New game: Werewolves of London

Just in time to distract me before PAX Unplugged, but too late to be added to the fliers that I already printed to bring with me, it's new game time!

Werewolves of London is an area control game with blind bidding and (my favorite thing) two layers of prisoners' dilemma.  You play as predatory businesspeople by day, literal predators by night, competing for control of the city.  Each area where you have majority ownership earns you two resources, Money and Meat.  Money is used to bid on territories, either to acquire new ones or strengthen your position on ones you already own.  Meat is your victory points (though extra money that you have at the end of the game can also get you a few extra points).

At the start of each round, you bid on up to three territories.  Other players can see the amount that you bid, but not where it's going, until everyone has placed their bids and reveals simultaneously.  Whoever has the most money on a territory gets its resources and possibly another bonus of some sort (whoever has the second most might still get some benefit as the minority shareholder).  Money stays where you put it, so if another player wants to steal your territory they'll have to bid higher than whatever you already put in.

So, that prisoners' dilemma thing - when werewolves keep mutilating little old ladies, Scotland Yard eventually starts paying attention.  There is an investigation meter, and if it ever reaches the end then it's game over, everyone loses.  The meter goes up based on how much meat is collected at the end of a round, so players can choose to give up some of their victory points in exchange for slowing the investigation (but this must be declared secretly, so you don't know if anyone else is doing it until it's time for everyone to collect).  And once the police do start to investigate, any player can bid on the Scotland Yard territory to bribe them and move the meter back down (this is instead of owning that territory).  But once again, since bidding is secret, you don't know who is or isn't doing this until bids are revealed.

Current state of the game is that I have a rough sense of the basic rules, enough to test it, and I have a map that definitely isn't the final one I'm going to use but is enough for me to start some proof-of-concept testing.  Just playing around with that has already given me some idea of where to focus with writing decent rules rather than just rough ones.  I think there's a lot that still need to do there before I even feel ready to spring this on playtesters, but it's a start.

The other big challenge is with the map.  I need to figure out how I want to divide up the territories so that there will be a good number of them and most (if not all) have something interesting, rather than there being a few in the middle with Famous Tourist Attractions and then just a bunch of nondescript residential neighborhoods with slight variations.  And I'll need to figure out what are good bonuses to put on these territories that are meaningful for the game and at least kind of accurately reflect what's actually there in real life.  Hopefully I can get a few people who know the city better than I do to give me feedback on that.  I guess next time I'll have to write a game off of a song about Philadelphia.

EDIT: I'm calling it now - if Werewolves of London is successful, I will write an expansion for it, and it will be Lawyers, Guns, and Money.

Neon Knights - serious update

Finally made all the official changes I mentioned in the last post.  Approaches (now called "virtues") are updated so there's still that knightly flavor but they correspond more clearly to a given die roll, and you're only using one per roll instead of the mix-and-match thing I was trying earlier.  Not combining stats on a roll means that vehicles and mounts no longer have stats to add, so those now just give you stunts and/or Aspects while you are riding, plus the option to absorb hits that you take, and I also put in a rule for modifying die rolls when it matters that one vehicle or animal is significantly faster than another.  Hopefully this runs a lot smoother in play, with PCs still feeling powerful but not ludicrously overpowered.

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In more general news, I think I have everything ready that I need for PAX Unplugged this year.  I'm looking forward to running Under a Violet Moon in the Unpub room, and meeting with a couple of publishers who didn't immediately shoot me down when I contacted them about pitch meetings.  Now I just have to wait out the next four weeks until we get there.

Neon Knights - approaches, again

Finally got to do that test battle I was hoping for a couple weeks ago.  I had three players, only one of whom had any prior experience with Fate.  From my side of things it went more or less how I expected - while we were using the current rules it felt like I was struggling to determine what approaches the players should roll (even if one was obvious, which second one to add was usually less clear), and when we switched to default FAE approaches it was much easier to decide.  From the players' side, however, that wasn't the consensus (and this is why testing with other people is important, of course).  They didn't feel a big mechanical difference when we switched, but they really preferred the flavorful stat names over the FAE defaults.  Similar to what I had pointed out in my previous post but more emphatically so.  Coming away from that, it felt like my idea of adding a "cardinal virtue" Aspect wouldn't suffice, they really wanted to be rolling against Prudence or Wisdom or whatever every time.  So it seems like the next thing to try will be to tighten up the definitions of the "knightly" approaches to be clearer about which would apply when, and to cover more of the gaps where I feel like none of the current approaches fit as well as I would want.  I will also drop the "combine two" idea, which has not been satisfactory, although this will have some significant ripples that I will need to address right away.  So that'll be the next game update.

