: A plague that makes most animals unsafe to eat results in large-scale cannibalism. This can take place in a post-apocalyptic landscape where people do it to survive or a not-so-different-from-our-own world where society holds together and the decadent elite feast on human flesh in the shadows. GM's choice. 
7. The Apes of Wrath: Hyper-intelligent apes enslave mankind. Presumably the players are mankind, but if they want to ditch their old characters and play the apes, go for it. 
8. The Obliteration of Flab Quarv 7: Aliens invade the Earth (or as they call it, Flab Quarv 7). It's up to the GM what they do with it, but it will probably be something the players don't like. 
9. America Must Be Destroyed: A technologically superior enemy (possibly with doomsday weapons) invades America (or whatever country the PCs live in). The PCs must decide whether to welcome their new masters or Red Dawn the shit out of them. 
10. Slaughterama: The PCs are abducted (possibly by aliens) and forced to compete in some Running Man style gladitorial games. 
11. World of Filth: Society becomes appallingly decadent. Drugs, disease, crime, and unconventional sex run rampant while good, decent folk spend most of their time terrified. Recommended reading: The works of Warren Ellis, especially Transmetropolitan and Crooked Little Vein. 
12. The New Plague: Just your standard, everyday zombie apocalypse. 
13. Zombies, March: Same as #12, but the PCs all get turned into zombies early on. 
14. Bring Back The Bomb: The PCs country becomes involved in a tense Cold War with a nation with appropriate doomsday devices. Things don't change that much on the surface, but a shadow of Impending Doom hangs over everything and the demand for people with a very particular set of skills (you know, like most PC groups) increases significantly. 
15. Penguin Attack: Penguins enslave humanity. Holy shit! Who saw that coming?!
16. The Years Without Light: To survive an apocalypse, the PCs (and countless others) hide out in a series of underground bunkers for decades. The GM should probably read a few J.G. Ballard stories and maybe Philip K. Dick's The Penultimate Truth to prepare for this one.
17. They Swallowed The Sun: The sun goes out. That can't be good. 
18. A Gathering of Ghouls: The world is overrun by monsters. 
19. A Short History of the End of the World: The world is destroyed or reduced to a post-apocalyptic state because of something the players did. 
20. Endless Apocalypse: Re-roll 1d6 times and combine the results in any order you like.   

I should be spending the limited time I have to work on Cinemechanix to update all the Elevator Pitches (sample games) to the new rules, finish up the Sample of Play Theater entries, and doing some editing and probably reorganization. But that’s Grunt Work, and I’ve spent the last six months doing Grunt Work. Besides, I have no choice but to get three of the Elevator Pitches up to at least beta test standards by June (when I’ll be running them at DieCon), so I’ll have a looming deadline to motivate to do that sometime soon. Right now I want to work on something new and exciting (or, if you’ve been following this blog, I want to create more potential Idea Debt, because that’s what I do). 

Since I don’t want this to be pure Idea Debt that will turn into unfinished products, I decided I should at least work on a new Elevator Pitch, and luckily I’ve got several I want to do besides the ones that will be in the book. One thing I especially want to do is make sure we’ve got Elevator Pitches with completely different magic systems to help illustrate that Cinemechanix is meant ot be adapted to the game you want to play, not the other way around. We’ve got a reasonably complex ritual magic system for Hobomancer that shies away from flash-bang magic (that’s what Hobo Powers are for) and a super-simple, super-flash-bangy system for Guardians of Aetheria (the He-Man meets Heavy Metal game), so something in the middle that combines elements of both without acting quite like either would fit the bill. Luckily, “Kid Wizards” has been on the list of potential Elevator Pitches from the beginning. 

The original plan was to just file the serial numbers off of Harry Potter, but every time I start thinking about it I drift a little farther away from going with a pure Hogwart’s clone. I think I subconsciously committed to doing something different when I decided to call the thing “Bad Luck Streak at Wizard School,”  a title that Andy at Crafty Games and maybe as many as 20 other people will find mildly amusing. Anyway, the thing with Harry Potter is that it’s just so goddamn British and, as some of you may know, Hex Games has this theme of doing products about American magic (see Hobomancer and American Artifacts), so I’m kind of obligated to figure out what the American Hogwart’s would look like. I feel like the staring point for using the Hogwart’s model without just ripping off Rowling is to figure out the school’s Houses (or equivalents), since they’re kind of a starting point for understanding how a lot of things work in the wizarding world. 

