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All the best
Iain
Thankfully my second box has now arrived which means my Shop is up and running. The game is retailing at £9 and if any shops fancy stocking it then please get in touch with me directly.
If you are stateside you can currently get the game direct from my publisher "Guild of Blades".
The last week has been a great start for my company I can't wait to see what the rest of the year will bring.
All the best
Iain McAllister (The Frontal Lobe)
Well I am on holiday at the moment but my brother informs me that the pack containing my rules for 'Revenge of the B-Movie' has arrived. Good News!
On the bad news front, my second box did not go out till tuesday night as the guy Ryan had left in charge didn't know how to put the creases in the tuckbox. It does mean I don't have to pay shipping on the reprint cards though, I mucked up one of the cards, which is sort of good news. It does mean it is going to be a little tight but hopefully I will have received that box by next tuesday. In Ryan's defence he has been very open about it and told me as soon as he realised what had happend. A thoroughly excellent chap.
On the upside I am getting into the marketing side of things now and throwing myself around the internet looking for various sites to post on and places to put press releases out. Anyone got any advice on where I should head? I have a presence on BoardGameGeek now and I am starting to see a good upturn in traffic on the site.
Cheers
Iain
I am very excited to announce that 'Revenge of the B-Movie' will be launching on the 31st May at Games Expo in Birmingham. Soon after that you will be able to order the game through my website and the Guild of Blades retail site, which will be up soon.
In the meantime here are some pretty pictures of the Grand Box Opening
Opening the box
Unpacking
Tuck Box
Constructed Box
</a>Some sample cards
Yes the cards do fit!
I can't wait to get this into the hands of my fellow gamers.
All the best
Iain
- Mood:
excited
In other news, the game will be available in the states through Guild of Blades initially. They are putting together their retail site over the next week or so and will post links about the the place as soon as I know the exact details.
Cheers
Iain
More info. very soon.
Cheers
Iain
- Mood: chipper
As soon as I have pictures I will post them. There will aslo be a giant party at my house to celebrate!
More details soon.
Cheers
Iain
- Mood: excited
Why use randomisers at all?
First things first, why should you include a randomiser in your game? If you think about it there are plenty of successful games, chess coming instantly to mind, that have no randomiser in their system at all. On the other hand there are games that are only randomiser, snakes & ladders.
The main reason to use one is to make the outcome of a given choice uncertain. This can increase tension and excitement in the game and force players to react to an ever changing set of circumstances. For example in most wargames the way of determining whether my guy kills your guy is to roll some dice based on, or compared against, unit stats. If it was just a straight comparison the game could become very dull and all about the superior troop type, meaning all players would just field the strongest force they could. The introduction of a random element means the choice of army is not 'obvious' and you get a more diverse spread of troop choice which can only make the game a bit more interesting.
However the introduction of randomisers must be handled carefully. Snakes & ladders, though an entertaining game when you are a child, is actually terrible from the point of view of design. Their is no choice for the player and all you do is roll a dice several times until someone wins. The game is all randomiser and no choice. This is to be avoided at all costs.
Randomisers in RPGs
Now RPGs, and especially story focused games, introduce another factor worth considering. The choice we have mentioned above becomes more interesting as the players, I include the GM here, are creating a narrative that other players can react to. In a way the other players introduce the random element we can get from cards or dice and as such the need for a randomiser to create unexpected situations is lessened.
That is not to say we can always design RPGs without a random element, and indeed most still include some kind of dice or card mechanic to decide the outcome of combat/ social situations etc. Those without these randomisers must be careful to not fall into the trap of making all deciscions fall to one player, GM fiat for example, or to reduce it to such a point that it is non-existent and the game has no suprises for anyone. For me the thing that makes RPGs so interesting is the unexpected twists and turns in the story that we create.
Once you have decided to include a random element in your design, you need to decide which one.
Dice
Games have been using Dice since, almost literally, the dawn of time. The most common dice is of course the d6 and is readily available, in small quantities, in most households. Now our hobby has more dice than I can really mention and you could write infinite words on proababilities, why a d6 is better than a d10 etc. I am not going to do that here.
What I will do is lay out why you might want to choose dice over cards.
1) Probabilities: Ok I am going to mention it briefly. The core range of polyhedrals offer and interesting range of probabilities, some of which may suit the mechanic you are thinking of better than a deck of cards will. The core range is: d4, d6, d8, d10, d12 and d20.
