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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 4, 2010 7:37:13 GMT -8
I'd be lying if I said that the Steampunk game wasn't a source of inspiration for this new side-project I've been working on off and on for a bit. It came out of thinking about the game mechanics involved in running an actual con in a role playing game and realizing that there are too many elements for it to really work realistically in any game I can think of (or at least satisfactorily and without having to be an actual con artist). And since we've been watching way too much Hustle, I had the idea to write an RPG that's just about grifters and "the long con". It's nowhere near finished, a lot of it lives in my head, but I set up a mediawiki page for it since the mechanics are kind of sort of maybe done-ish. Mostly -ish...there's things like difficulty modifiers and buying skills that I haven't even thought about yet. Anyway, it's over here in its skeletal glory. Feedback and/or contributions are welcome The Long Con
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Post by brendur on Aug 4, 2010 8:02:18 GMT -8
OOoooo after watching Inception...I am intrigued.
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 4, 2010 8:42:28 GMT -8
Neat! That's actually a really cool idea for a game. Has a nice simple system too, or at least what I've seen of it so far. The Specialization system hurt my brain a little, but I think I jut need to go read it again. No real suggestions or anything so far, other than if you really intend to host things on Ye Wiki, make sure you keep a backup of your original files. But hey, when you get it up and running, I'll play.
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 4, 2010 9:00:46 GMT -8
I'm hoping when it's in a runnable state that I can say "Here it is, now go run it!" ;D the theory being that it would be easier to pick out potential problems if someone else was trying to kludge through the system. Which was part of the reason I started thinking about open source. (that part hasn't been worked out fully yet, i.e. which license, etc...)
Re: specializations -- yeah...it needs help. and it's badly written. it's sort of based on the white wolf/WoD specializations you can get, except turned into a somewhat more formal system, but I start getting into dice pools and things and I know i haven't really explained/written any of that yet...
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 4, 2010 9:13:58 GMT -8
oh, I forgot to mention that I have a plan to make the game playable without a GM. It's based on the concept of modules that can be used as supplements to traditional games, or can be taken as standalone sets for solitaire or 2-player games. Modules would include a bunch of potential marks (and probably some red herrings) and there'd be some randomization technique for landing on any given person, and the game would involve figuring out that person's weaknesses and the best kind of con to run against him/her and then rolling against pre-determined stats.
There'll also be potential for expansions, which would be settings/worlds/etc and would (probably) contain modules. The idea is that con artists have been around forever and probably will be around for forever, so wouldn't it be cool to run a game in the wild west? In Victorian England? In Nazi Germany or Fascist Italy?
re: wiki -- yeah, I basically copied and pasted from the original word doc this morning when i set up the wiki site. the wiki does make it useful to put notes on particular areas i want to flesh out and highlight terminology or sections that need to be defined.
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 4, 2010 9:29:21 GMT -8
Pardon me if this is stupid, as I'm working with an imperfect knowledge, but:
Of the 'standard' difficulty for skill checks is a 6, maybe if you took a specialization in a specific area it would just lower the difficulty by 1 if you were making a roll that falls into your area of specialization.
Every 3 levels (after the first 5) you could either choose a new spec or improve one you already have.
Improving an existing spec further decreases the diff to 4, 3, 2 etc.
Not sure if that's the effect you were looking for, though.
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 4, 2010 9:33:44 GMT -8
Modules are rad, also. ;D Multiple times/settings is a great idea too. Playing GM-less would be an interesting step, too I think.
