Tea Wagon Games

 Original Dwindle had hit points, and rolling for damage. I kept this as I wanted a bit of an old-school feel. The HP were limited to 10 + 5 upgrades of 3 points each. This gave a total of 25 max HP. A tier 5 NPC will hit for 1d12 points. This means a PC could be down in as few as 3 hits. Armor decreases damage (max 5 armor to reduce damage by 5). But there is also a chance of loosing armor each time you're hit. With the more narrative approach to this edition, I'm doing away with swingy damage, and hit point pools. For more narrative damage, I have to admit that I am in love with the system presented in Blades in the Dark. But I will be modifying it a bit, of course. Trauma Often as a result of a failed roll, you will suffer Trauma. Trauma includes any negative effect such as injury from a skirmish, shock from a shoggoth, or delirium from a drug. You have 6 trauma boxes. When they are all filled, your character will leave the campaign in a suitable manner. For example, if the...

 Quick update because it has been a long couple of days. The character creation session went well for my middle schooler game. We still have some items to round out their backstories, but most of it is set. Hour hour got us to work through their character sheets. Like I said, a fluent English speaking gamer could probably make a character in 30 minutes or less. But for non-native students, a bulk of my time was spent explaining how Discern is different than notice, look, see, observe, etc. Or what exactly Defy means.  Also, Korea is entering shutdown mode again. So I am not sure how that will affect my schedule, and everything else. If posts become intermittent, I hope you'll be understanding. Finally, I am proud of my daughter. This morning she taught me how to make an origami bat. She already had a small box full of about 10. Somehow the idea to use them to tell a story popped into my head, so we got started. We sat down, worked out our plot, and then broke it down into indi...

 Tabletop Role-Playing Games got their start in the US. But they are becoming a truly international phenomenon. As I mentioned before, I live in Korea. I have talked to locals about RPGs, and usually they either think I'm talking about video games or look at me like birds have flown out of my mouth. I have found a nice group of other expats, and we enjoy a good game once in a while. But apparently, there is an underground TRPG scene in Korea. Also, I find it interesting that they use TRPG instead of the western TTRPG. Also, Korea, with its huge focus on studying and schools, has a great independent publishing industry. In a nearby city there is a book district that has publishers, vendors, distributors, and book cafes all in a few blocks radius.  I'm still just dipping my toes into this scene, but here are some links I have found so far. This is the blog that first opened my eyes to this niche culture. Here is the English SRD for a Korean game. Here is the Korean SRD of the sa...

 Tomorrow morning I have a game with a group of middle schoolers. What is important here is not the rules, but getting them to express themselves narratively. However, I will still need to be able to express myself clearly to them and walk them through the character creation system. Often, when I am explaining a new system, or if I am going to teach a subject or grammar structure I am unfamiliar with, I will walk through the process a few times in my head. Preferably, if I have a free space, I will walk through it outloud. This is a dwindle derivative. Dwindle , of course, uses the class resource die, this one uses Stress. If the stress doesn't work, I'll move them over to Full Dwindle. Today, I'm going to try to do it here. I mocked up some character sheets here , if you want to follow along at home. Yes, there are 2 character sheets per page. The original page size was A4, but it'll probably fit ok on Letter size. Character Creation So this game, is going to be differ...

 Last night I began to write a quick summary of the Dwindle changes. This was primarily to get the ideas down on paper. When I first made dwindle, 18 months ago, one of my goals was to have all the dice (d4~d20) used during play. But lately, I've been thinking of dropping the d20. It is just so swingy. I was crunching the numbers last night with anydice.com  . This is an excellent resource for punching in numbers to see what the actual values are.  Here is a spread for the new mechanics I am looking at . It really helps to sort by "At Least". After looking at the outcomes, I think I'll keep the d20s. The newest Background mechanic greatly improves your chances for success, so I am hoping this will have the players talk about their characters more. This will cut down on the number of dice the players are adding together, but still make the bonuses meaningful. Recent sessions have had outcomes of less than 20 be the exception. This contradicts this post , as well as, ...