2) Visually: They are an instant number you can read easily and as long as you don't have too many fancy calculations in your system resolution is instant.
3) Familiarity: It is more common to use dice in a board game as the randomiser than cards and as such people are more used to seeing them used in a gaming context.
4) Addition: If you are pooling and adding them together then they are easy to add as the numbers are instantly there. You don't need to think about how much a face card is worth.
5) Quantity: You can roll loads of dice easily in your hand but holding more than 10 cards say is a bit troublesome. However not everyone has loads of dice so there can be an accesibility issue there.
Cards
I have been heading towards using cards in my game design since 'Mob Justice', basically because I think you can play more interesting narrative tricks with them. However they aren't all good and carry their own set of problems. So why would you use them over dice:
1) Accesibility: Every household, pretty much, has a deck of cards in it and is familiar with the suits and value. You show the average joe a d12 and he will look at you like you just insulted his mother.
2) Visually: They are bigger and impact more on the play area than dice. This can be good, from the point of view of everyone being able to see it, and bad, means you need more table space.
3) Quantity: Holding more than 10 cards in your hand can be a bit cumbersome, though is not impossible.
4) Probabilities: A lot trickier to calculate with cards and something that you really need to think about when designing a game. Does every player need a deck? Do the proabilities balance out as players draw cards?
5) Addition: this can be harder than with dice if you are including face cards as people need to think about what they are worth. However it means you can play tricks with their value that can be useful.
6) Tricks: You can play tricks with leaving cards on the table, bluffing, winning whist style tricks etc. that you can't with dice. This gives us more design opportunities to maniuplate player behaviour, but that is another post, or 10, all in itself.
So there you go. Dice vs. Cards is something that will be debated for a long time yet and either method has its pluses and minuses. I will post more soon about exactly why I chose cards over dice for Reel Adventures.
All the best
Iain
For those who are interested in seeing what I am working on I will have a preview version of 'Revenge of the B-Movie' and in-development versions of 'Stitch' and 'Reel Adventures' at Dragonmeet in London this coming saturday. I should hopefully be getting another test session of Stitch in over the weekend as well.
On the subject of 'Stitch' I have put the Game Chef version up for free on the website. It is very rough but if you want to see where I am going with it this is a good place to start.
http://www.giantbrain.co.uk
Cheers
Iain
I was a bit nervous having not run MJ, or a traditional GMed game, for quite some time. I had asked the players to email me their character ideas before we started saying I thought I might go for a detective based story. Boy did that change.
We ended up with:
Mike Degallo (Joe) - son of a former boss, not the brightest tool in the shed, but well liked and useful to have around as muscle.
Mary OBannon (Shevy) - a socialite, her father is running in the imminent mayoral elections. Well known around town and can charm her way into anywhere.
Sondra Kaine (Gregor) - A black torpedo, ex military, just working her way up in the mob and a surgeon with a sub-machine gun.
The game started off in the a cold new york dawn. The previous night Mike had hit it off with this beautiful girl, they had gone to a hotel and he had had the time of his life.
When he wakes up the next morning she is gone. Makes his way to the bathroom only to find her cut to ribbons blood everywhere, a single 4 leaf clover floating in the blood. Suddenly sirens go off in the distance, too soon to be anything other than a setup. He calls his old friend Sondra Kaine, who has looked after him in the past, and they arrange a place to meet up as he flees the scene.
Meanwhile uptown, Mary OBannon, is getting the news that her sister's body has been discovered in a sleazy hotel and could she come and identify it. Once she has laid her eyes on her sisters corpse, and after being told by the detective in charge that the suspect, Mike Degallo, may dissappear into the underworld, she makes a call to the Police Chief of the city. An old boyfriend, he agrees to give her a PI's licence and so she sets out to find out what happened. She decides to visit the morgue for the coroner's report first.
Sondra in the meantime is tapping some of her contacts for a lead in who might have set Mike up. Coming up with nothing particularly new, and guessing that the four leaf clover is a plant to put them on the track of a supposedly retired assasin, they head to the morgue to get rid of the body.
They arrive shortly after Mary, and she hides as they enter the morgue. They knock out the two men on duty, take their coats and try and act like morgue technicians as they go and find the body. Mary isn't fooled, they are after all mafia men and not actors, and confronts them. They manage to convince her, sort of, that mike didn't have anything to do with it and tell her that they want an 'independent opinion' on the autopsy.
