CRUSADERS: The Book of Night (Book 5)
A change of scene and a change of pace for the next installment in CRUSADERS:
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CRUSADERS: The Book of Night (Part 4)
The first big fight scene in my ongoing heroic fantasy tale CRUSADERS is up, featuring amazing double-wide art by my partner-in-crime Andrew Trabbold.
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Seth Johnson Bystander Tokens for HeroClix
When I was lead designer for the HeroClix line at WizKids, I went to a lot of conventions and tournaments to watch players play, and to talk to them about the game. It was a blast, and I loved talking to players everywhere from San Diego to Philadelphia.
For fun, and to encourage players to seek me out so we could talk, I decided to make up some special HeroClix bystander tokens to hand out. But as a WizKids employee, making tokens of any licensed character like Batman or Spider-Man involved fees and approvals–and I was typically working on a budget of pizza money and a time frame of “That Kinko’s downtown is open 24 hours a day; I can get there before I have to go to the airport, right?” So instead, swallowing my humility and sticking my tongue firmly in my cheek, I made tokens of myself.
The Seth Johnson bystander tokens looked like true bystander tokens, although they weren’t die cut. I handed out the first token I made (B001) for two years. Then, when I ran out of those, I made three more (B002-B004.)
Sometime last year, I gave away the last one. I’m probably never going to print up any more, so they’ll have to join the SKETCH! Character Generator as collectible artifacts of my career. (Not that I expect them to be burning up eBay anytime soon–my mom already has one of each.)
But as the tokens are still mentioned and discussed by HeroClix fans once in a while, I thought I’d put them up here on my webspace so anyone who wanted some could print their own. (Note to fans: Let me know what your local judge says if you try and field them using WizKids’ new “print n’ play” policy!)
Click here or on the image above for the bigger file, and then take me to your battlefield! It’s too bad that I didn’t get a chance to work on the line a bit longer, so I could do a Seth token with a special power or two. But I guess there’s nothing stopping me from posting one here…
CRUSADERS: The Book of Night (Part 3)
A new page is up in my ongoing heroic fantasy tale CRUSADERS is posted, with more fantastic art by my partner-in-crime Andrew Trabbold.
Go check it out, and subscribe to the Crusaders RSS feed!
Aldrin Games Unlimited
In this week’s episode of How I Met Your Mother, the great Chris Elliot appeared playing Mickey Aldrin, estranged father of Alyson Hannigan’s Lily.
Mickey Aldrin has been crushed by his dream–”to design the next great American board game”. For more than twenty years he’s slaved away, building prototype after prototype, most with surprisingly polished components:
But the joke goes further than just the games named in the dialogue. It looks like the props department joined the fun and decorated Mickey Aldrin’s homes with an ever-growing number of prototypes. A bit of freeze-framing helped me put together this (most likely partial) list of games he designed for his one-man design house, Aldrin Games Unlimited:
THE MICKEY ALDRIN LUDOLOGY
- Thirsty Thirsty Hippo
- Tijuana Slumlord
- Car Battery! (“How long can you hang on?”)
- Sleepy Tombstone Maze
- Landmine Lunge
- There’s a Clown Demon Under the Bed!
- Dog Fight Promoter
- Foodology
- Truthology
- Hamster Havoc
- Runaway Train
- Bermuda Triangle
- Diseases! (with an…interesting components list that apparently includes “lead paint from China and horse bile”)
And inspired by the events of the episode, “Slap Bet”, which apparently includes cards like these:
Not since Double Cranko on M*A*S*H have I wanted to play a TV board game quite so much. Well, okay, maybe not “Slap Bet”. But “Sleepy Tombstone Maze” sounds kind of fun…
You’ll should be able to watch “Slapsgiving 2: Revenge of the Slap” on the CBS HIMYM website sometime this week (they’re a little less reliable than Hulu) to see the rest of the episode, and the commercial for “Slap Bet”. Because currently the only version I can find on the web right now is this shakycam screen recording. Seriously, CBS–answer Hulu’s calls.
My Story of Batman
Lots of exciting game design and writing going on…all of which is locked up behind NDAs. One day I’ll work on a project with completely open development…
In the meantime, it isn’t a new episode of Crusaders (also delayed by exciting news that can’t be spoken of), but it is a new comic–one written by me when I was 5 years old. (5 and 1/2!, as I might have added at the time, judging by the note on the cover.)
Art and story by me, lettering by my dad. The comic:
“It was the Batphone. They went to their secret room. They went and got it.” Sounds like someone had been reading the Super Dictionary a bit too much…
CRUSADERS: The Book of Night (Part 2)
Andrew Trabbold and I have posted the second part of our Crusaders saga! Click on the thumbnail to check it out.
Crusaders: The Book of Night
The first installment of a new project I’m writing is up!
My pal Andrew Trabbold and I have moved through the game industry at the same pace, but on parallel tracks. We met while shopping at the same comic shop, about the same time I started freelance writing for the game industry and he started selling illustrations to some of the same companies. A few years later Andy did some illustrations for SKETCH!, but we’ve never really had a chance to collaborate–until now.
