Update On Where We Are

Wednesday, 16th January, 2013 by Ashley 0 Comments

So things are moving on with Sanctuary, the survival horror game I had scribbled up a bit about. Mainly this is thanks to Kelly from the Dutch Invaders who had a really interesting setting from a novel she had been working on. She let me steal it and so I have been tweaking Sanctuary a bit and am intending to have a playtest?(storm) at Conception.

Other than that I have been mainly ill for the last month, so its been pretty slow going. I really want to get my Vampire done properly system finished, but its getting quite complex now, to the point that I am having to invent tech to meet some of the requirements for what I want out of play, so this isn’t going to be a short term goal and is probably going to go through lots of heavy playtest and rewrites.

So, yeah, sorry things have been quiet, but my health has just been getting in the way of me doing much and hopefully I am over the worst of it and should be back in full swing for Conception and beyond.

…

Oh and yes, you can take the lack of mention of NP as almost conclusive confirmation that I really am not interested in finishing it anymore, barring a massive epiphany.

General, Narrative Pursuits, News
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This is getting to be a habit

Tuesday, 4th December, 2012 by Ashley 0 Comments

We really need better NHS dental care in this country, but until then I guess it means I get to make slightly more regular updates.

I went to Dragonmeet at the weekend, what can I say? It was Dragonmeet, same as always. I helped out with the Indiemeet Games on Demand stuff by running Fiasco for a group who wanted to play. It was good to see the increase in traffic to the Indiemeet area compared with last year.  The interesting thing that came out of it is a lot of discussion that has been going on, on the UKRP forums. Specifically geared towards growing the hobby, what we should do about it and who we should be targeting. Well I have a few ideas and I want to talk them over with people, so if you can make it to Indiemeet on 15th December, then we can all have a good chat about it.

I don’t think I have mentioned it before, but I intend to try to get a con running in Oxford. At the moment it’s looking like it will be in the vein of Concrete Cow at least at first. I have some big ideas I would like to try, but I want to see if there is even a base of people who would attend first, before trying to arrange more complex multi-day cons. But I have a cool name already, ConSpired, so that’s basically like all of the planning done, right?

Narrative Pursuits still sucks, I am so massively disillusioned with it right now that I am seriously considering just completely abandoning it. Poor MacGuffin Quest, you should be so simple to write but it just doesn’t seem that way.

I haven’t really made much progress on my “System Vampire Should Have Had” game, but I am hoping to get some time to work on it soon, I think what it really needs is a good playstorm of the basic ideas of the mechanics. At the moment there is no coherent whole just a few ideas that may or may not work and I need to really see how they are in play before getting too far along (this is the mistake I think I ultimately made with NP) so I may ask for some victims at Indiemeet to see if we can just try some mechanics stuff out, it definitely won’t be a coherent game for the slot though.

And finally I really want to get around to finishing off The Not-So Beautiful Game very Soon(tm). It’s basically done apart from me bulking out the bullet points with, you know, actual text and stuff. I think getting something else finished might get me over this little lull in doing design I have been having recently, and I really do want to see if the ideas around play within tightly confined story limits actually work.

 

Narrative Pursuits, News
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Oh Look! Its 2am and I have Toothache again!

Tuesday, 20th November, 2012 by Ashley 0 Comments

So I guess I should take this opportunity to write up something about Indiecon before the glories of the codeine kick in.

This years Indiecon was exceptionally brilliant for me. Of course it had the usual cool of great people, great games, great location and great vibe, but this time I was releasing my game and trying to raise money for Autistica.

WYWF happened in 6 slots, including an ambitious attempt in slot one to run two games at once. All the players seemed to enjoy the games and I sold some copies, so that’s good.

I also ran one playtest of Narrative Pursuits, the system is definitely better with the new changes, but I find myself losing all love for the game. Its just not as awesome as I think I can design a game, but I don’t know what to do about it to make it better. I suppose removing a lot of the complexity of the pretend system may help, but I really wanted to push the game-resolution approach as opposed to conflict resolution. I will keep working on it over the coming months and we will see what comes out of it I guess.

As a favour to the awesome Dutchies, I dusted off my Fiasco facilitating skills. I am glad I did, it was a really tight, awesome game. The first 5 player game of Fiasco I have ever ran in 2 and a bit hours, everyone was on form and it was just the right tone of over the top but not gonzo that makes for really good sessions.

But the best thing about the whole weekend was the amazing support all the gamers there showed for my charity raffle for Autistica. We managed to raise £550 from the raffle, people seemed to like the artwork they won, and lots of money goes to an awesome cause really close to my heart.

So all in all, Indiecon was as amazing as always plus some.

Now since its 2am and I have toothache, I guess its game design I should be doing! Therefore I am working on my new Troop Play/Political Machinations/Urban Fantasy game (basically the system Vampire should have had based upon what its actually supposed to be about, as opposed to that awful combat simulator that makes no sense and doesn’t really work that they put in the books). Obviously if it ever comes out it will have its own setting, but if you should so desire to run it with an alternative setting involving clans of undead locked in century spanning political conflict – I won’t tell, if you don’t.

And there’s the codeine…night night.

