24h RPG Competition 2014

[kylesgames]

Squidmen fighting the great war in armored dreadnaughts?

Or is that too much like Crysis?

[Chainsaw Aardvark]

Eight legged petrol powered walkers to cross shell holes and fire down into trenches? The Kaiser of Germany being replaced by a Cuttlefish? Uber-Celeocanths replacing u-boats? Hells yeah!

[Evil Scientist]

[misterecho]

I love it. Go big or go home is a great idea.

[Anastylos]

[Rob Lang]

This has some lunatic traction. I'm helping out with Aethercon III this year - trying to get some things together. Work has been crazy but is easing up now.

[kylesgames]

I'm probably not going to be able to participate in the formal compo, so I'm starting work on my kinda-sorta entry.

EDIT: I'm going to bed now, and I'll let myself have more like 48 hours because I have other obligations to fulfill this weekend that I don't normally have. I've drafted up a cover, and I've begun work on the game.

Like I often like to do, the game begins with some in-universe fluff, a letter sent home by a member of the Atlantica Guard Company (mercenaries comprised of both humans and non-humans of US or British loyalty) that details some of the setting elements. I haven't had time to work on the Cuttle (basically the catch-all phrase for sapient undersea critters), but there will be at least cuttlefish and octopi variants playable.

The schtick is that it's after WWI and set in a cold war (1930's, but still steampunk and Victorian); most of Europe actually doesn't participate in the war (Germany is still paying off reparations, and the whole Great Depression thing is going on), but Russia has control of the Pacific and Britain and the United States have control of the Atlantic. Underseas outposts are valuable because in addition to enabling relations and trade with the Cuttle, they also are sources of fossil fuels and a variety of wonders; there's no general "unobtanium" that people search for underseas, but rather a variety of things (such as Inksac, a black serum produced by specially bred fish that allows humans to breathe underwater and survive immense pressure, albeit at the cost of significant discomfort).

WWI was fought with giant war machines, and many of them have now found their way underwater in one way or another. Called Olympians (because Titans was taken), they made it possible for the war to be undertaken with far fewer human casualties, though the economic cost and resulting property destruction was astronomical. Most of Europe, barring Britain, is still rebuilding any industry that they once had.

The Cuttle, on the other hand, are almost alien. They have their own culture and their own gods, plus several meaningfully different races. Highly intelligent, their technology reflects their lack of fine manipulators (though the octopi-equivalent can use some human gear because of their longer tentacles the cuttlefish-analogues cannot do so [at least comfortably]). It is steam-powered, like human technology, but their weapon technology and other utilities tend to output energy through light, sound, and electricity. This makes it much better suited for underwater environments, where projectile weapons do poorly. Cuttle technology has the advantage of operating in the "mad science" realm of things.

Tentatively titled "The Inky Depths", it will use a d6 pool-based system and feature combat rules for both Olympians and infantry using the same general mechanics. Characters are limited in combat and in some pursuits by their gear or attribute/skill ratings; dice must be split between "chance to succeed" and "degree of success" pools before being rolled.

EDIT 2: The system is a little arbitrarily complex, in part because I can't figure out alternative terms to pools and successes. Basically, characters have a potential pool of dice, which is equal to the lowest pool that would apply to the actions they undertake (so a pilot can't apply his massive Olympian pool to rolls in the same turn he has to sprint across the seabed to reach the darn thing, since he'll probably be rolling on his lower Athletics pool).

Beyond this, there are also limits. These are always applied by skills and attributes, and some gear may have low limits that keep characters from fully utilizing their limits (I refer to skill-based limits as potential Success/Effect results). The lowest limits always apply to a roll, and characters cannot roll more dice than the sum of their limits, though they do not have to roll separately for both successes and effects, since that's both a little more merciful for small rolls and makes the rolling process a little quicker.

I recognize that this is a little complex, but a lot of it should be pretty easily streamlined because the same limits will apply to certain actions over a long period of time (for instance, a character may be limited by their weapon's Success Limit of 3 and Effect Limit of 2, meaning that they can only ever roll five dice with the weapon), and limits only come into play for large rolls (small rolls, as are somewhat common, will almost always consist of 2-3 dice per result pool).

An interesting thing about this is how the need for characters to have successes allocated to both their Success and Effect pool to have any impact from a roll plays nicely with the round structure. Rounds essentially allow characters to take actions until they deplete smallest pool that would apply to the skills they're using (like the Athletics pool of a pilot running to start up his Olympian, who makes two three-die rolls against the total pool of 6). Basically, since you're looking to get a minimum of two successes, you can't just take an arbitrary number of one-die rolls until you succeed (especially since Olympians with large weapon banks would allow their pilots to hammer away with a bazillion single die rolls until they eventually hit someone who needs to roll).