Together we’re working on a new online project called Crusaders, mixing my writing and his art as we explore a world and tell its stories together. It’s influenced by the comics and superheroes we both love…but it’s an attempt to approach it from a new angle.
The first story we’re telling is “The Book of Night”, and the first installment is up. Check it out!
HeroClix World Interview
My Hammer of Thor chariot showed up in the mail the other day, the first HeroClix piece I had nothing to do with in five years. I’m pretty excited to sit down and discover how it plays with the rest of the HeroClix fan community, as soon as I can tear myself away from the Champions Online beta.
Speaking of HeroClix, one of the sites helping keep the game alive is HeroClix World, and a couple weeks ago I did an interview with the site that rambled across my history as a game designer (the long-lost Masters of the Universe RPG revealed!), how I got to WizKids, and more. You can read the interview here, broken up into three parts as I kept blathering on and on and on:
They’ve already done an interview with nbperp, the last Rules Arbitrator for HeroClix, and they’ve announced upcoming interviews with John Byrne and Jason Mical. Definitely great stuff for HeroClix fans.
2d6
Consider the simple, six-sided die.
Better yet, consider two of them.
To those who speak gamer, a six-sided die is a d6. Two of them is 2d6, natch. When many games ask a player to roll 2d6, they are asking the player to roll both dice and sum the results. The standard 2d6 gives a nice bell curve of probable outcomes, a curve peaking around a result of 7 that allows game designers to present players into situations with probable–but not certain!–outcomes depending on the target number the result needs to meet or beat.
I spent a lot of time thinking about rolling two six-sided dice while working on HeroClix. The core mechanic of the game was a classical 2d6 roll (modified by an Attack value versus a target Defense number scaled to match), but feats, special powers, event dials and more each had their own unique, new rules text and occasionally gave me a chance to play with alternative ways to use the dice.
When I did get a chance to play around in the design space, I was always pleasantly surprised at how many ways you could coax different results from a single roll of two six-sided dice. Some thoughts on a few of them, as I think about how I might use two d6 in a design I’m working on right now:
Pick a number between 1 and 6 and roll two dice; if the number comes up on either die, you succeed.
A 31% chance of success. If you pick two numbers that jumps to 56%, and three numbers 75%.
When you roll 1d6, every possible result has a flat and equal 17% chance of occurring. Even if the second die is rolled at the same time as the first, it will feel like a backup plan and give many players a psychological cushion that makes 31% feel like acceptable odds.
Roll two dice, take the highest roll as a result.
Another roll with psychological benefits to the player. Who doesn’t love throwing out a bad outcome and keeping a good one?
Looking at the table of probable outcomes for the roll shows how it puts the player’s thumb on the scale and tips the results toward their favor. More importantly, it shows how provides the same range of results as 1d6 roll, but on a curved distribution rather than the flat distribution of the 1d6 roll.
Roll two dice, and subtract the lower die from the higher die to get a result.
This gives as narrow a spread of results as rolling a single die, but what makes it interesting is that zero is one of them. So it could be interesting to use as a means for generating a modifier (“You get extra points of damage equal to the result”) when you want “no modifier” to be a possible outcome.
Roll two dice; a result of doubles is a success.
Of the 36 possible outcomes of this roll, only six are successes. 6/36 is equal to 1/6.
I hear your question across the Internet: So why not just roll 1d6 and say only a 6 is a success, Mr. Game Designer?
Mathematically, no reason whatsoever. Again looking at the roll psychologically, I think there’s an argument to be made for rolling doubles as a more ‘exciting target’ than rolling a 6 on a single die.
Roll two dice, and multiply them to get a result.
The minimum result of this roll is 1 (from rolling two 1s) and the maximum result is 36 (two 6s).
Interestingly, though, within this spread of 36 there are only 18 possible different results. Despite its prevalence in the normal 2d6 roll, 7 will never be a result here. Nor will any number between 26 and 29. If it can’t be factored completely using only the numbers between 1 and 6, it will never come up.
But check out the results that do come up! A maximum result in the 30s! 18 different results when 2d6 can generate only 11!
The chart of possible outcomes only appears to be a sawtooth when you’re charting the number of times each possible outcome occurs, as numbers with multiple results as factors like 6 (1,2,3,6) and 12 (2,3,4,6) spike above the rest. Yet if you click through that link and scroll down a bit to look at the curve generated when you look at possible outcomes through a greater than/less than lens, you get a reasonably smooth curve with more gradations than 2d6 thanks to its larger number of possible outcomes (though there are larger intervals at those same multiple-factor outcome points.)
Often games that use d6-centric mechanics have a tiny number of possible target numbers; when rolling 2d6, if you stray far from 7 you have large effects on the possible outcome. If the roll is an ability or skill check (or an ability plus skill check), it will likely be difficult to improve your abilities or skills, lest you slide down the probability curve.
Rolling 2d6 and multiplying to get a result versus a stat or (stat + skill) as a target number could be interesting in that it would allow for a much wider range of character advancement without breaking the curve.