Violet Moon - a small maybe-update

Most recent couple of tests have suggested that the gameplay overall is solid, but I'm still not sure about balance.  I already decided that a change I'm going to test out next time will be to drop the rule about yellow spaces being safe for villagers.  Hopefully that's enough to keep it even between the two sides, but if not, I thought of another change today that would be next in the queue to test - penalizing the Villager player for wrong guesses.  In the game narrative, this would be something like "everyone is suspicious of John and focuses on him, and the faeries take advantage of this confusion."  What it would look like in the mechanics, as I'm currently considering it, would be that if the Villager player tries to capture a piece that turns out to just be a villager and not a faerie, then the Faerie player gets to turn one of their basic move cards face up again.  So it's not a huge penalty for guessing wrong, but it is something.  I actually really like the idea, I feel like it puts more pressure on the Villager player in a way that fits with what I want the game to be, but there's also the risk of it pushing the balance too far in the Faerie player's favor and that's not what I want.  Oh well, more testing to do.

Neon Knights: taking a different approach

I have my first in-person playtest of Neon Knights coming up, so I've been getting ready for that over the last few days.  Meanwhile, my play-by-post playtests have led me to become increasingly unhappy with my modified approaches.  So for the in-person test I'm planning to start out with the current system, then switch to baseline Fate Accelerated midway through and see which feels better for everyone.  That means writing two copies of each pre-gen character, one for each version, and that led to an interesting observation.  The stats didn't convert cleanly from one to the other; e.g. just because someone was high in Prowess in my modified format didn't necessarily mean that Forceful made sense as their best stat in baseline FAE (and never mind trying to figure out what Diligence or Empathy maps onto).  And it occurred to me that the two different versions are looking at the characters' actions in different ways.  Baseline FAE approaches essentially describe the action itself - I swing my sword in a Forceful way, or in a Quick way, etc.  But my current modified approaches in NK feel more like they are describing the thought process behind the action - I swing my sword with Courage when I am focused on plunging into a dangerous situation, or I swing my sword with Diligence when I slow down and study my opponent before striking.  Prowess is kind of an outlier here, throwing "thought process" out the window and being all about physical capability.

And as much as I don't love the current system of deciding that my attack this round is based on Courage+Prowess or whatever, I do still like the flavor behind it.  To me, it's a large part of what makes the Knights actually feel like knights and not just action heroes with colorful gear.  So I'm thinking about ways to preserve that flavor if I do end up getting rid of my modified approaches.  Idea #1 right now is to put a "Knights' Code" in the flavor text of the game.  Idea #2, which will have more mechanical impact on the game, is to add a "Cardinal Virtue" Aspect, so my character really leans into Courage while yours really leans into Empathy, and these things affect die rolls and roleplay complications the same way as any other Aspect.  Most likely I'll do both of these things.  Or maybe I'll think of something else.

Anyway, that's it for now, and hopefully I have something cool to say about the test session in a couple of days.

Update: in-person test didn't pan out; too many designers at the meetup and not enough time for everyone's game to hit the table.  I might try again next month if scheduling works out, or I might try to put something else together.  But I will say that the more I think just about the stuff from this post, the more I'm feeling like I should make these changes.

Apparently deadlines are helpful for me?

One of the items I picked up for Free RPG Day this year was 9th Level Games' Level 1 anthology.  Apparently this is something they've been doing for a few years now, where they provide a prompt and then people submit mini-RPGs that somehow fit that prompt, and the best 15-20 of them get published in this book.  So I held that in the back of my mind as something that might be fun to do.  And then I finally got around to checking their website and saw that the deadline for this year is in just a few weeks.

Had a bit of panic, then suddenly thought of an idea that I liked, and with the pressure to get it done quickly, I have the first draft completed after only a couple days of work.  Granted, the 1000-word limit means that I don't have to make it as thorough as, say, a Fate-based game that I intend to charge actual money for and thus must have enough content to feel like I'm justified in charging actual money.  But even so, I can't think of the last time I have written this much this quickly.  I'm going to go ahead and attribute this to having an inflexible deadline.

So what's the game, you ask?  Hopefully you'll find out on Free RPG Day 2024.  But if not then I'll post it online myself in a less fancy and prestigious format.

New title reveal

Just a minor update here, following up from the previous post.  After much beating my head against the wall and also doing the relatively smart thing of seeing what relevant others think, I have my new title for the game that used to be DGE:

Dwarven Engineers: A Game of Preposterous Prototypes and Implausible Explanations

It's still the same game, but hopefully this title does better for setting expectations.  Now to update the tags on the blog and then write a new game synopsis for the next competition I'm submitting it to.