As they leave some other gangsters, who had just missed them as they left the morgue, give pursuit, but Sondra's driving gets them out of danger. They head to a chinese doctor Mike knows for a second look at the body whilst Mary is deciding whether or not she is entirely convinced by there story.
So there we go. that was the first, pretty short session, and I hope to finish it off at some point, maybe even turning into a campaign. I would be interested to hear feedback from the players, and from you guys as to how this reads as an AP report. I need to get some practice at writing these things and am wondering if I should include more mechanical detail.
One thing I did learn from the session was that I am very rusty on explaining the nuances of the MJ resolution system, which led to some confusion for Shevy as I kind of rushed through the explanation in game. Need to polish that up.
Once I have that feedback I can publish it on other sites alongside my posts about the development of MJ.
Cheers
Iain
Reel Adventures saw its first 'public' outing back at Spodley Grange, or the Collective Endeavour goes to a cottage, a few months ago. I got some great feedback there and the basic idea was good as everyone enjoyed themselves. However there hae been some problems that I have finally fixed:
1) The game was way too complex, involving different way of manipulating a pool of d6.
2) It was hard to define yourself through action, as you had to set up a pitfall, an enemy, before you could defeat it and couldn't do anything else in that scene.
3) The character sheet was to confusing, probably from the mechanical complexity.
4) Pitfall creation was done by the player to overcome it which is unsatsifying.
Since then I have solved a lot of those problems by removing presence, which you spent to give your character hooks, things you could use to increase your dice pool, and your qualities, which are the basic thing you use to overcome pitfalls. You could also use presence to boost your dice pool when overcoming pitfalls.
The problem with presence was that if you gained too much of it then you nothing felt threatening, and I needed pitfalls to feel threatening even if they aren't actually.
So now, each scene is one of two types:
Action: where you overcome pitfalls in order to gain hooks and qualities, with a risk of increasing the threat pool.
Development: where you can gain a hook or pitfall without overcoming a pitfallm but the threat pool increases.
The new thing here is that you define yourself through action and the threat pool. The threat pool is a little like the twilight pool in the LOTR ccg, which you should play if you haven't, meaning the enemy gets stronger as you do until the final confrontation.
Also your dice are now just d6 with no mods so you are just rolling pool versus pool which feels a bit more satisfying.
More on this once i have tested it.
The Giant brain website can be found here.
Cheers
Iain
I would just like to give my thanks to everyone who has helped with this project over the years. My playtest groups, family and friends have all helped in one way or another to get this game out and I will be forever in there debt.
I would especially like to thank the fine folks at CGS; Malcolm, Paul, Gregor and John, without whom Mob Justice would never have seen the light of day. Thanks a lot guys.
For those who want a look at the game you can download a preview here.
It is available to buy from the CGS site.
Indie Press Revolution
and
RPGnow
Thanks again everyone
Iain
Indie Press Revolution
RPGnow
and a free preview!
Don't say I'm not good to you.
Cheers
Iain
Cheers
Iain
http://www.contestedground.co.uk/mobdlo
It has an overview of the game setting, quickstart rule set and the contents page of the fullbook so you can see exactly what you will be getting come release date.
So excited, it is going to be wonderful to get the final thing in my hands.
Cheers
Iain
I have posted a little teaser for 'Stitch' up on the site and updated the forum with the progress I am making on B-movie, which to be honest isn't much. Getting the templates from RapidPOD is proving a little difficult.
http://www.giantbrain.co.uk
Cheers
Iain
I will be posting up some new info about the game on the CGS site:
http://www.contestedground.co.uk
You can find basic info about the game already up on this site and there is also some actual play from the playtest groups.
I should be putting some new info about StitcH on the Giant Brain by the end of the day.
All the best
Iain
http://www.giantbrain.co.uk/bmovie.htm
I have the templates from Paul and will be laying out the game over the coming week. All going well, like if I can get the tuckbox template from Ken, then the game should be being sent to the printers next week.
All the best
Iain
You can check out the website here.
Any advice and comments are appreciated.
Cheers
Iain
I am currently working on a Game Chef project called STITCH, about time travel and doing what is necessary over doing what is right. Should be great if I can get it to work. i will be looking to do it as a full game at some point as well, maybe for Dragonmeet or Gencon Uk.
Other than that my life has not been terribly interesting of recent.
I am looking for a new job though so if anyone hears about anything that might suit me, throw it my way.
Cheers
Iain