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 4, 2010 10:41:59 GMT -8
Pardon me if this is stupid, as I'm working with an imperfect knowledge, but: Of the 'standard' difficulty for skill checks is a 6, maybe if you took a specialization in a specific area it would just lower the difficulty by 1 if you were making a roll that falls into your area of specialization. Every 3 levels (after the first 5) you could either choose a new spec or improve one you already have. Improving an existing spec further decreases the diff to 4, 3, 2 etc. Not sure if that's the effect you were looking for, though. Well, my thought is that people aren't going to have more than 10 dice, max, and I'm also thinking that a lot of skill checks might be combinations anyway (i.e. roll your Read+Body Language, or some such), in the same way that White Wolf does it. Having not tested the system, my fear is that lowering the base diff to lower than 5 will make skill checks too easy. While I like the idea of having things like Pickpocket 2, 3, 4, etc, for advanced levels in your specialty, I'm just wondering if that will break the system too much. It's the sort of thing I'd need to actually test in order to really know how solid my basic rules are...also, I'm trying to keep the basic mechanics as simple as humanly possible, so more options feels like it may make an already muddled system unnecessarily complex. That said, I'm always in favor of automatic successes (or failures) to save dice rolling, but I haven't really figured that part out yet ;D Yeah, I sort of see this as being almost like a CCG, like Magic. The primary motivation for this is to have something that Erin and I could potentially play without having to have a big group of people or a forum or, you know, any kind of socialization at all
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 4, 2010 11:06:55 GMT -8
Well I won't to argue for my version of specialization too much since it's your system, but I think, it's advantages would be tempered by the fact that you won't get that bonus on every roll, so it's powers wouldn't be too overwhelming. For instance you have Lockpicking, specialty combination locks, while your chances of picking a combo locks are better, (Diff 5 or 4, etc) you're still rolling to beat a 6 on every other type of lock out there. The key to balance I guess would rely on the GM or whomever is designing the scenario to not rely too heavily on one kind of skill (or in this case lock type) in order to avoid giving players a free pass by happening to have the right skill. So maybe the outer gate has a combination lock, the building itself has a number of door locks, and the final objective is inside an electronic safe. In this case the specialty would let us get more easily by one kind of obstacle, but there are also areas in the same field where the spec doesn't apply. ..I'm also operating on the assumption that it requires multiple successes to accomplish more difficult tasks. (For instance the lock on the gate requires 3 successes to get by, whereas somebody's cheap school locker maybe only needs 1) Anyway.. That's my ยข2, but like I said that may not be the kind of effect you're looking for and I won't claim to understand all the system yet. So unless you want to hear more from me on this, I'll butt out. (...However if you don't wind up using my version of the spec system I'll probably use it somewhere else myself, since I like it. ) As far as concept/system testing I use this when I'm at work: www.wizards.com/dnd/dice/dice.htmTo play with numbers and run mock skillchecks and whatnot. Very handy. I should mention that I'm actually pretty excited about this game. ;D
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 4, 2010 11:17:18 GMT -8
Actually, you may have convinced me.
My thought re: successes was originally that 1 success was a marginal success, 2 was better 5 was an outstanding whammo success, and i'd deal with the difficulty of the lock (in your example) with modifiers. requiring a set number of successes based on the complexity feels more organic, though, and it would make higher levels of specialization more feasible. and you're right, it's limited to the situation so it's sort of got a built-in protection against gaming the system too bad...
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 4, 2010 11:26:34 GMT -8
Oh. Well all right! (^.^)b
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 8, 2010 7:01:18 GMT -8
FWIW, the Classes are finished & I added some terminology that was pulled from a Facebook group page. Going to work on integrating the specialization stuff and core gameplay stuff. I had to swap a couple skills, too, because I realized I left out a couple that would be crucial to how the PCs would be getting information on their marks.
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 10, 2010 10:00:32 GMT -8
Hehe.. cool. I gave it a skim yesterday and once I get the chance to settle in I'll have a good look. Glad to see you're making progress on it.
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 10, 2010 20:04:48 GMT -8
The terminology stuff is just busywork, really, but I wanted to get it in there so I could close those tabs. Apparently the peeps who posted it on the Facebook page got it from the official Hustle website, so I should probably track that down at some point. Plus, there's a lot of good stuff in this wiki article that I may appropriate: en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Confidence_trickI was kind of sort of thinking if there was going to be a break in the SP game to gather more crew that I could run a test Long Con game with anyone interested (that is, of course, with the administrator's permission/approval ), so I'm pushing to have it at least functional by then. I'm imagining individual scenarios would be relatively short since they're all self-contained and fairly formulaic.
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 11, 2010 8:14:38 GMT -8
Wullllll. I was thinking the hiatus would only be for about a week to give new players time to roll up toons. Maybe 2 weeks if some other things I want to do take longer than I expected. I really wouldn't want to make it much more of a break than that. I could probably handle both games concurrently though, running one, participating in ye other.
Guess I should also mention I'll be at burning man from Aug 30 - Sept 6 so I won't be posting much between those dates, for future reference.
