The development of the core rules and toolkits has followed a principle of agile / lean production. Large chunks of work broken down into smaller, doable modules, where customer reaction could be used to adjust the design of the existing and future components. This next slab of work will go the same way.
Here is the index to the Open Table Chassis – Fantasy as it has been cobbled together so far. Each section is mainly notes or bullet points in the actual document, although some is more fleshed out, having been used to play test the combat toolkit.
In order to get something out in a reasonable time this needs to be broken into parts, with plug in points in the core chassis for those parts to connect to.
Pulling out the magic stuff is a first item. That is getting fairly well developed but there is no point finishing it without the chassis being out there.
The Quest system is also a good candidate for break out, although its a really great and important part of the concept, the chassis can work without it. There is also a dependency from the Magic mechanics to the Quest System so the Quest System will need to get finished first.
The last 6 items in the index are all works taking the Chassis forward in more detail and adding content, so they can wait till further down the line.
The basic structure stays: Village Start, The Adventure, Village Return. The concept of reputations is important and the details for hireling and companion reputations stay, other reputations will be added to the relevant modules, such as quest reputation.
The adventure as an objective could be moved out to accompany the quest stuff, but its better if that remains in, along with encounter zones, wonders and various bric-a-brak.
Socializing in general concept stays, but there are detailed elements associated with quests and magic that get moved out into those modules.
Stuff about searching and spotting and hiding and evading should all end up in the toolkit that focuses on such things, and be part of that toolkit set.
So here is a rough breakdown.
Further down the track, we will be pulling the whole system together into a single print product, and creating an Open Game License System Reference Document for the core rules.
Having thrown together an old school style of play for running the Combat Toolkit play tests, and having 15 players regularly continuing with open table play, it seems like time to make the game structures for this type of open table into a product.
For those interested in some detailed philosophy of open table play I recommend the Open Table Manifesto.
Just as an aside, the Stealth and Investigation Toolkits are also being worked on. As with the Combat Toolkit they will be a mix of mechanics and ruling guides. We are using the Call of Cthulhu (7th Edition) RPG as a framework for play test, obviously with the AUG mechanics swapped in for the Basic Role Play mechanics.
The Open Table Chassis is a set of rules structures to allow groups of multiple players, with multiple characters to casually play with multiple game masters, potentially each with multiple home regions in a single game setting.
For this to work each play session has a single GM, using one of her home regions, and whoever is available to play, each using only one of their player characters. A fairly “board game like” rules structure is used to break an adventure down into a cycle of 3 parts.
Prep
The players have episodes in their home location where they do things covered by fairly mechanical rules: go shopping, do training, spend growth points to grow a skill, hire people to guard treasures or accompany the group on an adventure, socialize, build reputations, acquire companions and gain quests.
Adventure
The players go off to role play in a world slightly artificially structured into areas of increasing risk, and with treasures to be gained, hazards to be faced, and factions to be dealt with.
Wind Down
The players return home, gain growth points for the adventure based on treasure gained, risks and difficulties, and for quests completed based on commitment of time, risks overall and encounters braved.
In a given session of play there will be one or more complete adventure cycles. Any adventure in progress when a session runs out of time comes to an abrupt end and the wind down is flicked through.
The chassis comes with some simple book keeping, tracking which characters are the primary quest bearers for which home town, and what the character reputations are there, and tracking things that may be transferred between GM home regions, like magic items, pieces of technology, or global rank.
The first Chassis will have a baked in fantasy genre. Its treasures will be coins, gems, jewels and works of art. There will be some generic sorcery and mysticism rules (aimed at eventually being used for Mists of the Carpathians) and a collection of play structures for dungeon, wilderness, ocean and city adventuring.
A second Chassis under development will have a baked in space opera genre, with aliens, high and low tech worlds, space ships, interstellar corporations and nations and super tech artifacts left behind by “the ancients”. This will be used to lay some ground work for the Shadow Over The Galaxy setting.
Wherein I explain why I’m making a new RPG and a bit of a plan for the future.
As I write this in December 2019 all that can be seen is a sparse home page with a “Mail Us” form. All Us Gamers does not yet exist beyond the walls of my office and the minds of the twenty or so early play testers.
When the game is finally out there what you should see is a core game system, explaining how to play role playing games that involve players that have characters as avatars within a game master’s imaginary setting, plus a set of really engaging settings in fantasy, science fiction and horror genres. That’s the future, and maybe you are there right now?
There are, of course, lots of role playing games. Some don’t have a character focus, instead they have a narrative focus, where the rules help decide who gets to write the next bit of a commonly developed story. All Us Gamers is not one of those, although narrative is an important element. In the character focus games there are the venerable giants, Dungeons and Dragons, Traveller, Call of Cthulhu, and great indi games like Stars Without Number. And there is the fabulous 200 Word RPG challenge for those that want some fun, simple but highly innovate games to play.