EDIT 3: Blegh. I just spent three hours driving a friend home from an accident, and I don't think I'll get any significant amount of work done today. I'm setting my final deadline at "bedtime on Monday".

EDIT 4: Between the three or four hours of work I got done on Saturday, the two or so yesterday, and the two I've had today, I've completed way less than half of what I need to complete; I have "ten essential sections", of which three are complete or passable. As expected, most of them are pretty brief; they average about 1000 words each. I wasted too much time working on illustrations.

EDIT 5: Characters can take a "tax" rather than immediately die if they take too much damage, which proscribes them from using a particular pool until they are given medical care. This was perhaps done to facilitate a joke about "Death and Taxes".

EDIT 6: My TOC is now longer than a whole page (it's autogenerated from headings). I've achieved the *opposite* of what I did with Tales of Narvi, where I'm making a lot of emergent content and basically no pre-scripted stuff other than weapons and armor.

EDIT 7: Weapons and armor are finished, now just to make the Olympians. Right now they don't have any features that other things don't, which is a bit of a shame, but I need to hurry up to get in a satisfying combat system with destructible elements.

EDIT 8: Loophole I won't close because of a lack of time is that technically passengers can make melee attacks out of an open-air Olympian. DRIVE ME CLOSER, I WANT TO HIT IT WITH MY SWORD!

[kylesgames]

Bumping with result. I spent about 16 man-hours on this (if we count the two or three on illustrations that went mostly unused), which is pretty much equivalent to what I'd spend in a 24-hour compo if I could find a non-busy day (Tales of Navri got a whopping 20, but I stayed up until dawn to finish it).

41 pages. 10340 words, most of which have not been reviewed since they were written. Complete rules according to ten criteria (core mechanics, setting section, character creation, health and dying, gear, combat, social rules, intellectual skill rules, hazards, GM guide), and terrain destruction.

Features I didn't get done: a meaningful setting section (the current one is essentially a chain of five or ten minute freewrites), separate Olympian weapons (they use infantry weapons, but more of them/particularly large ones), and actual blast/explosive rules. Probably should have included a section for non-Combat non-Olympian skills beyond athletics. If I had the time, I'd give a detailed description of each skill, as is they're kinda limp.

Features I'm unsure about: Double pool system—between tired typing and the natural ambiguity in terms, figuring out what exactly Success success results are is probably a nightmare. I might ditch it and just allow uncapped effects, since hitting the effect limit is borderline impossible anyway. Also, combat balance is trash. There's not many examples for a lot of things as well. Character scale. Olympians are probably too susceptible to damage. The fonts. All the fonts. Disregarding time in a quasi-wargame with environmental effects.

Features I think I got done well: Using pool size as an alternative to initiative, to make up for how slow the game goes. The game feels borderline wargamey to me, which I actually wanted to do since giant robots. The hazards, while simple, are pretty cool.

I didn't get everything I wanted to done, but I'm hitting the limit of what I can acceptably call a 24-hour game analogue. Ideally, I'd go back and improve the illustrations, then go on to put at least a page background on each page, as well as pretty up the TOC. I'm using Libre Office exclusively, and I had to learn a lot of new features as I went. I don't think having the 72 hours instead of 24 was terribly helpful to me, because I put it off on Saturday because I couldn't be bothered to start after I put the first few words down (literally the letter home and the introduction section), then played Skyrim and discovered path-shape brush things in Inkscape for the rest of the evening (which gave me the cover, something I factored into my man hours).

I'm thinking that this might evolve into a larger project, one which focuses more on the differences between the surface and the ocean and includes more expansive rules. The first step would be removing everything about TN and exploding dice. Then perhaps the double pool system (it's really artificial and unnecessary). Add in some more non-combat stuff. Re-examine the node system. Balance weapons. Add Olympian scale weapons. Hype up Valor. The MG can one-shot with three effect successes.

Oh, and a character sheet.

[Evil Scientist]

You're a maniac. In the good, 1km1kt sense of the word. Maybe you are a bunch of monkeys, not just a single one, with that output rate. I'll give a quick read later on!



As for game ideas... I've recently read Clive Barker's "Books of Blood", volume 1, and I think I might just try to turn the last story, "In the Hills, the Cities" into a game (if we decide to GO BIG OR GO HOME). It freaked me out, that story.

[tygertyger]

Hmmm... I like the concept of Go Big or Go Home. If I can carve out the time I believe I'll do something kaiju-related. Most definitely not a knockoff of Pacific Rim, though.