Sorenson's 3 Questions - Sword & Scoundrel

In ye ancient days of yore, Jared Sorensen (designer of many things) put forward three questions that now collectively bear his name. Between writing on the subject, I've been attempting to decide how I wanted to answer.

What is your game about?

Sword & Scoundrel has the tag: A game about Passion, Violence, and General Skullduggery. Above all, the game is a passion play. It's medieval morality theater presented as an HBO or AMC-style character drama. Players decide what's most important to their character, what they care about, what they want, the lines they will not cross. Through play, we challenge them to see how far they are willing to go and what they are willing to sacrifice. The game is about moral conflict, with forces set in motion against the player's goals and beliefs. Finally, it's a blood-opera with the player's passions leading to quick and brutal violence. We wanted the fantasy equivalent of a western or a john woo film, with swordplay being quick, flashy, and lethal.

How does your game do this?

Mechanically speaking, characters are not just their attributes and skills. Their goals and beliefs are represented by player-nominated phrases called Drives which have a mechanical weight to them. Similarly, characters have Traits which can represent everything from the character's history and background to their physical or personality quirks and their relationships with other characters, including the players in their group. These all have mechanical significance in play, often giving them additional dice for their pool when relevant.

On the other side of the coin, the game is written in such a way that it is explicitly about conflict. If there is nothing in conflict and nothing at stake, there is no roll made. Further, while the game goes out of its way to play up its blood-opera persona with a detailed combat system, the rules support conflict in a broad range of arenas. The current beta supports anything when rolled as a simple conflict, but as we get the opportunity we intend to add a fully formed social combat system, faction rules, magic, and other forms of more abstract conflicts.

How does your game encourage/reward this?

The primary reward mechanism is through the accumulation of Drive Points. When players engage in conflicts with their drives, they are rewarded for it through additional dice that drive is worth. These dice come up as bonus dice in any conflict that is directly about the drive in question. Further, when players engage in certain behaviors that highlight their drives and traits, they can gain additional points that can be added to the drive of their choosing. The quickest way to earn these points is often to allow your drives or traits to get you in trouble, rewarding the player directly for making choices that are in line with who their character is even if those choices are not the optimal way to get what the player might want. Finally, these drive points can be spent to increase any of the character's abilities or traits or learn new of the same.

In short, players advance solely by making the kinds of characters suitable for good character dramas (ambitious, resolute, yet flawed) and then role-playing them in the fashion that these characters tend to behave (struggling between who they are and what they want). When they do this, the game not only gives them more dice to throw around in the conflicts they will face but also gives them the means to improve their character's scores as they play.

The King is Dead, Long Live the King

The blog here has been silent for a while, as my writing efforts in the last few months have been almost solely concentrated on a project that I can happily announce has begun its release cycle today.

If you would, head over to Grand Heresy where the Sword & Scoundrel (great name, huh?) RPG will be beginning it's release cycle. The starting documents contain the core rules and the character creation materials. We also have a print pdf, form-fillable pdf with character creator, and a sheet already approved and available in Roll20.

This is going to be an interesting ride, folks. Buckle up.

Art Woes

The 'Bastards draft is chugging along. I may or may not meet my year-end deadline, but progress is being made at least. As the days tick by and I get the systems bolted nicely into place, I start to worry about other issues. Writing a game, as it turns out, is only one part of making a game.

We're going to have to deal with the kickstarter thing, sooner rather than later. We've waited too long to wrap all this up as it is. We have a date in mind to begin once we've gotten feedback on this draft. The problem, of course, is that we need art. It was an inevitable issue, but one that presents me with sort of a catch-22. To really get off the ground with a kickstarter, you need good art to sell it -- but our primary reason for doing a kickstarter is to get an art budget.

If you've been around my blog long enough, you've no doubt seen some of my own artwork. I know I'm decent at it, but I also know I'm not good enough to meet the task at hand. Not in any substantial way, in any case.