So why am I going to add “Yet Another Role Playing Game” to the market?
Lets get in the Wayback machine and travel to the groovy, large moustache and platform shoes days of 1974. (Yes, that was me but the photos are in a thrice locked vault where you will never see them!) My friend Grant and I played a lot of miniature figurine table top war games back then. Early that year we got hold of the game Chainmail. We were fine having little armies run around bashing one another but then along came original D&D, in its white box, to rescue me from armies and introduce me to adventuring!
In D&D, you are either the game master (or Dungeon Master as D&D prefers), who runs the game, or a player who looks after a single character in the game world. You go about exploring, encountering and fighting monsters, and finding treasures. After D&D many other games began appearing and exploring the possibilities of game design, and I have played a largish number of them. But there has often been a niggle, an annoyance with the games. Well several I suppose.
In many such games the rules tend to devolve into really nitty gritty pieces, what my friend Andras calls “rules by exception”. So for example you might want to play a character who is a military sniper, and so you find a game that has lots of stuff about snipers. Rules for caring about ammo and adjusting the sights on your weapon and how to adjust the gun balance and breathing styles for long shots and on and on. And you end up with some careful and well balanced mechanics about “snipering”. The thing is there is a balance between game mechanics that give you structure about what your character may do during an adventure, and getting detail that is so esoteric and rarely used by players that it gives poor return on the time invested.
An interesting thing about detail is that it can be attractive. If you look at Traveller there are rules about rolling dice to create the sectors of space that players will play through. The planets have a size, an atmosphere, hydrology type, colony size, law level, technology level and star port. And you romp through before playing and roll up all these planets in a sector and note them down. Only, that work doesn’t really make an adventure, it provides a structure that sometimes has some use. And there are game masters, myself included, who love to design different kinds of starships and make up rules about how planets should “really be” based on current scientific knowledge, but again it doesn’t really further the adventuring part of the game much, while taking up a lot of game master time and mind space.
As a response to these complexities people have tried creating simpler, more universal rules systems. Some are good fun, like TechNoir which is very innovative. The players collaboratively build the connections between elements of the game world as they play, so the game master has no idea what is going to be the case when things start rolling along. It relies on people having reasonable knowledge about the real world and how it hangs together and draws on that. It also does something I have always liked, top down context building.
The idea is that you start with a comprehensive description of the world. Its fuzzy, not very detailed, but provides just enough knowledge that if you threw players anywhere in the world there would be enough context to decide who the characters are and what they might be experiencing, what scenarios you could improvise. This level is not ideal for play but it does mean that there are no complete blanks in the world. (This article on incomplete game structures would give you an idea of a complete blank problem in an existing game, with this follow up regarding Plugging the Traveller Scenario Structure).
Next in context building an adventure setting there is some intermediate region of the world. Its more detailed. There are some factions of people doing things. There are important places. There are trade routes and major points of interest. Specific cultures are apparent. All of this remains consistent with the broader brush strokes at the higher, broader level, but this region only covers a small part of the large picture. Detailing this level takes more work per square foot, as it were, so you just do enough to surround the players out to some reasonable distance. If you start playing with the broad level and one area of regional level detail then you will have a pretty good time with the players, and only have to improvise details as needed.
And then the lower, local level, which is inside a region, inside the broad description. Again remaining consistent with the higher levels but getting into some clear focus on individual people, streets, buildings whatever. You only do this for places you are sure the players are going to interact with because now your effort per square foot is really high.
And that is the approach I want to use with developing a game system. There is a very broad brush stroke game, what I call the inner core. It tells you how to imagine an adventure, a character, and have characters “do things”, sometimes using dice to decide how well those things get done, given the character’s aptitude and the difficulty of the task. It also includes saving your character from harm (the classic “save” dice roll) using the same action mechanism. This level of rules is comprehensive, gives some procedure for running the game, and is very adaptable for any genre or setting, but leaves the game masters and players to do a fair bit of heavy lifting still when it comes to running the game in detail. I have play tested this inner core a lot. It’s very satisfying and has allowed time travel adventures, adventures in mythological ancient Greece, an adventure in the middle of the Vietnam War and several other impromptu, once only games.
The next step of the plan is to produce the outer core, which has richer ways to design characters, have characters grow, and run more detailed procedures for conflict, investigation, navigation, wealth building, politics and so on. These outer core features will get developed along with specific game settings that require their specific use, and the game setting will come with extensions that are most useful for that setting. These extensions will include step by step play procedures, such as how to handle players investigating a potentially zombie infested neighbourhood, or how to explore star systems that are outside the graviton stress lanes that make up the interstellar empire.
So that’s the plan. I’m working like crazy to get the inner core out to you all for free as a pdf. We’ll see what happens with that and hopefully embark on the larger quest to RPG joy together.
All Us Gamers Role Playing Game 