I've got a couple of role-playing game projects started. I've just started on the basic premises the next step being producing something playable to experiment with. The biggest hurdle (for me at least) seems to be imagining the play - how to structure the rules to facilitate a certain kind of play experience. And even more simply, imagining the best possible play experience. There seems nothing tangible to use as a guide.

But then it dawned me that the first stake of a role-playing game, the one thing holding the wishy-washy stuff firmly on the ground has always been the character sheet. I remember when we got bored with D&D with my friends (we were 11 or 12 at the time), we came up with a viking rpg in a couple of hours - all we needed was a spanking new character sheet (complete with six attributes sounding a lot like STR, DEX, CON, INT, WIS & CHA). Just by making the char sheet we had our own viking heartbreaker (but fortunately we didn't go and publish it and sell it for real money).

But, nowadays I'm a bit iffy about char sheets being as useful as they used to be for prototyping uses. Sure, you still put all the crunchy bits of your character in the sheet, but how exactly does a char sheet show what kind of game you are dealing with?

Maybe you have more room for the important stuff. The 3:16 sheet has a lot of space for flashbacks and they tend to have a big impact on the play on a scene level. But, other than that I would think that you would need a different kind of artefact to design your game's play experience with. Right now I'm thinking game boards - using a game board or something like that to illustrate the game's scene structure, the interplay of different mechanics or somesuch. You could even have a score board instead of character sheets. The score board would have positions for all the different combinations of character stats so you would see at a glance where everyone's at.

I don't know, what do you think is important / helpful at this stage as a design / demonstration tool? Are char sheets informative? How?

This article is an in-depth review of 3:16 carnage mongst the Stars role-playing game. Unfortunately it's only in Finnish at the moment. I wrote a short piece in English about 3:16 a little while ago, please check it out . The Finnish article follows: 

Kirjoitin Roolipelaaja 17:n lyhyen arvostelun Gregor Huttonin 3:16 Carnage Amongst the Stars -roolipelistä. Jutun pituus oli rajattu 1500 merkkiin, koska lehteen ei enää siinä vaiheessa, kun juttua tarjosin, olisi mahtunut pitempää. Tein annetussa tilassa parhaimpani ja mielestäni juttu on hyvä johdanto peliin. 1500 merkkiä on kuitenkin sellainen pituus, jossa ei ehdi kertoa läheskään kaikkea oleellista pelistä. Niinpä kirjotin jutun jatkoksi pidemmän arvostelun tänne Alt+Games -blogiin. Juttu on alla. Vertailun vuoksi voin sanoa, että pituus on reilut 12000 merkkiä, eli neljän sivun juttu Roolipelaajassa.

Koska Roolipelaajan arvostelussa selitettiin perusseikat, aloitan tässä heti asialla: omilla kokemuksillani pelistä ja systeemin kuvaamisella. Yleisen kuvauksen pelistä saatte Roolipelaajasta (mitä, eikö sinulle tule Roolipelaajaa?),  pelin omilta sivuilta tai Arkkikiven sivuilta. Kirjoitin myös aiemmin lyhyen ennakkojutun 3:16:sta tänne.

Ensivaikutelma

Jo tiedote pelin julkaisusta laittoi puntit tutisemaan. Vaikka tiedotteessa ei mainittu sanaakaan Starship Trooper -vaikutteista, fiktiopätkät ja pelin lyhyt kuvaus tihkuivat niin paljon mustaa huumoria ja ylilyötyä furutistimilitaristimeinkiä, että ostopäätös oli helppo tehdä.

Itse peliin tutustuminen vahvisti samaa positiivista tunnetta. "Mars mars pelaamaan, mitä siinä toljotat", peli tuntui kertovan jokaisessa luvussaan, "Ei se ole temppu eikä mikään". 3:16 tukeutuu niin syvälle scifigenrekonventioihin, että sen idea syöpyy mieleen kuin automaattisesti.

Peliin tutustuessa tuli myös tunne siitä, että simppelin ja kompaktin ulkokuoren alla piili äärimmilleen viritetty koneisto, jonka saattaisi nähdä koko loistossaan vasta pelatessa. Sen verran irrallisiksi eri mekaniikat ja niiden tarkoitus kuitenkin jäivät, että oli hiukan vaikea aavistaa, millaiseksi pelikokemus muodostuisi. Oli siis pakko kokeilla.

Last Spring we played a Dust Devils Revenged campaign over the 'net via Skype and a Vassal  Engine playing cards module that I had hacked especially for that purpose. After the campaign ended I thought about publishing the Vassal module for others to use and improve. 

Finally I've had the time to polish it. So, here's the first version of my Dust Devils poker hands playing module for Vassal Engine. It still has a few glitches in the graphics and needs a help file to go along it, but those are coming very soon, I promise. 

The module is intended for playing out conflicts in Dust Devils. In the game, each player draws cards according to their character's traits and forms a five card poker hand. Bets are also used. The module supports up to six players and a dealer with concealable card hand windows for each player, has two card decks combined so you want run out of cards even in a massive conflict, chips, a chat window (as per Vassal Engine). You can also save and load game situations in it.

The module is based on Tom Dufresne's playing cards module; the card, the card deck and the player hand functionality are his design. The module also has the poker hands chart from Dust Devils Revenged book with approval of Matt Snyder to include it. 

I've been skimming over the archives of the Sons of Kryos podcast (by Jeff, Judd and Storn) in the past few weeks. There are lots of really useful stuff and I thought that I should break some of my finds out for you.

The first podcast of Sons of Kryos was published in July 2005. There have been 62 podcasts since. Each podcast consists of three or four sections each lasting about 15 minutes. In my recap effort I'm now in the third season, somewhere around episode 40.

The only drawback of the Sons of Kryos podcast is that the starting times of different sections in the individual podcasts are not marked in the archives. Here I'm trying to give approximate numbers for those, also.

This is similar effort to the Cull blog where Ryan Stoughton recaps different rpg blos and podcasts and tries to point to the most bestest material. My effort here differs in that I haven't even listened to every Sons of Kryos podcast and my selections are simply a result of my personal interests right now. Regardless, I hope this is useful to you.

A short list of my recommendations, the full descriptions follow in full text:

• Episode 12, section I: Bangs (At the beginning)
  
• Episode 12, section 3: Inspired Games (Starts at 30 minutes) 
• Episode 15, section 1: Good sentences - This is what the game is about (At the beginning)
• Episode 15, section 2: Stakes (Starts approx. at 15 minutes) 
• Episode 18, section 2: How to Start a PTA Game (Starts at 23:40)
• Episode 27, section 1: Managing Screen time (At the beginning)
• Episode 35, section 2: Good sentences - No (Starts at 16 minutes)