All Posts (Yekrats)
Re: MavenCon 3 |
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Not too shy to talk
 
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Hi sockmonkey,
This sounds great! I will check my schedule and see what I can do. Thanks for letting us know! -- Scott S.
Posted on: 2008/2/12 10:33
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Re: Hello! |
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Not too shy to talk
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Thanks! I'll look into that...
Posted on: 2007/8/21 17:25
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GenCon 2007: Friday 5pm... "Demon Hunter Tokyo" |
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Not too shy to talk
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We held our second StoryCards session last night with some good success. I think the players had fun, but due to various complications, my timing was a little off for the adventure. I had to hurry the last scene just a little bit. Nevertheless, I think we had an enjoyable time.
Like yesterday, we drew the Angels and Demons card from the deck, but today we coupled it with Martial Arts. (I am taking the A&D card out of the deck tonight!!!) After some discussion, it was suggested that the players could be a special task force who hunts down demons. Cool, huh? The players were tasked with stopping a demon-infiltrated Yakuza, who has an anonymous tipster on the inside called Katana. He sent information to the players about a shipment of arms at the docks, and of course the players had to stop it! The tip also noted that one of the Yakuza lieutenants would be there for the deed, a demon by the name of Aigu the Blade. (Yes, I reused the name of Aigu from yesterday, since it sounded roughly oriental.) The shipment was stopped, but it was a different Lieutenant making the drop, a demon (who also happened to be a blogger) by the name of the Crane, a birdlike demon who threw shuriken. It was disovered that Aigu the Blade was the insider Katana, who wanted out of the organization and protection in exchange for information of how to get the crime boss, which the players succeeded in getting. Early this morning (on Saturday) I have the Scooby-Doo adventure, and tonight I have one final generic StoryCards game. So far, though, the response from players has been really positive! We're psyched!
Posted on: 2007/8/18 5:24
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GenCon 2007: Thursday 1pm... "Angels of the Village" |
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Not too shy to talk
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We had a very good session of StoryCards on Thursday, but I'm a bit sad about it as well. We only had four people in attendance (out of a full session) because of a misprint in the GenCon directory. We received errata about the change, but I suspect some people were fooled by the misprint. We did not figure it out until it was wrong until it was too late!
 So, if you were fooled by the stupid GenCon directory, we sincerely apologize. But the game turned out to be a success, I think. All of us that navigated the GenCon directory pitfall had a good time. The players decided on a scenario where the players played supernatural beings who were protectors of a village. The high priestess of the village was afflicted by a strange supernatural disease, and she felt that the portents pointed to the neighboring village. The neighboring village was under a different kind of illness, and the players met with the supernatural protectors of that village, and agreed to a chat over the meal. At the meal, the ferret-esque leader of the other village, Tubor Valichian, announced that they had discovered the source of the evil, and it came from the players' village! In fact, they had sent a contingent of troops to dispatch that evil. There was a rush to stop the troops from battling each other and work together, and as the war was quieted, it was discovered the source of the evil: the players' own high priestess and the formerly imprisoned brother of two of the player characters! After a fight, the players managed to stop them before they started a second war between the villages. Overall, I think it was an excellent adventure thanks to the tightly linked player characters, and the good role-playing on the players' parts. Thanks, guys! This morning I have a second StoryCards game, and we've double-checked that it is proper in the book with the errata we received. Hopefully, we will have no more miscommunications like we did yesterday.
Posted on: 2007/8/17 6:07
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Re: Say hello! |
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Not too shy to talk
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 I've found that if you select one of the other editors, the smileys work. For example, I'm using FCK WYSIWYG. I'm not exactly sure why that is. 
Posted on: 2007/8/12 5:15
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Re: This Just In! |
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Not too shy to talk
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That's too bad about the tuckboxes, but I think a little fly in the ointment is to be expected, from what I've heard from indie game designers. What is so different about the way the boxes were printed? Are you sure you're not being too hard on yourselves? The stuff I've seen so far with the cards looks great!
Either way, congratulations on such great work. Just remember, the manual doesn't have to be "perfect"; it's more important that it's "done".  (And because it is being published as a PDF, we can update it later to make it "better".)
Posted on: 2007/8/9 4:41
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Gamemastering 101: Texas Hold'em and the Hypergeometric Distribution! (Wha?) |
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Today, I'd like to chat about a fifty-cent word I picked up in a statistics class a few years ago, which greatly improved my game design: hypergeometric distribution. (link to Wikipedia). It's really not as complicated as it sounds, and it's actually quite useful. I will use this article to try to make it easy for you to use.
