Update 3/1

Well that’s not good! Nearly a month-long break between posts. I guess I underestimated how much work my last semester of graduate school would be. I’m still working on Hand of the Rat, though progress is slowed. Right now I can’t tell where procrastinating schoolwork ends and procrastinating the 1330 Project begins–they’re all kind of tied up in one another.

I recently received my paperback copy of Dungeon World after backing it on Kickstarter a while ago. I’ve had the .pdf of the rules for a while but put off reading them until I had a physical book in my hand–it’s just easier to read and absorb that way, I find. So I’ve been spending the last few weeks working on schoolwork and reading Dungeon World, while toying with Hand of the Rat in what little free time I have. 

Update 2/8/2013

Hey folks,

Between school and everything else, I find, ashamedly, that I don’t have much concrete to talk about. So in this update: Random musings, a short progress report, and an awesome animated short after the jump.

Progress Report: Hand of the Rat I

Inspiration and Influences
This Christmas I picked up Klei Entertainment’s widely acclaimed game Mark of the Ninja after having read this fascinating review by Ben Kuchera and seeing it go on sale on Steam. I quite quickly fell in love with the game—as Kuchera points out, Mark of the Ninja handles stealth and assassination in a beautiful, intuitive and informative way. It is, simply, the best stealth game I’ve ever played, based solely on the myriad of choices and options offered and how the game presents lots of data in clear, concise ways. Mark of the Ninja is a game that makes you really feel like a ninja. And, as I often do, I stopped to wonder if one could make a pen and paper roleplaying game like it.

Could it be possible to make an RPG based solely around stealth, while keeping it clean, simple and quick? How would you handle all of the information that goes into stealth—detection, silence, line of sight, quick and silent attacks? Traditional games often require a roll of the die or dice for each action, but in a ninja game each action has a multitude of facets that must be taken account of, and you can’t simply roll for each facet—whether the enemy sees you, hears you; whether you do damage to one without another noticing—it would take forever to do even the simplest action. So what kind of system could work for this?

R3: Psi*Run and Player-Driven Conflict

I picked up Psi*Run at PAX East last year, after seeing Vincent Baker and Meguey Baker in a few panels and hearing a few things off-and-on about it. When I stopped by their table, Meguey wasn’t available, but I was able to talk to Vincent about Psi*Run and he easily sold me on it.

I read the book shortly afterwards, put it down with a “Hm, interesting,” and kept an eye out for a time I thought would be good to pull it out and convince a group to play, half fearing it would end up shelved like Do by my regular gaming group, perhaps lacking the apparent strength to build up interest like some of the bigger, grittier games I’d coerced them into playing.

Eventually though, I did get the chance to play. Around Halloween half a year later, I GMed for a group of friends relatively new to RPGs with the promise that it was “kind of like amnesiac X-Men on the run.” It’d been a while since I’d read the rules so I looked them over again quickly, managed to find some paper for the trail, and we got started. Very quickly I learned that, though I’d realized this game was different, I hadn’t really understood just how streamlined the game would play.

Reflection: Red Heart, Red Claw

Red Heart, Red Claw was a bit of a cheat. I wrote it in November and December of 2012, not 2013, and I wrote it before I decided to do the 1330 Project, so it gave me a bit of a head start. Still, finishing it—flawed as the game is—helped inspire the 1330 Project.

Red Heart, Red Claw isn’t the first game I’ve attempted—it’s not even the best one I’ve attempted—but it is the first one I’ve finished, and for that I’m pretty proud of it. Though I must say that “finished” here comes with an asterisk—the game still requires work, and there’s a lot I’m still unhappy with—but there’s a complete set of rules here, and if someone decided to put themselves through it they very well could play a full game of it. Not that I would know—I haven’t yet. The game was written as a Christmas gift to my girlfriend, who’s in love with Disney’s Beauty and the Beast. It was written as an art piece and a romantic gesture, I suppose, more than it was a game to be played by the masses (I don’t expect it to have mass appeal) but that doesn’t mean I don’t want it to be an enjoyable game. Unfortunately, my girlfriend and I haven’t had the opportunity to play it together.

PAX Prime ’12 Panel — Designing and Publishing on a Ramen Budget

At PAX Prime last year, there was a panel I was very disappointed I wouldn’t be able to see–“Designing and Publishing on a Ramen Budget.” Luckily for me, and for you too, Fire Opal Media posted the panel on their youtube Channel a few weeks ago. These panels are a great resource for aspiring game designers–and artists in general, I’ll discuss later–and it’s always great when they’re made available to people who can’t make the convention. Meguey Baker and Luke Crane are two of my favorite game designers, and the rest of the panelists are now on my radar as well. The best part of conventions like PAX is getting to pick the brains of your heroes, and those who have been there ahead of you.

[Video after the Jump]

First Post

Hello, and welcome to the 1330 Project.

The 1330 project is a personal year-long challenge I’m undertaking. The goal of the project is to write, by the end of 2013, 13 roleplaying or story games each under 30 pages. Each game must be “finished”—by which I mean it needs to have complete rules and be playable. Ideally the games will be enjoyable as well, but I’m not promising anything.

As a writer, one piece of advice that stuck with me as an undergrad was that finishing a piece is a skill in and of itself—and, as a skill, it’s something that needs to be learned and perfected through repetition and training. When this sentiment was repeated as advice for game design by the admirable Ben Lehman (The Drifter’s Escape, Polaris) at PAX East 2012, I realized that game design is not something that you are just born with. Like drawing or writing, you can only get started with game design by designing and finishing games. Just like your first drawings or short stories, your first games will likely be rubbish. The only way to get better is produce, finish, learn and start again.