 There are lots of stories out there about using RPGs in the classroom. I too am a teacher. In particular I teach EFL in South Korea. One of my classes is a group of middle schoolers. Their moms simply want them to keep their interest in English, and to continue to use it. Basically, I have the greenlight to just play games with them for 2 hours a week. Often during our lessons the more dominant students run the class, and the lower level, passive students just listen. When I bring in an RPG, everyone gets a turn, and even the passive students will attempt to express their intentions and to describe their actions. For this class, I've been teaching them for nearly a year. During this time, they have been my playtesters for a myriad of my games. We also ran Kids on Bikes, which was a very cool story. That system does a lot of things right for one-shots. But we found it difficult to keep it going as a longer game. So this time, I am taking a reconsideration of a basic skill test, thr...

 I am really digging the Dungeon World basic moves right now, and I think it'll be cool to narrow down my set of 10 abilities down to a smaller number. So without any further explanation, I will define my abilities here. This write up is written using Dwindle rules. Abilities Abilities are used to describe your character's special skills. These may be spells if you are a wizard, special maneuvers if you are a fighter, or special skills if you are more of a Jack-of-all-trades adventurer. Using your ability requires a Class Resource check. Regardless of the check, the usage of the Ability occurs, but on a 1 or 2, your class resource die dwindles. At Tier 1, you begin with 2 abilities. When you create your abilities, chose 1 of the core types below. Flavor it with your class and a fancy name. You may add a description if you'd like, and consider how investing extra points will affect it's result. Extra point examples can include: +1 extra damage or protection, +1 target,...

 Two for Tuesday? That is my goal today. I took a break from writing yesterday. It was a tough day at work, and I just wanted to relax and watch DRX in the LCK. So I am hoping to write a post this morning, as well as, one tonight. Last night, after I finished watching DRX get trounced by T1, I stumbled across something that got me thinking about using PbtA moves as special abilities. For the general rule set I am trying to build, I want skills to be very specific. In the end, I want them to be your link to your contacts and supplies. This is of course outside of defining what your character can do and not do.  On the other hand, I want the Abilities to be a bit more narrow. I had a list of abilities in the Dwindle Class and Ability post, but maybe those abilities need some work. Blades in the Dark is as close to PbtA as I have come. But what I was reading last night, kinda opened my eyes to the move system. From my understanding, a move needs a trigger, I'm guessing this can...

 D windle is going well. I need to write up descriptions for skill test mechanics and for resource usage mechanics. These shouldn't take too long. I'll also need to to items. Then I'll need instructions for GM, creating NPCs, and how to run them. In other games, I ran my current Zenagos set up with my daughter again. She groks the system well, and says she likes it.  She finally had a chance to roll 10d6, they barely fit in her hands, and she didn't get a single 6! Also, as a side effect of understanding the mechanics better, she is more hesitant to reroll, because she doesn't want the blue markers (stress).  But I must say that I find it a bit boring. I was brainstorming yesterday, and I thought of a way to utilize d12 (or possibly 2d6?) to make a similar system without requiring fistfuls of d6s. I love the simplicity of the Year 0 Engine, but it does get a bit monotonous. I have an idea for a zany post-apoc setting that includes Kaiju, Zombies, and Demons. Still ...

 My plan for the Zenagos Mechanics is a little like the Year Zero Engine mixed in with a healthy dose of Pokethulhu and a dash of narrative design..maybe I got the idea from 13th Age, but I'm not sure. For this system, you roll a pool of d6s just like in Y0E. Your skills are the main source of these dice, with each skill granting from 5 to 2 dice each. The skills are tiered like those in Gods of Aureata. Then the character also has 5 backgrounds. These can include Species if there are more than just Human, as well as hobbies, jobs, and Class (much like in Dwindle). Each background that applies to the roll adds 1 die. In the playtest I was running the game for my daughter. She made a character that was half Carmen Sandiego and half 9-Tailed Fox. She groked the system very quickly (quicker than other systems I've played with her). I am thinking of having about 2/3rds of the skill points allocated at character creation, leaving about 10 points to be distributed as the character ad...