Further complicating matters, I'm not entirely sure how to start the shopping-for-art process.  I sent out a couple notes on Deviantart, but that's about the depth of my experience with the subject.

This post was mostly just my musing on the subject, but if anyone wants to toss me any advice, offer their services and quote a price, (or ESPECIALLY if you want to contribute art) feel free to leave a comment, hit me up on G+ or otherwise get in touch.

'Bastards 0.2

If you lurk around our forums, you may have already heard: Band of Bastards is currently in the middle of a substantial overhaul. I thought it was appropriate to make some kind of a statement about what we're doing and why.

We've done this a few times before, though most were before we were ever under as much scrutiny. 'Bastards was (fittingly) the illegitimate child of the Trosfans forums, in their project to produce a new, unofficial, and revised edition of The Riddle of Steel after Driftwood went dark. This burst of creative impulse ultimately gave birth to Blade of the Iron Throne as well, which we still look at as a sibling for that reason. Like most siblings, though, we wound up going very separate directions.

The first iteration of the game was exactly what it set out to be - a TROS update, with all the bells and whistles. We had something like 60 maneuvers, 150+ weapons (most of which had more than one stat-line), and a whole mess of very exacting specifications for everything we touched. After the initial creative rush of cobbling together every optional rule from all of the TROS books and somehow making them more-or-less work together, we realized that this was a beast so ungainly that it would be a nightmare to run, let alone teach a new player.

Back to the drawing board.

The next iteration of the game would become what we promoted as Song of Steel. At the time, our focus was still on historical fiction -- a position we leaned into all the harder with Blade selling itself by contrast as a Swords and Sorcery game. It's a funny thing that siblings do. Bernard Cornwell had a prominent place on our bookshelf, along with a great deal of non-fiction that we picked up on swords and swordsmanship (including the book with a very similar title). This is about the time when we started pestering people like Nikolas Lloyd, Roland Warzecha, and Matt Easton for insights, which they all graciously provided.

This was the iteration when we really came into our own. Systems were scrapped, new bits invented, unnecessary bits stripped away. Our ranged combat and skirmish systems date back to this iteration (both of which were Higgin's contributions, amusingly enough. Thank him. He was very insistent on ranged combat being awesome).

Then came Song of Swords. What were the odds of another game being developed by another indie-dev team based on the same original game with a nearly identical  name? We discussed the thing with them - their hands were tied. The name was chosen by their fans. They were polite about the thing and even complimentary. At least one of them had been a fan of our work. It's always nice to be noticed.

Restriction breeds creativity. We were already competing for attention in the same sub-niche of a sub-niche of an already niche hobby, so we were left with the options of either sharing an initialism with who was arguably our closest competitor or redefine ourselves. We chose the latter.

One day, I'll shake Jimmy Rome's hand. Rebranding seemed like a setback at the time, but in the process, we had the license to re-evaluate everything we had chosen to do up to that point. Everything got cleaned up and polished, had the rough edges smoothed out. A lot of the stuff we had been so insistent in trying to replicate in exacting detail simply got dropped or abstracted. 'Bastards began to really hone in on what it wanted to be, which was a game about ambition and conflicts of the moral, physical, and bloody variety. In a strange way, despite being the furthest mechanically from its forebear, it may have been the closest in essence to what TROS wanted to be about.

This latest revision is a continuation of the iterative saga this game has undergone. The purpose of a beta test is to get feedback and have room to make adjustments. Between some of the cracks that have shown themselves at the fringes of our own play, and some of the feedback we've gotten on the forums, we're finding places where things could be better, tighter, or conversely need to be loosened up and made less rigid.

Higgins and I have both grown a lot as both players and designers since we started this project back in (dear God, really?) 2011. The last couple years, in particular, have been spent in a kind of ongoing game design boot camp. One of the driving forces in the revision is that certain areas of the game reflect designs that were either inherited from TROS once upon a time, or products of our early attempts to fix the products of those inherited parts. We can do better, and we're going to.

