Two more mundane characters up on the DFRPG Samples page.
First, there’s Johnny Boniface, an ex-soldier of God who pushes the definition of mundane.
And Lyn McBride, a young lady who’s a little too smart for her own good.
That leaves one left to post.
So, tomorrow half my group comes over for our first test of the conflict system in the Dresden Files RPG. It’s very similar to the Spirit of the Century system, but with a couple of tweaks to add a little detail (like weapons and armor) and scale up the grit a bit. It looks like DFRPG conflict is going to be a little nastier than SotC, more of a noire feel than a pulp one.
Both systems allow for different types of conflict. There’s the common physical conflict system (i.e. combat), of course. But they also allow conflict in the mental and social arenas. So yeah, your character can lose an argument by using the mechanics. Or get embarrassed in public. Stuff like that. There are rules for your confidence and your reputation taking a hit and affecting you throughout the game. Or longer. Man, I love the Aspect system in this game. That’s where this kind of flexibility comes from.
Anyway, these tests aren’t going to be a full-on game, just a stress test of the system. I’m coming up with one of each type of conflict, and we’re going to play through it, and see how it goes. Postmortem on the play, then maybe run them again to see if different choices in play make a big difference in the outcome or if the stats and skills on the character sheets determine winner. Depends on how much time we have.
All this means that, today, I’m trying to come up with one of each type of conflict to play through, based on the Magical Winnipeg setting and the characters we’ve created. The physical one is easy: I figure a bunch of Mad Cowz led by a hyena lycanthrope. I’m struggling a little with the mental and social conflicts, though. I’ve got a number of options, and I’m trying to work out which ones will work best for a group. Here’s what I’m toying with:
Mental
Social
Now, all these things are doable with the system (and how great is that?), but some are going to be more interesting than others. I’ve got to put together encounters where everyone has a chance to contribute, and not everything hinges on a single roll, or a single skill. While things like that might work in a normal game, it doesn’t fairly test the system, which is the point of all this. So, I’m thinking.
I’ll let you know what I come up with, and how people handle it.
First off, a new character posted: Iris McPherson, another crazy street person, this one with an alien fixation.
Next, I noticed on some forums out there that people were a little disappointed that I haven’t dealt with the magic system yet. There’s a reason for that: it’s not done. We have, in fact, just received the first third of it – Supernatural Stunts. After that, we still need Spellcasting and Artifacts. Don’t worry; these will get extensive coverage as we test them.
Also, there have been some questions about release date. Now, I’m not privy to the discussions at Evil Hat, and I don’t make any decisions for them, so all I can tell you is what they’ve told me. There is no release date yet. Evil Hat is very committed to an extensive playtest to make sure the game is as good as it can be when it’s released. That’s going to take time, not because the game is bad, but because testing takes time. Might it be out by GenCon? I dunno. If I had to guess, I’d say that was pretty optimistic.
Finally, there have been some discussions where rules are reversed engineered from the characters I’ve posted. That’s cool, and some are pretty close to what we’ve been given. Keep in mind, though, that this is a very early stage of alpha testing. Things are going to change. What things? I don’t know, but they’re going to change.
Just sayin’.
Another character added to the DFRPG Samples page: Sydney Rae, who’s had enough of the White Court in Winnipeg.
So, I’ve mentioned my playtesters several times, but I haven’t told you about them.
Well, I don’t want to violate their privacy, so all you’re gonna get is their names and a rundown of our general demographics.
Including me, there are nine people in this playtest: Chris, Sandy, Kieran, Penny, Vicky, Clint, Tom, Fera, and me. Four women, five men. Age ranges from mid-teens to mid-forties. There are members who have been gaming for just about three decades, and one member for whom this is the first RPG experience. Three people in the group run games on a regular basis.
And they’re all creative, energetic, and excited about the game.
