Monday, March 26, 2012

Podcasting and Probabilities

It's been a little while since I've talked about gaming, my last post being mostly about a dream-like movie. Not a whole lot has happened with the game, but I did have a bit of a moment of clarity and I may (emphasis on MAY) have focused on a system. Nothing major, it's just the core mechanic that I want to get down - there are loads of permutations, and bizarreness to build around it.

If you imagine that the basic mechanic of Doctor Who is Stat+Skill+2D6=beat a difficulty, it's how that mechanic is implemented that makes the difference to the feel of the game. But without a core mechanic, it's hard to write the bits that go around it.

Sitting and cashing up at the day-job, the realisation came to me, and I had to stop and write it down on a scrap of paper. Then the next stop was (a) typing it all up so my notes made sense, (b) sounding it out to the genius gamers that I've been brainstorming with to get their feedback and (c) work out some probabilities to see if it's fair and works.


We'll see. It may all change and go a different route. When not thinking about the core mechanic, we had an excellent discussion about how the game can be used. And I have to admit, some ideas that came out of that surprised even me! I thought I'd worked out the many possibilities of WILD, but the scope is even more immense and bizarre than I thought.

I'll post more as and when it happens.

Meanwhile, I'm on the interwebs a bit more - I recently did a podcast with the cool guys at CarnageCast - (You can download and listen to it HERE). The podcast is a great chat about my work on Conspiracy X 2.0 and the game's recent revival thanks to Kickstarter. Give it a listen, hopefully I won't say "er" or "erm" too much during it.

Until next post! Sweet dreams!

4 comments:

Daniel said...

Enjoyed the interview. A whole 'nuther volume written, huh? Cool.

David F. Chapman said...

Oh yes... you never know! Hopefully one day!

Daniel said...

Given how well the Kickstarters have gone so far, I have high hopes! It must feel good to know that despite the very long period since publication of the core book, folks still really want the follow-ups.

Zombie Lord said...

I am very excited about the Con-X lineup. I have all of the old material, but always preferred Classic Unisystem. I had started doing conversions back when Con-X 2.0 was released, and had hoped to see the rest of the line fleshed out. Then came the pdf for E.T.'s followed by kickstarting 2 physical copies of new books. I really appreciate your updating and conversions.