My first thought (again, probably inspired in part by the title reference) was to tap into another common theme at Hex of treating music as a magical force. I could replace wands with musical instruments and have houses like the House of Cash, House of the Rising Sun, House of Hair, Run’s House, or whatever. The first dealbreaker here was that the available House puns leave out way too much American music for my taste. The second is that they’re too jokey and dumb to hold up unless you go for pure comedy. The third and biggest is that deciding that all wizards are also musician leads to a lot more world-building than I want to do and takes the premise too far away from the initial inspiration. This could lead to an interesting ficton in the same thematic neighborhood as things like Six String Samurai, the second Blues Brothers movie, and that crazy-ass Jim Shooter Dazzler script that never got made into a movie. It also provides an obvious “Battle of the Bands” season finale. But it requires building a whole new world that would probably be a hell of a lot more interesting than the magic school, so it’s not gonna work. 

So maybe circle back to the source material and have the houses founded by individual magicians. If you’ve read the previously mentioned books in the American Magic series, you’ve probably already guessed that my first stop was American history and folklore. In the “history,” department, we’ve basically go Marie Laveau, a bunch of hoaxers and Jesus freaks, and some scapegoats that the Pilgrims burned. Folklore doesn’t give us many more, and most of the “name” characters who you can squint and kind of pretend are wizards (like Stagger Lee) are, if not outright bad guys, at least too messy and ambiguous to fill the house founder role. If you’re really willing to stretch the definition of “wizard,” you can throw in people like Emperor Norton and maybe one of those Founding Fathers with their Freemason Illuminati rituals and what-not, but those don’t work all that well either. 

So maybe go even closer to the source material and just make up some founders and let Laveau and Stag and Norton and Jefferson play a more Nicholas Flamel role. So what kind of founders do we need? Maybe base them on American archetypes, like cowboys or inventors or industrialists, but there are too many of those, so it needs to go broader. Right now I’m tentatively settled on the four archetypes: 

• The Blue Bloods: These are obviously your Slytheryn, people who were born on third base and are convinced they hit a homerun and therefore believe anyone can do it if they just pull a little harder on those bootstraps. They’re the conservative Mayflower families with old money and a preference for Old World hermetic magic. 
• The Common Folk: These are your Prairie Home Companion style rural Americans. Hard working, simple, direct, and boring. They’re basically Hobbits. Mountain witches, hoodoo men, root workers, and future southern Grannies gravitate toward this house. 
• The Cosmopolitans: Wizards in this house embody the Melting Pot. They’re tolerant, creative, and open to new experiences and ideas. Voodoo priests, technomancers, chaos magicians, and other bleeding hearts who borrow from many magical traditions end up in this house. 
• The Wanderers: The Wanderers are the resourceful square-jawed men of action who built this country and paved the way for all the others. They’re America’s independent streak personified. Explorers, cowboys, soldiers, mountain men, and (eventually) hobomancers and gonzo magicians fall into this house.  

I even came up with Rowling-style alliterative names for three of the founders: Abraham Alger (Blue Bloods), Levi Ledbetter (Common Folk), and Colt Callahan (Wanderers). I was still going to use Marie Laveau as the Cosmopolitan founder until I talked myself out of it a few paragraphs ago, so I don’t have a name for that one yet. The biggest problem is that I’m not sure that they work as House names. The names work great for the characters, but House Ledbetter still feels a little bland even though it’s an uncommon surname with exactly the right baggage. Maybe they’ll sound better with repetition, maybe I’ll have to go with completely made-up names like Rowling did. My main reservation about the latter option is that I’m not sure I can do it without sucking out some of the “Americanness.” 

At least I know without a doubt who He Who Can Not Be Named will be. It’s The Devil. In American magical folklore, it’s always The Devil. 

I’ve been a fan of the weird west genre since I watched The Adventures of Brisco County Jr. in high school, and at least half of the (admittedly few) Boot Hill games I’ve run have featured something supernatural, or at least seemingly supernatural. I’ve done vampires, The Hound of the Baskervilles (which is really just Victorian Scooby Doo) in a mine, and assorted other horror stories in the Old West. Running these kinds of games with something like Boot Hill is especially fun since the players aren’t expecting the supernatural, so their characters aren’t as credulous as they are in Deadlands or Call of Cthulhu where everyone knows the horror is real but have to go through the often-tedious formality of pretending otherwise for a while. 