Now, I sort of act as front-man for the group, but everyone reading this (and my official playtest reports to Evil Hat) needs to keep in mind that I’m not doing this alone. I couldn’t. Even if I tried, the results would be no where near as good without this dedicated group of gamers.
So, thanks, guys. You make this possible. You deserve the credit. Feel free to introduce yourselves through the comments, if you like. Feel free not to, if you don’t.
I’m just happy we get to play together.
Just want to let you folks know the status of things, and our plans for the playtest over the next couple of weeks.
First, a couple of days ago, Evil Hat sent us two background chapters on the Dresdenverse. One is a Who’s Who of characters from the books, and the other is sort of a monster chapter – info on the types of bad guys that might come up. I’ve distributed those to my playtesters, and we’re currently reading through them. They were written by Chad Underkoffler, who also used to write for Unknown Armies, so I know they’re going to be solid stuff.
Second, just tonight, Evil Hat sent us the chapter on supernatural stunts. There’s still the chapter on spellcasting and the one on artifacts to come, but this really puts us in a good position to start seeing how the magic works in the game.
Now, my plans.
Next week, I’m running a couple of sessions using only the mundane characters that have been created. It’s just a test of the conflict system – not a full game. So, I’m going to try to run one physical, one mental, and one social conflict in each session. If possible, we’ll rerun one or two of them, to see what effect different choices make.
A week or two after that, we’re going to get together and create supernatural characters, using the new rules.
Once that’s done, we’re actually going to run a couple of games – maybe two or three session arcs, seeing how the whole thing fits together. That’s the part I’m really looking forward to.
So, that’s what you can expect to see about the DFRPG over the next little while.
Oh, and I’ll continue posting characters as I receive them from my playtesters. I know it’s tough to wait, but it can be even tougher to get them to send them to me.
I’ve set up a page for the material my playtest group produces for the Dresden Files RPG. You should see the link in the header.
I’ve moved the write-up on Magical Winnipeg there, and added three of the ten characters the group has produced. More will be added as I can.
About ten days ago, the fine folks at Evil Hat provided us with a big chunk of rules for the game. Enough, in fact, to run character creation, as long as we stuck to mundane types.
Why just mundane? Two reasons. One, they’re still working on the section for supernatural characters. Two, they want mundane characters to be viable in the system.
Yeah. They want to make it as good a game choice to play Murphy as it is to play Harry. They’ve got an interesting balance mechanic for this that seems, right now, to work fairly well. It has to do with paying for Stunts with Refresh Rate.
What does that mean? It means that the more Stunts (which let you stretch the rules to your advantage in very specific ways) you have, the fewer Fate Points (which let you stretch the rules to your advantage in more general ways) you start each game session with. Mundane Stunts cost less than supernatural Stunts, so mundane characters will tend to have higher Refresh Rates than supernatural ones.
It looks not only workable, but truly inspired. Of course, this is early in the playtest, so things may change.
Anyway.
Character creation works similarly to Spirit of the Century, which you can see here, with some variations to make the system fit the setting a little better. You pick Aspects for different parts of your character’s history, pick Skills, pick Stunts, star in a novel, guest star in other novels, and you’re set.
The character creation of Spirit of the Century was one of the things (one of the many things) about that game that completely blew me away, so it’s nice to see the best parts of it live on in Dresden Files. You do character creation as a group, and you help each other with your characters. Discussion of Aspects, background, good Skill and Stunt choices, and pretty much every other part of the character really helps you zero in on getting the character you want to play.
But the sweetest, most brilliant touch has to be the novels.
Everyone makes up the title of a novel starring their character. Then they write a brief (I restrict it to a single sentence) set-up of the novel. Then they write a brief (again, I impose a limit of a single sentence) account of what their character does in the novel.
Pretty cool so far, right? Just wait.
Now that you’ve done that, you swap novels with each other. You get to guest star in another character’s novel, adding a sentence about how your character helps out in their story. And then you swap again, and guest star in someone else’s novel.