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 11, 2010 9:25:09 GMT -8
welll...I really don't want to take the thunder from your game. Seems like every time we've tried that in the past, one or the other (or both) of the games has gone kablooey. Also, I didn't really anticipate needing to have it done, like, now which, if we all die horribly, it would sort of need to be if we were going to do that. So, I don't have a problem waiting for an opportunity later.
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 11, 2010 10:58:28 GMT -8
Nah, I'm not really concerned with any sort of thunder-stealing, (it's a different genre and a different system after all) I'm of the mind that we should concentrate on working co-operatively, and I'm going to support your game as best I can, because it does sound like fun. I'm gonna play the hell out of it.
Anyway, I have no problem at all with you starting up a Con game, and I don't want you to have to delay longer than necessary in order to start it up, However I also don't think there'd be a problem with running both at once. In my experience running 2 or even 3 forum RP's concurrently is fine, so long as you have a dedicated playerbase. I was part of a WoW roleplaying guild for 2 years and routinely had 2 or more separate storylines going at once, not counting events in-game.
I wouldn't even mind halting an SP game for a week or two to encourage people to give yours a fair shot, but I wouldn't want to wait for yours to conclude before continuing mine because it's likely to take a long time. (IoP has been running for almost 2 months now) even if the point is brevity, as you say. Things always seem to take longer than people expect.
Anyway, I'm cool with putting SP on hiatus for a week when you're ready to launch. That ought to be long enough to get people settled in and familiar with the system. But like I said I don't think I should leave it hanging till yours finishes up, since there's no telling how long it'll go for.
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 11, 2010 14:43:56 GMT -8
Alright then, I won't worry about it. I'd hate to see the Steampunk game go poof because we've got multiple games running concurrently and I think we've both seen games fizzle in the past (since we, two, personally, have run games concurrently before). But I like to think we've got a good core crew here, and certainly the Con game can run with fewer players than SP (considering that's sort of the point. One of them, anyway), if necessary.
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 11, 2010 14:45:40 GMT -8
*scratches head*
When were we running two games at the same time? ...Not that I doubt you, but I just can't remember. -_-
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 11, 2010 14:53:23 GMT -8
Pretty sure I was running something while you were running Auntera. Maybe Buffy? Maybe Firefly? Can't remember exactly now. I know my Buffy and Firefly games both fizzled disappointingly and I'm pretty sure in at least one of those cases (if not both) there was something else going on at the same time. Of course, it's possible you actually weren't involved in or around either of those, in which case my players just sucked
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 11, 2010 15:06:41 GMT -8
Ooooooooooh, right, right, I remember now!
Ergh. I think Auntera copping it was my fault, I was supposed to come up with the second part of that story and just never got around to it. -_-
I forget what happened w/ Firefly and Buffy, though. I remember the Buffy one had a pretty good run. Hell they might have been my fault too, I don't remember. : / Hope not though.
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 11, 2010 15:13:09 GMT -8
I don't think Buffy was your fault. I had a particularly difficult player who liked to play the most complicated characters ever and call foul when things didn't go the way he thought they should.
Your character is invisible. When this happened in Buffy, it wasn't fun and games, the character became invisible because she was ignored and she was tortured by it. Your life isn't going to be all sneaking into girl's dressing rooms...
/sigh
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 11, 2010 15:18:38 GMT -8
Myeah.. You gotta take three steps back, take a deep breath and remind yourself that it's a game... Actually I'd like to take the opportunity to ready a big sloppy fanjob for everybody who's been in the threads so far. Everyone's been playing very well and doing a great job of putting up with me.
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 11, 2010 15:34:34 GMT -8
Ditto that Now stop thread-jacking my post about the con game ;D
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Post by Gravedust on Aug 11, 2010 15:38:20 GMT -8
ARRRGH!!
And I would have gotten away with it too, if it hadn't been for you pesky kids!
Hehe.. okay, shutting up.
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 11, 2010 15:50:34 GMT -8
I just like taking every opportunity possible to use the term "thread-jacking" ;D
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Post by jazzs3quence on Aug 16, 2010 14:02:23 GMT -8
I just wanted to say that I'm adding some stuff that should make the game really interesting, like a reputation system, earning points in skills by rolling well, and going "off the grid" and assuming a false identity to elude the cops... ;D
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