Age of Steel

[Chris Gardiner]

I've been tinkering with a game I'm calling Age of Steel for a good while now. It's a little game intended to create action-packed single-session sword and sorcery adventures. It's cobbled together from a wodge of indie game mechanics, with a couple of tweaks. The two bits I'm most taken with so far are Plights and Epilogues.

Plights are starting situations tailored to each adventure, which provide each character's startig scene and are assigned randomly to players. In the playtest game they were: "shipwrecked on a desert island", "member of a pirate crew that has been taken over by a sinister sorcerer", and "captured by pirates and thrown in the brig". Each player gets to describe how his hero ended up in that situation, and anything goes. Sword and sorcery heroes, and Conan in particular, spend half their lives tossed upon the winds of fate, being dumped into endless situations that aren't their concern, and coming out of the deal up a pile of gold, a gang of bandits, and a hot chick.

The epilogue is the prize for spending more of the game's reward resource - fortune - during the session. The character who used the most fortune is considered to have been the actual hero of the story, and everyone else was just a guest star. The hero gets to say "And so it was..." and then state a fact related to the events of play that affects the setting. So if the adventure featured the backdrop of an expansionist empire warring on hill-dwelling tribes, the hero could decide whether the empire was the eventual victor, or whether the tribes drove them back, or something else. That then becomes a part of the setting for future sessions, and may spark off ideas for future adventures.

I've written a full account of the play over at the Sons of Kryos:-

http://www.sonsofkryos.com/phpBB2/viewtopic.php?t=107

I'd love to hear peoples' thoughts.

[Ben Lehman]

Hi, Chris --

Your game sounds really cool!  I don't have a lot to add, but I think that the plight / epilogue / fortune bits are brilliant.  Good luck to you smoothing out the last rough bits, and I'm happy to talk about them with you if you like.

yrs--
--Ben

[andrew_kenrick]

I like how the epilogue acts as a reward and an incentive for players to go all out and spend all their fortune, rather than hoarding it. That's neat!

Is the game strictly set up for one-shots, or could it cope with a series of adventures? I guess you could have it so that the same characters featured in each adventure, but they were very much standalone - like a series of Conan novels, to go back to your example. Same characters, different setups.

[Chris Gardiner]

Hi guys - thanks for replying!

Andrew: Once you've created your heroes you can drop them into a series of adventures, together or seperately, with the world being shaped by the epilogues of previous games. So you don't need to make new heroes each time, and there is a 'campaign-y' element to it. My old gaming group are scattered to the far winds but we see each other every couple of months or so - I wanted something that we could pick up and play in short, satisfying, self-contained sessions, even if all of us weren't there.

Ben: I'm really pleased with the plight and fortune mechanics - they're simple, but seem pretty powerful.

The two things Im trying to work out now are the adventure creation process and a means for the GM to ramp up the difficulty on key challenges.

For the adventures, I'm thinking about a series of lists of classic pulp elements, that can be combined to create a setting and situation. And guidelines on creating NPCs that are active forces - ideally I'l like to hit that People of the Black Circle feel, with lots of different agendas clashing in exotic corners of the world.

Also, one thing I found in play was that it was quite difficult to really challenge the heroes. To an extent this was intentional - I wanted the heroes to stand out and scythe through lesser foes like chaff. Or wheat. Whatever it is you scythe through. And they did, but there were a couple of times when the opposition was more severe, and they steamrollered it. The heroes have a lot of resources - what with fortune and Tricks - so I think sometimes it'd be okay to stack the basic dice against them.

One idea I'm toying with is giving locations Descriptors ("A tumbledown, spider-haunted ruin, with thick shadows clinging to its corners") like the heroes have, and allowing the villains to call on them for a bonus dice. If only the bad guys get to do this, it creates a bit of a hero-vs-environment vibe, which might further push the sword-and-sorcery theme of a hero only being able to rely on himself.

But on top of that I'd like the GM to have some resources he can draw on. Something he can use for bonus dice, and to activate the Tricks of named NPCs. I'm trying to think if there's some way to link this into fortune, somehow. Or maybe give the GM equivalents of Drives to earn this resource?

[Valamir]

If players have fortune to spend to make their characters bad asses, and he who spends the most fortune gets to be the "hero" of the story...then players will be spending lots of fortune.

Why not spend fortune by handing it to the GM...the GM now gets to spend it

[Chris Gardiner]

Why not spend fortune by handing it to the GM...the GM now gets to spend it

I wondered about this, but I was concerned it might act as a disincentive to fortune-spending. I wonder if a fixed pool given to the GM at the start of play is the way to go, so the players can see when they're whittling him down, or if he's saving up for a big encounter.