Why am I sharing it with you? If you are a game geek like I am. Carl and I used this function to do some probability balancing in StoryCards, and I can teach you the probabilities behind things. Better yet, you can plug in a few numbers into this function to get the odds of any situation where you make a number of draws hoping to get something of a certain kind. Basically, the hypergeometric distribution is a formula which you can plug in 4 numbers to spit out the probability of drawing something out of a lot. To actually perform the formula by hand, you would need to multiply and divide a number of factorials. Fortunately, I've done the hard part, and made a handy-dandy spreadsheet for your pleasure: Download that puppy and take a look inside. You'll find 4 variables in there that can be twiddled: n = The number draws you will get. N = The number of total cards in the deck. d = The number of the type that you want to draw D = The number of that type in the deck. (Column E you can ignore, except for E4, which are the actual odds. The other numbers I left in there for number crunching and error checking.) This equation can be used to figure the odds of StoryCards. Let's try an example! Let's say you have a Strength of 5, and you are trying to push a particularly large boulder out of the way. The StoryGuide informs you that you need three successes. Let's stick those figures into our formula: n = 5 (the number of draws you get) N = 60 (assuming a fresh deck) d = 3 (the number of successes you want) D = 24 (12 of the Strength suit, and 12 of the Essence suit) You plug this into the spreadsheet, and you get .2334.. or 23%. Is this the right answer? Well... no. You see, it's possible to do BETTER than exactly 3 successes. If you get four or five successes, then you also succeed. So if we twiddle the "d" variable above to 4 and 5, we get the chance for getting EXACTLY 4 successes, and then the odds of EXACTLY 5 successes. Since all of those possibilities are possible success situations, we just need to add them up: 3 Successes: .233474 4 Successes: .070042 5 Successes: .007782 Total: .311298 (31.13%) You should also note that I'm assuming a fresh deck here. If you know what a few cards are (like, for example, you have already seen some in the discard pile) you may need to change N (number of cards in the deck) and D (number of the suit you want). How is this useful? Well, it can be used in any kind of card game where you draw cards (or tiles, or whatever) and you want to know the odds of getting something in what you have left. Let's say, perhaps, that you are playing Texas Hold'em, and draw an Ace-seven off-suit. You want to know the odds of drawing one more Ace. n = 5 (the number of draws you get... the whole river) N = 50 (You have two cards out of 52, but you don't know the rest) d = 1 (For starters, but be sure to add in d=2 and d=3) D = 3 (Three aces in the deck, bay-bee!) So, the possibilities are: Draw 1 ace. (d=1) .252551 Draw 2 aces. (d=2) .022959 Draw 3 aces. (d=3) .00051 Remember, we must add up all of the winning possibilities. Adding up all three winning possibilities gives you .27602, or 27.6%. Still want to bet that shirt on an ace-high? Next time I'd like to chat about the the golden rule of StoryCards: "Do what makes the game fun."
Posted on: 2007/8/1 11:53
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Re: The GREAT IDEA contest. |
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Wow, Lawrence... all of those are really GREAT IDEAS!
Posted on: 2007/7/21 4:51
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Gamemastering 101: Smooth Combats |
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Many years ago I was part of the Fantasy Club at Purdue. (No. Not THAT kind of fantasy you perv!) We played Adventure Quest, a role-playing game by Daniel Lawrence, which evolved over decades of play. It is essentially a fantasy-themed RPG. This fantasy club is still running strong. Dan has since released his 500-page Adventure Quest system as a free download, with extra rules for larping and such. As an aside, he is currently working on an automagic world-building utility which you plug in a few variables, a computer does some crunching, and out pops a character with a complete history. He uses a massive database of old characters as a guide for creating new realistic characters which seem like they have a real history. Anyway, sometimes those club games would get pretty large, and often there would be just one GM (Dan) for twenty or thirty players! Most of my games scale a magnitude less than that: My biggest crowd is generally about 8. However, the techniques that Dan used to corral 30 players works equally as well for corralling a smaller group of eight or four. There are five phases of Combat, with four repeating, and one only used once:
The initative phase is only used once at the beginning of combat. Who acts first? I usually make a judgement about this using the golden rule, "Do what makes the best story." Next, during each round, I will solicit questions from the group. Often during this phase I will try to map out for the players where they are standing in relation to their opponents. To streamline things, I try to have the players ONLY ask questions in this phase. During the prepare actions phase, I have players independentlly think of what they will do during the next round. I do not go on to the next round until all players have decided what they will do. (I have them "lock in" what they will do, based on the honor system.) I also like to have players give the thumbs-up sign; when all players have their action locked in and the thumbs-up, we go on! This gives a feel of the "fog of war" because players will not know what their comrades-in-arms are doing. Additionally, during this phase, I try to think of what the enemy might be doing. The next round I have players declare their locked-in action. I usually try to go in a somewhat random order... it doesn't matter much, since the actions are decided on in the previous round, but I like to give each player a chance to "go first." I address each player. (Sometimes, I get a player who wants to go back to the information phase during this round! At this point, I try to gently ask them what their locked-in action was, and advise them that I'll answer their question in a moment. It usually only happens once. Once players get used to the system in about a round or so, they seem to get the hang of it.) Finally, I do cleanup, advise of any feat checks that need to be made, and give resolutions. For example, if a player stated that they were attacking the dragon, I ask them to draw cards for the attack. Furthermore, the dragon won't take this lying down, and he will probably do a counter-attack. We also update the map with the players, and prepare for a new round of information. Of course, all of you come from your own background of GMing, so feel free to bring to the table your own system. Be true to yourself and the story, and you shouldn't go wrong. What works for me, may not work for you. Do you have your own tips and techniques for GMing during combat? (It does not necessarily have to be for GMing StoryCards) If so, please respond to this article and list them below. Next time I will talk about something that may only appeal to math geeks or people interested in game design: What are the odds of drawing a particular suit from a deck of StoryCards? Yes, I will simplify the "hypergeometric distribution" so that even a non-mathish person can understand it.
Posted on: 2007/7/13 10:41
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Re: The GREAT IDEA contest. |
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"cowardly monsters intimidated by primitive tribesmen" What???? I'm not familiar with that one!!!
Posted on: 2007/7/13 8:35
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