One of the best RPGs I have ever read is Pokethulhu . I don't know how well the actual mechanics would hold up during play, I think it would be to difficult for PCs to fail. However, the tie-in between the setting and the mechanics is spot-on. Not to mention the evocative (and funny) description of the rules that also expands on the setting of the fictional anime of the same name. But the most stealable bit of their game is the Pokethulhu ability system. Every little monster has the same 4 abilities, and two affinities. You then assign an affinity to an ability, and give the combination a descriptive name. So the Injure ability might be a Bolt from the Blue if lightning is your affinity, or Death by a Thousand Cuts, if your affinity is paper. As someone that enjoys thinking about games, but hates creating a set number of abilities for each class, this was a lightbulb moment. This was the inspiration for Gods of Aureata . The ability to allow Players to mix and match abilities and a...

Metapost Incoming. If this does not interest you, I absolutely would not blame you for moving on. However, if you are considering starting a blog, or new to Blogger, this may interest you. This is Formatting  Formatting posts in Blogger is a pain. I mean a ROYAL pain in the backend. Actually in the frontend because we are dealing with the HTML and CSS. You see, Blogger is a CMS (Content Management System). It is supposed to help you manage your blog, to easily create new posts, and to provide tools to design a nice looking platform. Their are big names in the industry. WordPress is one, Tumbler is another. Most CMSs have some sort of pay hierarchy. This is where Blogger stands out. It is simply there, waiting in your Google account. It enables anyone to create a basic blog with little or no hassle. There are some basic themes to choose from, and ways to customize them. The main way to theme a website is through CSS. CSS is a file that says, for example, the first paragraph should h...

 Skills to pay the bills. I find skills to be the core of any game. Sure, some game don't have "Skills". Instead they have "Aspects", "Traits", "Professions", or "Abilities". But I think skills are simply the basic quantifiers for what your character is good at doing. I don't care if it gives a flat bonus, an extra die, or a reroll, having a skill, or investments in your skill, makes doing some activities easier than others. I also like to play with how skills are named. Infiltrating, Infiltration, and Infiltrator all have a different feeling to me. Infiltrating  is like the most basic skill name, and would simply be used when trying to enter a secure location. Infiltration  sounds more like an umbrella skill, and could include bypassing security, wearing uniforms to blend in, or slinking in the shadows. Infiltrator means you are someone practice in the arts of Infiltration. You know other infiltrators, and you can turn anything...

D windle has a lot going on. It also has a whole bunch of Skills. This is a good basic skill list. But I am thinking of limiting the skills, much like I do in my new games. For example, in Zenagos, I want your best skill to have a maximum value of 5, and your worst skills to have values of 2. This does a few things: First, there is no Maxing of all skills as players increase in level. Second, This should encourage players to coordinate their top 3 skills. I don't think any Current player in Dwindle has over 20 skill points, so I think I can get away with a change. The Redesign Currently Dwindle's skills include: Athletics Attune Combat Command Consort Deception Insight Negotiation Notice Perform Scholarship Stealth Survival Tempt Tinker Theft In Gods of Aureata, I was able to cut the skills down to 10. I did this in part, by naming them after different jobs: Grifter, Tinkerer, Medic, etc. If it was something you could imagine someone in that role taking on, then you could use ...