Why do I think that’s so cool? Because of too many games where the characters meet in a bar as strangers and decide to trust each other with their lives. Because of too many games where people hang together because they’re PCs, and no other reason.
Here, characters have a history with at least two other characters. They know each other. They’ve worked together. They have a reason to get together and trust each other.
And it’s just bloody fun. Try it. Check out some of the novels and characters from my Spirit of the Century Pick-Up League site. They rock.
So, we wound up with a nice batch of characters, ranging from crazy street people looked after by faeries to cops in the organized crime unit, from nightclub bouncers to victims of White Court vampire preachers.
Everyone was quite pleased with their character. They’re really looking forward to trying the combat system (we’ve got the bare bones, and that’s the next step), and to creating some supernatural characters (when we get the rules).
I’ll let you know how it goes.
Okay, so the new Dresden Files RPG has a system in it for converting your hometown into a playable setting for the game. Well, less a system than a structure for brainstorming and relating ideas. It’s quite good. We tried it as a group in our playtest, and managed to turn Winnipeg, Manitoba into a city where we could all see adventures to run and characters to play. I thought it was pretty impressive.
So, here‘s what we came up with.
So. I’ve started a blog. I guess.
See, I managed to get my gaming group in on the early alpha playtest of the Dresden Files RPG, by the folks at Evil Hat Productions. They do good games over there; check ’em out if you haven’t. It uses their FATE system, which they also used in Spirit of the Century, which is probably the smoothest, coolest, most true-to-the-source pulp game I have ever seen.
Lemme back up a bit.
The Dresden Files are a series of modern fantasy novels by Jim Butcher. They deal with Harry Dresden, a Chicago wizard who advertises in the yellow pages. Hilarity ensues. They’re fun books; Jim has really struck a balance between an updated noire detective story and an urban fantasy world worthy of Charles de Lint or Emma Bull. There are currently nine books in the series, with a tenth due out in April of this year. If the idea of a modern Phillip Marlowe battling the forces of darkness appeals to you at all, I say pick ’em up.
The novels also spawned a TV series that lasted a season. It wasn’t without its charm, but it wasn’t as well done as the books.
Anyway, I found out that the rpg license for the series had been bought by a little company called Evil Hat Productions. This worried me. Licensed properties are always kind of shaky in the rpg world, and I had never heard of Evil Hat prior to this. But they also advertised this cool pulp game called Spirit of the Century, so I decided to buy it and see what kind of chops they had.
Wow.
Blew me away. Completely.
After a single reading of the Spirit of the Century rules, I went from worried to ecstatic. These guys knew their stuff. Their thinking about game design, about what made for fun mechanics, about how mechanics fueled story, all of it: rock solid. Much of it even brilliant. Some of it revolutionary.
So, when I ran into Fred Hicks and Leonard Balsera at GenCon this year (Aaah, who am I kidding? I deliberately went looking for them!) and begged them to tell me when Dresden Files would be released, they took pity on me and told me to contact them later about playtesting.
Now, I’ve done playtesting before. I’ve even written and sold a fair amount of game material for D&D and Unknown Armies. So I leaped at the chance, and they decided that they would like input from me and my game group.
There’s a bit of a catch, though: instead of a Non-Disclosure Agreement, I had to sign a Disclosure Pledge, saying that I would talk about the game, and some of the stuff I see, in public, on the web, etc. They want me (and all the other early alpha playtesters) to talk about our experiences with the playtest, so that people start to see the way the game is shaping up and get excited.
And there’s some neat stuff to get excited about, lemme tell you.
So, over the next few weeks and months, I’m going to talk about the playtest here. Keep an eye out for some tidbits that have come out of our experiences, and for some general comments about the game and the process.
I’m not going to post the playtest documents, of course; they don’t belong to me and they’re not finished.
But there’s still some neat stuff I can show you.
Stay tuned.
