Treasure Hunt 2023

 This year’s Christmas treasure hunt:

Add together the fifth and sixth prime numbers. Then subtract 1.

Find the three consecutive odd numbers whose sum is 27. What is the middle number?

The first letter of the capital city of Myanmar.

Decrypt this using a caesar cypher with a shift of 3: “Wkh dqvzhu lv wkh ohwwhu g.”

What is the number of the chapter titled “The Forbidden Forest” in Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone?

The ninth prime number.

The first letter of the name of the artist who painted three castles.

A bat and a ball cost £1.10 in total. The bat costs £1.00 more than the ball. How much does the ball cost, in pence?

The first letter of the name of the artist who painted a wine bottle and two glasses.

A score.

Changing my mind – Fate

Last time I talked about the change I’d make to Fate Accelerated – I’d add a seventh approach, Charming.

Vodkashok pointed out some errors in my thinking on The Tavern discussion forum (where, through the magic of Interwebs, my blog was automatically posted).

He wrote:

I'd humbly suggest falling back onto my old favourite Fate Accelerated adage - Approaches say how you do something, not what you do. So each one can be applied to anything. So, if you are trying to charm someone

Quick - rapidly bombarding the listener with words, not letting them get a word in. Literal fast talk

Forceful - power of charisma or fear, like a drill sergeant

Flashy - a staged performance, ala Donald Trump

Careful - slowly and steadily picking your words to make the most impact

Clever - long words, complex sentence structure, introduce some Latin phrasing and the occasional 'Whaar!'

Sneaky - Laying down linguistical traps, boxing someone into a corner where they cannot do anything but agree, the weasel words salesperson

He’s right, and that’s helped my Fate Accelerated thinking.

How you do it, not what you do

Vodkashok is right to remind me that approaches are how you do something, not what you do.

It seems odd that I had forgotten that, as when I teach Fate Accelerated to new players, that’s exactly what I tell them: you tell me what you’re trying to do, and I’ll tell you which approach that is.

Can you forcefully charm someone?

But I’m not sure about all of Vodkashok’s examples (they appear to be persuading someone rather than charming them), but it’s a good example of how something like persuasion works in Fate Accelerated. 

And “charming” might even be part of your high concept aspect, allowing you to spend a fate point to invoke it for a bonus. Or it could be a stunt.

How do you charmingly open a door?

Thinking about it further, charming doesn’t work as an approach because it’s so limited. How would you “charmingly” open a door or drive a car? You can’t. It doesn’t work.

Now, I’m not sure that every approach should be used in every situation (I probably wouldn’t let someone forcefully charm someone), but adding niche approaches probably isn’t the way to go.

So, I won’t add Charming to Fate Accelerated after all.

What would I change about my favourite RPG system?

While I participated in RPGaDAY back in August, I found the questions a bit frustrating as I would have liked them to be more reflective.

As I was going through the month, I came up with a few questions I would like to answer. This is one of them.

What would you change about your favourite RPG system?

My favourite system, the one I find easiest to run and play, is Fate Accelerated.

I find Fate Accelerated absurdly simple. Characters are defined by:

• Aspects (“Hotshot pilot” “Rugged archaeologist” “Bull in a china shop”) which are always true. (Aspects can be applied to anything.)
• Approaches – how the character does things. Approaches come in six flavours: Forceful, Quick, Careful, Clever, Sneaky, and Flashy.
• Stunts – special abilities that work in certain circumstances, often giving a +2 bonus to a roll.

There are no skills – if you want skills, you should use Fate Core or Fate Condensed. (But I’m not a fan of Fate’s skills list, as I mentioned in my Fate of Cthulhu writeup.)

Doing stuff

So, to do something in Fate Accelerated, a player rolls four fate dice and adds the relevant approach. If they are smashing down a door, it’s probably Forceful. If they are picking the lock, it might be Careful.

The difficulty with approaches

Sometimes, I find it tricky to work out which approach should be used. Clever and Careful often seem to have an overlap. I don’t worry too much, but if I’m struggling, I do two things:

First, I consider what the result will be (and what might happen if they fail). If the player is carefully defusing a bomb, then that suggests a methodical approach. If they fail, they’ve probably taken precautions against taking too much damage. But quickly defusing a bomb suggests a certain recklessness.

Second, it’s sometimes helpful to think of the approaches as D&D attributes. While this works for Forceful (Strength), Quick (Dexterity), and Clever (Intelligence), this doesn’t work so well for the others. (This doesn’t work for every case. If a PC was trying to intimidate an NPC, I could imagine them rolling Forceful.)