[andrew_kenrick]

I wondered about this, but I was concerned it might act as a disincentive to fortune-spending. I wonder if a fixed pool given to the GM at the start of play is the way to go, so the players can see when they're whittling him down, or if he's saving up for a big encounter.

It would certainly make spending fortune a double edged sword, but hopefully the benefit from fortune and the reward of becoming the hero of the hour should more than compensate for it. This could work well, and ties everything into a single mechanic.

[Chris Gardiner]

Yeah - I really like that Ralph's suggestion ties everything into the fortune mechanic; I think that's really strong. I'm just reluctant to make fortune that two-edged sword - it worked so nicely as a pure, no-downside reward that I'm uneasy doing too much to undermine that. However, a thought occured.

I was thinking about having the GM's resource - let's call it adversity for now - divided into pools: one for each player. Currently, players have their fortune split into a pool for each aptitude, so it kind of reflects that. The GM can only use the adversity in each pool to affect that player. One of the advantages of this is as a pacing mechanism - the GM can see who hasn't really been pushed yet (lots of unspent adversity in their pool), and who he's been riding (little adversity left). If the GM has four (or whatever) adversity in a certain player's pool, it's probably time he hit that player with something challenging.

What I hadn't decided was how adversity could be allotted. I'd been thinking about it being a fixed resource assigned at the start of play, and saying the GM can't earn more, but that seems like a wasted opportunity, and might mean the later challenges in the game are weaker than the earlier ones.

So how about, whenever a player spends fortune, it goes to the GM, where it becomes adversity. The GM then places it into one of the other players' pools. That way, spending fortune isn't a downside for the player that spent it, but the GM's resources do grow as the players perform cool stuff. And if they see their adversity growing, players might push their drives harder to earn more fortune to deal with it when the GM lets rip.

Because the heroes in Age of Steel don't tend to go around as a group, this might also help encourage the spirit of friendly rivalry that the competition for the epilogue fosters, without making it too adversarial (since it's the GM who actually decides which player he wants to nobble).

Is that sensible?

Thanks for talking with me about this, guys - it's really helpful!

[andrew_kenrick]

I like the idea of adversity, although it sounded a little bit fiddly at first. I really like the idea of fortune becoming adversity for another player! That's a great incentive, as well as adding a more competitive edge!

[Simon C]

From a purely practical point of view, if your fortune goes to "adversity" for the other players (which is a cool idea), it might be a bit fiddly for the GM to remember where he or she can spend that adversity.  The best way I can think of is for each player to have different coloured adversity chits, and for them to go into a common pool, from which the GM can easily identify what can be spent on whom.

As a GM, I find it hard to spend resource "points" against players, perhaps becasue this feels distinctly more "adverserial" than I'm comfortable with.  Good guideline about where these can be spent would be helpful to me, so that I don't feel like I'm unfairly hosing one player.

I really love the sound of this game (you had me at "Conan").  I look forward to playing it once it's published.

[Chris Gardiner]

Hi Simon - thanks for the kind words!

Yeah - the practicalities of adversity are a bit of a concern, and different coloured tokens are a good way to go. Currently, I'm thinking about the GM having an Adversity Sheet (like the players have character sheets) which would be put in the middle of the table so everyone can see it, and have labelled pools for each hero where the GM puts the adversity. Maybe using coloured tokens would help to visually seperate the adversity pools?

I'll have a think about guidelines for assigning and spending adversity - this is something I'm going to need to playtest quite a bit. The aim is for the adversity to be a tool to help guide the GM in providing a good level of challenge, rather than a weapon to beat the players with. But at the moment, heroes tend to walk over all opposition, and when I was GMing I felt very much at their mercy. The GM really needs something to make the adventure more of a struggle for the heroes. Particularly since failing rolls and then having to deal with the consequences can be such fun, and heroes shine brightest in adversity.

I've got some ideas for tricks that allow adversity to be manipulated under certain circumstances, too, so I'm hoping to make as much as possible out of the mechanic.

Currently I'm working on the process for creating adventures; breaking sword and sorcery tales down into their component parts that can be used like a checklist when creating scenarios, and talking specifically about how Drives can be used to guide the process. Once that's done, I'll bung everything in a pdf and put it up on some web space for people to take a look at.

[Simon C]

Some rules for creating adventures is a cool idea.  I've looked at the town creation rules for DitV, and I reckon similar rules could be a good addition to almost any RPG.  "Dungeon creation rules" for D&D and so on.

I don't think that you 100% need guidelines for spending adversity, it's just a question of how you want the game to feel.  In GNS terms, I think the GM getting to spend them whenever he or she likes feels more "Gamist", wheras guidelines to spend them in thematically appropriate ways feels more "simulationist".