Damwain, Narrative Pursuits, What You Wish For
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Quick Update

Wednesday, 31st October, 2012 by Ashley 0 Comments

  1. WYWF Pre-release event and London Indiemeet went well, we raised £103 for charity, which will be added to whatever gets raised at Indiecon.
  2. Indiecon is coming up in a little over a week, hopefully raise a load of money, play some great games and see my gaming friends I haven’t seen for a while.
  3. Tomorrow NaGa DeMon starts, its like the game design version of NaNoWriMo. I am taking part and have a few ideas, so expect to see some posts about that.
  4. Also tomorrow is going to be another one of 29th birthdays. I am beginning to lose count of how many 29th birthdays I have had now.
Damwain, General
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And the rest

Tuesday, 18th September, 2012 by Ashley 0 Comments

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The books have arrived.

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And the sack packs for the 50 dollar contributors

Damwain, What You Wish For

They’re Here

Monday, 17th September, 2012 by Ashley 1 Comment

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So, lots of folding boxes for me coming up!

Damwain, What You Wish For
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High School Drama

Wednesday, 22nd August, 2012 by Ashley 1 Comment

So some people asked me about this, so I though I would show an example card. However since its very much supposed to be about the odd format, I am only going to show one as an example, if you want a real one you will have to catch me sometime at a con.

Rules of the game on the front of the business card. Back of business card with example character.

Damwain
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Three Out of Three

Monday, 20th August, 2012 by Ashley 0 Comments

So, (I love how people hate me starting my posts like that) London Indiemeet on Saturday went well, I took down WYWF, my latest playtest of Narrative Pursuits and my new business cards which have a little game on them called High School Drama. All three got played, which was nice.

Afternoon slot 5 of us played Narrative Pursuits, and in addition to testing out the new playing-card based mechanics, we ended up testing some of the ideas I had had about telling slightly more different stories than the obvious ones. The Quest set up was as follows.

Genre: Jews in annexed Poland 1941

Item: Freedom

Location: England

Group Goal: To escape persecution.

This tested some of my ideas about having none tangible items as the object of the quest, but more importantly an emergent property of this session was that we didn’t play the standard group on a quest game, it because 5 separate but interlinking stories for personal survival and escape, having strong specific complications for the journey acts meant that characters could identify with one or two and run with them in their stories and then adding the goal act complications as fairly generic meant people were able to pick them up in whatever their story was at the point. It worked really well and its definitely a style of play I want to articulate as possible in the actual text, for me personally it was actually more fulfilling than the tradition group on a quest idea.

During Lunch a couple of the people whom I had given my business cards to played a very quick round of High School Drama, and whilst I will be the first to admit it is not the height of game design just a gimmic really, they quite liked it and its purpose as a quick icebreaking game seemed not to be lost on them.

Then in the evening slot 3 of us played two short games, first GxB, which was fun although my dates were horrible. Then we played What You Wish For and it just worked again, which I am no longer suprised about, so its definitely ready for release.

Narrative Pursuits, What You Wish For
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Indiecon and Fundraising

Tuesday, 7th August, 2012 by Ashley 1 Comment

As some of you may know, my brother has twin boys one of whom is severely autistic, because of this every year I try and do something to raise money for Autistica, who are a great charity. This year I am doing it in conjunction with the release of WYWF at Indiecon. I am currently sorting out the details with the organisers but the intentions are as follows.

1. All copies of WYWF sold at Indiecon will have all the profit (about £3 on each copy) donated to Autistica (Sorry to the pre-orderers but you are getting them at cost so there is no profit to donate)

2. I will be selling raffle tickets at a pound each and the winners will each get one of the original watercolours that Nelly did for the Inspiration decks.

I will also try and run a small raffle at the pre-release event at the London Indiemeet in October with the prize being a copy of the game, again all proceeds from the raffle will be going to Autistica.

Damwain, What You Wish For
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More WYWF plus what’s next

Saturday, 14th July, 2012 by Ashley 0 Comments

All the art is in, Yey!  The inspiration decks should be going to the printer sometime next week. The books will go to the printer once the Indiegogo campaign ends, as part of the rewards are a thanks in the book, and its only a 10 day turn around for the book printing.

At today’s London Indiemeet, I ran WYWF twice for a total of 4 players who hadn’t seen it before and at least one who hadn’t played heavily narrative games before, it seemed to be enjoyed by all and so just re-affirms my belief that the text as it stands is ready to go.

So one final plug for my Indiegogo campaign if you would like to support the publishing of the game you can pre-order a copy at various levels of commitment a the following address.

http://www.indiegogo.com/wywf

Now as for what’s coming next, I was thinking about finally getting around to finishing Narrative Pursuits, and then after a bit of a discussion today with John of Kiwi Games, he gave me a really good idea about how to tidy up the final flow of play, by making a big but hopefully not to consequential change. In fact it may even improve the dynamics of the whole tension between goals. So I intend to playtest the new version at the next London Indiemeet.  If you would like to be involved just turn up and stick your hand up when I pitch it.

Finally thanks to everyone who has supported my Indiegogo campaign so far, I can’t sufficiently explain how much it means to have that support, you are all awesome.

Narrative Pursuits, What You Wish For
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