I didn’t post last week because I spent the early part of the week getting ready for Archon and Thursday night loading up the booth and driving to St. Louis. What was I working on for Archon? Mostly boring stuff: reprinting missing character sheets from the games I’d already run at other cons, counting and…
A few of the Cinemechanix core rules require the group to make decisions about how they apply to the game at hand. Determining the starting Hero Factor (see last week’s blog) is one example of this. Another is deciding whether a character who reaches “Broken” status ends up dead, forced into retirement by his injuries,…
Now that you’ve got the ficton lined out, it’s time to start thinking about the rules, and character creation is usually the best place to start. By this point, you’ve probably got a pretty good idea of what kind of characters the PCs can choose from, so all you’ve got to do is figure how…
A long damn time ago, I defined the word “ficton” (it’s a contractual obligation) and told you that you could break a ficton down into 5 main components: Influences, Setting, Genre Trappings, Tone and Mood, and Dramatic Rules. Now that I’ve talked about all the rest (and procrastinated a lot), let’s talk about dramatic rules….
I’d planned to post a GenCon report last week, but I got hit with overtime at my day job when I got back (my 4-day week turned into 50 hours) and just didn’t have any time to write it. As usual, the plan was to arrive in Indianapolis on Thursday, run games on Friday, Saturday,…
I know I said I’d get back to the Guardians of Shymeria campaign design walk-through this week, but I’m running a Qerth game using Cinemechanix at GenCon. I’d forgotten how long (compared to QAGS and Cinemechanix) it takes to create a Qerth character even when you’re not also converting them to another game system. So…
A long time ago, before it was the Atomic City or the home of the world’s biggest quilt show or the place where you could see the nation’s only statue of Bruce Willis as Emmett Smith from In Country, Paducah was a simple Native American trading post on the banks of the Ohio. This was…
Hey kids! Did you know there are still some openings for the Cinemechanix games I’m running at GenCon this year? Guardians of Shymeria is sold out, but the other 3 still have some seats left. If you’re going to be at GenCon and want to see how the Cinemechanix system plays, buy your ticket today!…
Tone is the attitude that the players take toward the game: is the goal immersive role-playing, a more beer-and-pretzels experience, or something in between? Mood is the atmosphere of the story: are you telling a grim story about characters trying to survive a zombie apocalypse, or an action-packed story about kicking zombie butt? Since it’s…
According to Merriam-Webster, genre is “a category of artistic, musical, or literary composition characterized by a particular style, form, or content.” Genre trappings are mostly the things in the “content” part of that definition: people, places, and things that help define the genre. While these trappings help us recognize which genre a story belongs to,…