I was working at a game distributor when Deadlands came out, and the first copy I pulled out of the box went into the “mine” pile as soon as I skimmed a few pages. While the game didn’t quite live up to my expectations in actual play (mostly because the system had so many moving parts that it slowed the story to a crawl), I was just happy to see I wasn’t the only one who enjoyed Joe Lansdale and Tim Truman’s take on Jonah Hex way too much. I even read through the preview copy of Werewolf: Wild West that White Wolf sent us at a time when White Wolf players annoyed me almost as much as they annoy...well, pretty much everyone I’ve ever met who worked for White Wolf.

Side note: at the time, I thought that maybe the hole in the book was there to mark it as a “not for sale” copy or something, but when the shipment arrived we discovered that they not only meant to do that, but probably paid the printer extra to drill a goddamn hole in the book. I think it was supposed to be a bullet hole, but some kind of art around the hole (maybe scorch marks or “edge of a bullet hole” art or something) probably would have made it clearer that the books hadn’t been part of a bizarre drill press accident. 

Anyway, the point is that Clanbook: Tzimiisce’s back cover art wasn’t the only really stupid idea White Wolf had in the 90s. Wait....that’s not the point. That can’t be the point. If I start making fun of White Wolf, we’ll be here all night making “Oh, such hair!” jokes. The point is I like the weird west genre enough to read most of a World of Darkness book with a dumbass hole drilled through it when I didn’t have anything better to do at work. I like the Cowboys & Dead Things genre, so it was really inevitable that eventually I’d decide to do my own thing with it. That thing was the Six-Gun Seven. 

I don’t remember the exact origin of the Six-Gun Seven, but the modern-day version of them made its first appearance in the “other monster hunters” section of M-Force and the Old West version was a Qik Start game in QAGS 2E, where their fearless leader Jake “Six-Gun” Sawyer appeared as a sample character. Since then they’ve been mentioned in a handful of Hex products and I’ve run a few con games featuring them, but that’s about it.

In terms of Idea Debt, The Six-Gun Seven is kind of like a credit card that’s had a $1 balance for the last 20 years. There’s probably an outline and a few notes somewhere on my hard drive, but most of the “work” I’ve put into it outside of entries for other books has been idle speculation. For example, to get around the fact that most people don’t want to play pre-gens, the game will be set up with an ever-shifting membership with the only constants being that Jake Sawyer is the leader (though he can be more of an M/Old Man With An Eyepatch type of character if nobody wants to play him) and there are seven members. I’ve also got ideas for (way more than seven) sample members, some sample adventures, settings, and all that good stuff, but nothing’s down on paper. It’s an idea I want to do something with, but haven’t really put much work into.

So why haven’t I? Part of it is the “old idea” thing where it’s been around so long that the initial excitement is long gone until I watch a Western and start thinking about it again. Unfortunately, that usually happens when I’m knee-deep in some other project that I need to get done. Another reason it’s never really made it to even the Books of Lore stage is that there’s an element of the “it’s D&D, ONLY BETTER!” problem. While the idea isn’t a Deadlands clone (I've been doing Old West horror since before Deadlands existed, and there a lot of things I’d do differently in terms of tone and world design), it fills the same niche as Deadlands, and Deadlands has been the standard for 20 years or so. That means the potential audience isn’t so much “gamers who like the weird west” as “gamers who like the weird west and aren’t already playing Deadlands.” So I’d basically be writing it for me, a few of the other Hex folks, and a handful of QAGS fans. While anyone familiar with the Hex product line already knows that we have no qualms about writing games that exist mostly for our own amusement (it's not like Fratboys, magical hobos, and the comics of Fletcher Hanks are wildly popular among gamers), we tend to stick to ideas that fit a niche that isn’t already filled with an 800-pound gorilla. 

The Six Gun Seven would fit in nicely with Hobomancer, American Artifacts, and a few other pieces of Idea Debt I’ve got floating around, but since the basic concept has already been done well by someone else, it’s at the end of the line. The ideas that haven’t been done as RPGs will come first because they’re more exciting to work on and more likely to sell. Since a couple of those are Hobomancer-size projects, my weird west game idea isn’t going to become an Actual Product any time soon (but I still hope to do it one of these days).