When I originally wrote Dwindle , any skill roll dice that had minimum or maximum values affected the degrees of the roll's success. Dice with 1s would make the roll less successful, causing setbacks (complications) on successes, or making failures into critical failures. Dice that showed their maximum values would do the same. They would grant a bonus on a failure, or cause a success to be a critical success. The rule worked really well. Then I tweaked it. Now instead of instant modification of the outcome, the characters gain cookies (my term for any metacurrency in games: power points, inspiration points, etc). This makes multiples 1s or die maximums count for more, but I think we lost some of the fun. Players began to just fling chips around without narration or description. Time to go back to the original. Bonuses and Setbacks Whenever you gain the minimum or maximum value on any dice in a skill roll, you will gain a Setback or a Bonus, respectively. These create nuance within...

So my plan is to only rewrite the parts that need serious overhaul here. For full rules, head over the the Dwindle Page . Backgrounds Backgrounds have undergone several iterations in Dwindle. From working as a spendable resource, to being largely ignored. I hope this will bring in some new life to character backgrounds. Backgrounds Your backgrounds include your species, class, and any hobbies, heritage, previous jobs, or affiliations from your backstory. You can have up to 5 Backgrounds for your character. When your background will be relevant to a skill roll, you may add a Background die, starts as a d4, to your roll. For each additional background that would apply, your background die will increase 1 step. My Dwarven , Trapper , turned Ranger wishes to set up a trap and ambush the enemy in a cave. All 3 of these backgrounds (Dwarf, Trapper, Ranger) could be applied to the task of setting up a trap and preparing an ambush, so I add a d8 to my roll. Each time your apply your backgrou...

Yesterday my game group was able to get together. We had a full group, including a new player who just got out of quarantine. This means we are up to 6 total members (5PCs, 1GM). I realized that I am going to have to be more strict at splitting the spotlight time between players a little better.  I am personally wanting to start a new game. I'm sort of tired of the current PCs' modus operandi  is to go into a town and cause as much chaos as possible, and then run away. We are running in the 13th Age default setting (just because it was ready made and fairly standard). They rocked into Santa Cora to register their new religion that they have created, which was a great excuse to introduce them to the new PC who happens to be a paladin. They decided to hold a rave to celebrate their religion's creation, and to try to find new members. Everything mostly went well for them, until the Empire showed up to challenge them on some outstanding warrants. They had some good rolls, and w...

Juggling 3 projects (within my hobby) is a bit confusing. So I set up a Trello board to help me keep track of things I need to do. Trello is a webapp that simulates a Kanban board. Kanban boards are a project managment tool that was invented in the Japanese auto industry (or they were at least popularized there). Before I get into a description of Kanban boards, here is my Game To Do board on Trello . The concept is simple: Divide your board up into columns, with each column representing a stage for your tasks. Then each row of the board is for a single task. For example you could have: To Do Started Finished Trash Dishes Laundry Floors Then make a card for each job. As the job goes through its process, you move it across the board. To Do Started Finished Trash Dishes Laundry ...

Sure. It doesn't really flow off the tongue, but it is just a working title. Maybe the Zenagos of Vaeth might be a better name. But it'll probably just be Zenagos by the time I'm done. I kept mulling over the God Hunters of Vaeth, but I could not get the right feeling for the game. I have great ideas for the system, but I could not get them shoehorned into Gods Hunters of Vaeth.Then I was thinking about the idea for stress. I want stress to partially bad, but also partially good. On the Bad Hand, it will reduce your dice pool. On the Good Hand, it will be spent to power your abilities. This got me thinking about psionics, and unstable powers and characters, and the big frustrating stress explosion. I may have written this before. I'm tired and a bit rambley... Anyways, during my morning commute, I got a lot of good writing done. Don't worry, I was on a train. The Zenagos are an idea that I've had bumbling around in my head for a few years. Zenagos The Zenagos (p...

