Tag: open table chassis

The Adventure Cycle is Released!

A framework to run a network of open table fantasy games. Each game master has one or more villages and each player has one or more characters that go on adventures across different game master’s tables.

Characters have their abilities, reputations, social rank and possessions that follow them from one game master’s village to another.

In each village they have their relationships with the local characters, and the tribes and factions in the lands around. They have quests, property and hidden treasure that are specific to a village.

Prior to a Session the Game Master for the session
will do some prep on the villagers, the adventure
region and encounterable situations.
An Open Table Session consists of the following
distinct steps:
1) Session Set Up Sequence: Any character creation
and existing character tidy up, including closed quest
effects.
2) One or more Adventure Cycles as follows:


adventure cycle step 1: Village Episodes Sequence.

  • Focus Recovery.
  • pay taxes
  • Max 8 episodes per character (up to 2 may be reserved for step 3).

An episode always involves a single activity of a
specific type. The episodes types a character may
enact are:
• Buy a Cottage
• Buy or Sell Equipment
• Buy or Sell Gems / Jewels / Art objects
• Enroll Adventure Hirelings
• Gain A Companion
• Philanthropy
• Secure Your Treasure
• Seek a Quest
• Seek the Right to Buy a Cottage
• Socialise
• Spend Growth Points
• Train a Skill
• Work a Profession

adventure cycle step 2: The Adventure Sequence.

  • Focus Recovery.
  • Determine quest active for each character.
  • Play out the adventure
  • Note acts of renown and infamy

adventure cycle step 3: Village Return Sequence.

  • Heal characters
  • Gain growth points for the adventure.
  • Gain growth points for quests closed.
  • Test reputations for changes.
  • Split treasure.
  • Village episodes. (Max 2 reserved from earlier)


Adventure Cycle Steps 1 and 3, in the Village, are
designed to be highly structured to handle adventure
“down time”, and generally contain few opportunities
for full depth role play. They do, however, provide the
context, motivation, and rewards for what goes on in
the adventure. The adventure itself is where all the
exciting role play happens.

Here is how everything hangs together now.

The adventure cycle provides a play structure that uses the core rules and toolkits to provide character action and development mechanics.

There has been a lot of play testing of the Adventure Cycle, at its peak 2 game masters and 16 players in 4 session streams each week. A lot of extra stuff has been developed in draft form, such as a magic system and dungeon crawl details. These will get polished up and provided later as Adventure Cycle Plugins.

The Adventure Cycle is available now as a “Pay What You Like” PDF, 58 pages, at DriveThruRPG.

Open Table Chassis Update

This new rule set is now entitled The Adventure Cycle. I’ve been a bit ruthless pulling out various mechanisms, to make available later as plugins. Here is the state of play for finishing up the text for the rules.

The Progress Track Using the Table of Contents

The things marked off have had some substantial play testing, as we are running four streams of play testers in groups of 3 to 6. Next up its pulling it all together into a PDF.

There is a write up of an interesting encounter with a giant spider during one of the recent play tests, at RPGGeek.com.

And the free dice roller has turned out to be a bit of a hit with the players.

Character Building

When On Aptitude was released it provided mechanisms for your character to have specific traits and skill sets. It also added a mechanism for improving your characters skills.

This is a common area of interest for players, how to build up their character over time. There is always the ability to gain material wealth, and now there was a way to become more skilled.

In the Open Table Chassis currently under development there are a few more formal mechanisms coming your way for elaborating your character. It all started with the idea of a formal quest and a play tester hassling the Town Watch quartermaster for a discount on swords and armour.

Lets start with the later. It presented the idea that since there are services available in the home village, like things to buy, soldiers to hire, training to be paid for, that characters relationships with villagers might be something to formalize. This is especially of value because the home village is intentionally set up as a high game structure, reduced role play, space in the game. So a series of mechanisms for making friends and influencing people within the village has started to be put together to allow some services to be available, and some to be cheaper (or more expensive or unavailable if someone doesn’t like you).

To dovetail with that is the idea of village reputations. How good are you at looking after the people you hire on for an adventure? Are you generous or stingy according to village gossip? Do you honor quests you are given? Do you succeed even at the hardest quests? So the Chassis will also have a system for formalizing reputation within the village, which will influence not only your ability to access services and get them on the cheap, but also your ability to gain and maintain friendships with the town notables. Legendary reputations may also leak across into home villages of other DMs where your character is present from time to time.

So, what about the people “out there” in the adventure spaces of the world? They can have contacts and reputations for your character too, but in a less formalized, less detailed way.

The magic system as it is developing also takes advantage of these mechanics, allowing for reputations and relationships among the sorcerers and entities in the spirit worlds. This helps with gaining access to spells and to working to get spiritual aid. The details here are still in a very preliminary stage of design.

Finally there is a nobility layer being designed, where characters can work their way into noble standing, taking on certain duties but gaining access to grand quests.

When in full flight this gives players lots of scope for developing their characters and buffing up their capabilities. And the quest system also provides accelerated skill development and strong purpose for adventuring.

Update: Here is a write up at RPGGeek that overviews some of the play tests.