Status — Conjecture, mostly untested. I have a suspicion that “levels” aren’t the best way to go about most of this — perhaps a flat list (“do at least three of…”), or a set of conditional rules (“if they’re ostensibly an ally of a PC, then describe…”), would be better.

Context

I’m writing this for my Beyond the Forest games. Key properties:

• Minimal rules complexity, characters are mechanically simple
• The story emerges from PCs pursuing their Burning Wheel -style beliefs — there is no “plot”

The Levels

Level 1 — People that exist

Give them:

• Name
  • I make lists of names by type of character (e.g. noble, commoner, goblin), usually by choosing a theme from the Story Games Name Project (POD / free PDF etc) and making lists ready to be struck of as I use each name
• Build point value
• One descriptive thing

Level 2 — People that persist

Continue reading “Levels of detail for NPC design” →

Some good articles I’ve read recently:

• Joseph Manola observes that good setting and adventure materials have a kind of conceptual density that makes them novel yet cohesive.
• Justin Alexander has written two articles about what he calls “smart prep”. I agree with just about everything in the first one; I think that’s true for the second one as well, but I feel like I need to process it some more.

Joseph is talking about using third-party sources, while Justin is talking about making your own material, but there is a common theme — support material that’s no better than the ideas you can improvise on the fly is a waste of time. It’s not just neutral — it’s actively bad.

For my posts Why Do RPG Players Ignore Rules? and What Do Rules Ever Do For Us?, there are some important nuances to bear in mind.

There are at least three different kinds of rules

1. Rules as Written (RAW) — rules coming from a single game text (or a set of designed-to-be-coherent texts) that is written by someone outside the group
2. House rules — explicitly agreed (or at least communicated) rules used in play. (These may be developed by the group, be cannibalised from other games, be syncretised from blogs …)
3. Conventions — informal and implicit table conventions, habits, and norms

Continue reading “Nuances on ignoring rules” →

I’m using Burning Wheel -style Beliefs in two new campaigns, the first time I’ve done so in many years. I’m finding my tendency is to challenge them directly — to say “Even if this?” or “Is that really true?”. This can be powerful, but I suspect it could be frustrating for players if that’s all that I do.

Michael Prescott has a standard list of Belief-response tactics, of which the above (“undermining”) is only one. The original was on the BW forums; a revised version is in a free sample of the Burning Wheel Codex. In summary, the tactics are:

• Validate — make circumstances such that the belief is fully deserved (their arch-enemy is indeed a monster; the rightful queen is indeed wise and kind)
• Undermine — make circumstances such that their belief is unreasonable (their arch-enemy is a great guy; the rightful queen is a spoilt, vicious child)
• Flip — switch from validation to undermining or v-v (their arch-enemy surrenders and promises to change his spots; the child queen shows signs of maturing Continue reading “Responding to Burning Wheel -style Beliefs” →

Adam Koebel, in a video somewhere (early on in Roll20 Burning Wheel, I think), suggests you make your three beliefs be, in turn:

1. About your past life
2. About your current situation
3. About another PC — how you relate to them

In StarCruiser, my main advice is that they should collectively be:

• Resolveable in the space of the current arc
• Things that will involve your PC with other PCs (even if only indirectly)
• About things that you, the player, want to see in play

Paul Beakley, over on G+, presents his Best Practices for BW Beliefs (and Instincts, and Traits). They include  a list of what your Beliefs and Instincts should cover:

Continue reading “Setting beliefs in the Burning Wheel style” →

The Dungeon World supplement The Perilous Wilds has an on-the-fly dungeon generator, which I use as part of Low-prep dungeons — a larval proposal. However, despite its CC-BY-SA licence, the text of that has not been available in a editable format. Until now. I have extracted the text of the dungeon generation system, converted it to Markdown, and put in online as a GitHub project.

If you just want to use, not to edit, you can download a basic PDF render of the text.

I’ve left some “see page XX” cross-references in the text, as I don’t know what best to do with them (other than pulling in text that they refer to). For now, I’ve replaced them with “CROSSREF”.

Following a discussion on Google+ , I’ve created a possible first session sheet for Dungeon World, in the vein of the Apocalypse World original. It’s based on a previous one by Jeremy Strandberg, and most of the names are from the Story Games Names Book.

The “Names” section is just an example – I’ve supplied the OpenDocument source file so you can put in your own setting-appropriate ones.

PDF version

ODG source file

Burning Wheel has a lot of moving parts to keep track of, with a surprising number only coming into play at the end of a session, or indeed the end of an arc.

I’ve created a set of checklists to remind the group what they need to do.