On Saturday we'll have yet another game of Dwindle . I have mentioned the system before, and since it is my group's go-to game I figured I should maybe expound on it a bit. However, I would like to note that I am a bit bored with the rule set and the game. I think this is important, because the Rules never reached an entirely completed state. It is playable with a bit of fudging, and there is left-over text that is no longer relevant in the current iteration that needs to be cleaned out. So I will not be posting the downloads just yet. Dwindle is a hybrid d20 system. One of my players abhors d20, but he says it is his favorite d20 game. I think that is praise.... Base Rolling Mechanic The basic mechanic is you roll a d20. If your result is 15 or higher, you succeed. There is Advantage and Disadvantage, which is almost exactly the same as 5th ed. but with the change that you can have both at the same time. If this occurs you simply take the middle value. Skills There is a list o...

I think I've been going at this whole design thing the wrong way; for my new game at least. For The Gods of Aureata the Affinity and Intervention system works really well. So well, I have now decided that I am leaving the rule system as it stands. I'm going to wrap up the game in a one city, 12 Affinity, 12 Intervention system that I have build for it.  After listening to the recording of the first Beta Test, it really seems like everything ran well. The players got the hang of the rules, and everything came together to make a fun one-shot. I would really love to run another game of GoA soon, but I have a feeling that the gang will want to get back to Dwindle.  Note to Self: Make a publishable version of Dwindle . Anyways, thinking of GoA, Dwindle, exploring the excellent Nibiru RPG for the first time, and revisiting Frie Ligon's excellent offerings (such as Coriolis) got my brain working in a different direction. I really love the Year 0 Engine, which are Frie Ligon's...

I am almost certain that my next game will be The God Hunters of Vaeth . This will be a continuation of the game, Gods of Aureata . The idea is that Gods have manifested in the world, bringing wild magic with them. This means the world has become a weirder and crazier place full of strange phenomena. The PCs are possessed by some Gods, but are able to keep them in check (as long as their gift values stay low enough.) I am changing a bit of Gods of Aureata's setting. It'll be a bit more Tesla-Cyber-Punk in an urban fantasy setting. The world has always had the different Kin, they each developed well thanks to the difficulties of crossing the oceans. As I am considering changing everything to a d6 pool system, I am putting everything into 6x6 tables. Thus I needed to invent two new Kin. Here is the first of them.  The Coggers The Coggers are Vaethir powered autonomous servitors. They have 2 chicken-like legs that support an egg shaped pod, with the narrow end at the bottom. The...

This is just some brainstorming before I head out for the day. I think about my current Intervention system, and try to corner the setting and motivation for my next game. Affinities and Interventions I am thinking that Gods of Aureata is nearly finished. However, I have thought up of a new table system for the Interventions. The table system is 6x6 and combines the PC's Affinity with a simple manifestation. Manifestation Types include Armor, Armaments, Trinkets, Creatures, Room Fillers, and Alterations. Examples of Armor are Crown, Cloak, Chest-plate, etc. Simply combine the manifestation with the target Affinity, and that is your intervention. So if your Affinity is Squamous, a crown might be Medusa-like head of snakes, a crown in the form of coiled snakes, etc. The Cloak could be a cloak of crocodilian skin that gives armor, or a writhing cloak of snakes that attacks those near you. Or they attack you. I am also nearly finished changing 12 affinities into a 6x6 table of them. ...

The beta test of Gods of Aureata went well. I had to run it as Gods of Miami, due to time restraints (I did not have time to detail the world for the players). The first session took about 4 hours including Character and Cult creation and the first adventure. Input from the players: Mr. A He said the progress checking was tiresome. Truthfully, I did overdue the first couple of checks of their adventure. Having 20 progress to fill, EACH, and some lousy rolls, means scaling the building took a while.  The Fix Outline the rules that most actions will require 0 or 10 progress to complete. Larger Progress should be left to actions that are really on the knife's edge with some clocks coming in on the players. He also said the chance of success always felt like he was on the edge.  Note : They were running around TN 13 minimum for most checks, a 50% or better chance for success.  The Fix Nothing. As it stands, they only failed 2 or 3 times total for the afternoon. That is acc...