Welp, I guess I’m blogging again. But with purpose this time, so it’s not just meaningless mid-2000s nostalgia.
I’m starting my first AW hack, and with everyone talking about taxonomy of AW, it got me thinking about WordPress, so I’m using a WP site to record ideas and patch the whole thing together.
The as yet unnamed game is a sci-fi horror game meant to evoke the And Then There Were None haunted house in space of Alien, Aliens, Event Horizon and DooM.
You can follow it here as it develops: https://sinisterbeard.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/welcome-to-not-the-void/
https://sinisterbeard.wordpress.com/2016/06/17/welcome-to-not-the-void/
Successful combat rolls buy you time, or protect someone or something. You’re buying a moment to act, even to think, during which the MC won’t be making a move against you. At the same time every combat roll is a risk. You can suffer harm. You can run out of ammo, or lose the use of your weapon. You can take care of the one in front of you, and as the echoes of your gunfire fade, you hear the skittering in the walls pick up pace.
Toby Sennett Nice! One of the things I want to include is ammo, but not in a a very exact, counting every bullet kind of way. The idea is that (like in the source material) if the creatures get their hands on you, you’re basically toast, so ammo sort of acts as your health track, but a health track you have to voluntarily expend in order to not die.
Instead of taking harm, you have a death time. Successful rolls push back your dead time. Situations and set backs might bring your dead time earlier. When the in game time reaches that time you die. Play books with powerful abilities have early dead times, but ones that are less flashy start with later ones.
David Rothfeder Ooooooooo that’s good. Because otherwise your Burkes and your Newts would die instantly. Also stops it being all combat, all the time. Builds tension massively too.
I’d also take a look at Mountain Witch as it has a great mechanic that prevents players of dead characters from disengaging
That’s a valid concern.
thinking about this more, my sugestion could create an interesting situation where players who’e near thier death time are looking for shit that will get them to roll, which can create complications that effect other player’s death times.
Will check out Mountain Witch. That’s one of the early Game Chef games, right? My plan for dead characters is for them to take a GM role, introducing and responsible for a new related threat.
So, to put it in Aliens terms, when Gorman and Vasquez die, one of them becomes the exploding nuclear plant and the other becomes the alien queen. Hopefully it’ll give a sense of racheting action and tension.
Talking of Gorman and Vasquez, “You always were an asshole, Gorman” is the sort of close-to-death move you mention above. They rolled a 7-9 on their “Take em with you” move, killing some of the aliens but allowing the GM to put Newt in a spot as the explosion knocks her off her ladder…
P.s. Thanks for engaging with this!
Yeah mountain witch was early, I believe it was the same year as Polaris and Ganakogak.