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.
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?
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.
The 1330 Project 