The end goal is to make a game that I will be inspired to play again. In slaughtering some of the sacred cows we've held on to in search of better design, of cleaning the clutter that we've amassed, we hope to create the kind of game that we're going to want to play and run for years to come. I want to be so again impassioned by this project that we have the energy and drive to see it through to the full vision we had for it. We hope that in making ourselves passionate about the thing, in cleaning up and overhauling the design of the thing, we'll make you passionate about it as well.

Beta Release - Part 3

Another Thursday, another release. Last week we got a ton of feedback on 90 pages of content and some very interesting discussions going on the forums. You guys have been phenomenally helpful. We tried to incorporate as much of that as time allowed, but we've still got a great deal of it ahead. That will be a project to carry us through the weekend.

In addition to some editing for clarity, this week we introduce two chapters that you have been eagerly awaiting.

Chapter 09: Full Contest gets into the core rules we use for chases, debates, and other prolonged skill-based conflicts.

Chapter 10: Melee Combat gets into the meat of our fighting system, which many of you have been speculating over for months now.

We haven't had as much time to work on everything this week as we had hoped, so the examples are still missing in certain areas. If our schedules allow, we may toss in a mid-week update before next Thursday to get everything taken care of and our release schedule back on track.

You can pick up your copy here or on our downloads page. As always, we'll be opening discussion threads for feedback on our forums.

Thanks for sticking with us, folks. Enjoy.

- The GH Crew

Beta release - Part 2

Mirrored...

 

 
What a week. With the last edits as fresh as this morning, we've pulled through. Grand Heresy is happy to announce release 2 of our rolling beta. This week we cover a ton of material, going from about 15 pages to 95, putting us up to Chapter 08.

You can download your copy here

Chapter 03 Anatomy of a Bastard takes you through the structure of character creation, starting with creating your band of bastards first and establishing the overall tone and expectations for the campaign ahead.

Chapter 04  Attributes & Skills has full writeups for each, exactly as you'd expect, as well as some more specific rules on using them in play.

Chapter 05 Proficiencies & Maneuvers is what many of you have been looking forward to. It covers a character's training at arms, our proficiency system, and the maneuvers 'Bastards uses to make combat interesting. In addition, it also covers Simple Combat, allowing for less intensive combat resolution for quick scuffles or groups that are less interested in the ebb-and-flow of melee.

Chapter 06 Edges & Flaws is thus far the largest single chapter in the book, accounting for 23 pages on its own. Therein we list all of the information for the various options available to your character, and how to get the most out of your flaws in play.

Chapter 07 Story Aspects details the mechanic that really drives our game forward, covering the role it plays in allowing the player to guide the story, the reward cycle, and how SAs play into character advancement. 

Finally, Chapter 08 Supporting Cast covers how players can establish NPC relationships at character creation, or make new contacts and enemies through play.

Threads have already been set up on a chapter-by-chapter basis on our forums for feedback.

We look forward to hearing from you!

- The GH Crew

Beta Release - Part 1

Just echoing this out across the various channels...

Beta Release - Part 1

This wasn't how we intended to do it, but we figured we've kept you guys waiting long enough. Credit for the decision can actually go to some of the posters on our forums, who made an argument for a chapter-by-chapter release of the documents we have. Alright, you guys win.

This first release is going to be the intro chapter and basic mechanics. Each Thursday, we'll release another chapter or two to you guys to dissect and discuss. With the biggest chapters mostly behind us at this point, we expect the rest of the document to be finished in the next couple weeks anyway.

The download can be found here:

https://dl.orangedox.com/OzGaYpVrYIULsCFspK/BandofBastards-Beta01-Ch08.pdf

If you share the link or the document, we'd appreciate it if you used the original link, just because we want to keep track of how many people downloaded the thing as we go.

This is for you guys. Thanks for sticking with us.

- The GH Crew