I guess I could argue that Careful might equate to Wisdom, but I suspect that the blurriness between Clever and Careful is like that between INT and WIS.

But there’s no approach in Fate Accelerated equivalent to Charisma or Constitution. That’s fine for Constitution – there’s no need for a “healthy” approach as that’s covered by stress boxes and consequences.

But Charisma? That’s the bit in Fate Accelerated I miss. My players often try to befriend or get to know NPCs, and I find the approaches let me down in Fate Accelerated. So, I’d like to see a “charming” or “charismatic” or “likeable” approach for social situations.

Just one change

So that’s the change to Fate Accelerated I’d make: a seventh approach – Charming.

Reflections on a campaign larp

So from what I could tell and what the players told me (and others afterwards), the players enjoyed my two freeforms at Consequences. Several players want to find out what’s coming next, and other players (who missed one or both episodes) want me to run them again.

Which has me in a bit of a quandary.

The big idea

So a recap.

I’m writing a series of connected freeform larps set in the same universe. The freeforms are based on the science fiction first-contact novels and movies (and other media) that I have always adored.

Some characters appear in multiple episodes. Some characters appear only once. The games are always written for 13 players (although I’ve managed when Life has interfered). The games are also designed to be independent – you need not play in the previous episodes, but I hope you’ll get more out of them if you do.

The games so far are:

The Roswell Incident: Kind of a prequel. Sets the scene and introduces some of the main themes. This is now published by Freeform Games.

All Flesh is Grass: Based on the 1965 Clifford D Simak novel of the same name.

Children of the Stars: The players grapple with another alien race. Friendly or not?

Messages from Callisto: A mission to Callisto has unsettling news.

The Stars our Destination: The next game, which I’ve started, is set on Rapa Nui (Easter Island).

So far, I have run each game twice – so I have two alternate “timelines” taking place.

Timeline 1 is is an online-only game, started in February 2022. It’s suffered from occasional technical difficulties.

Timeline 2 is a face-to-face series that started at Retcon in February 2023 and continued at Consequences in 2023.

There are a few differences between the two – aside from the differences the players have created. I have changed some character names and alien details (one alien has completely changed from my original ideas).

But I’m keen to carry on with them. The two timelines are diverging, which is both scary and exciting.

(I should also note that while I have a vague sense of where I’m heading with the overall arc, I don’t know how I’ll get there…)

Multiple runs

At a convention like Consequences, it’s common to have multiple runs of popular games. This year, The Ashlight Labyrinth and Incense and Insensibility both ran twice. 

While that’s an easy thing to do for a one-shot, that’s a little trickier for ongoing games.

One easy answer is to start each episode with a summary that basically says, “Forget what happened last time; this is the real history.” As I understand it, that’s what Tony Mitton’s Linfarn Run series does.

But I don’t want to do that. I want the players' decisions in an episode to affect later episodes. If the players decide to multilaterally disarm and dismantle the world’s nuclear stockpile, then that should be part of the history going into later episodes.

I guess I could run (say) Children of the Stars twice at the same convention. They could have a common background (let’s say Timeline 2), but I would then end up with Timeline 2A and 2B (or is that Timeline 3 and 4?).

But that’s not what I want to do. I’d rather start Timeline 3 with The Roswell Incident and start afresh.

Playing previous episodes

The other issue is whether players who join the game at episode 4 (say), would like to play an earlier episode. They already know some of what happened in those episodes (because it’s part of the background) – but would playing in an earlier episode appeal?

I don’t know.

I’d like to think that my games are enjoyable enough that they would have a good time playing even if they already knew some details. 

And freeforms are often re-run, and players often play them again. At the recent Retcons, I played in two freeforms that I had played previously – in one case, I even played the same character. It didn’t affect my enjoyment – I had either forgotten the details, or deliberately overlooked them.

So, I hope that players will enjoy playing in earlier episodes. (And if it were me, I’d be tempted to push the game in different directions.) I guess I’ll find out in due course.

2-3 monthly campaign

I guess my ideal approach for the campaign would be to run them at 2-3 monthly intervals with a stable of players.

If anyone is in the Leeds/Harrogate/York region and wants to organise such a thing, let me know!

Available for others

A final constraint is that I plan to make the games available for others to play.

So far, The Roswell Incident is available via Freeform Games as one of their murder mystery games (although the main mystery isn’t a murder…)

Next to get into shape is All Flesh is Grass, which I hope to start work on shortly. When that’s done, I’ll make it available on my itch.io page. With a fair wind, I hope to get that up in early 2024.

However, making a game where earlier games affect later games presents a few challenges. For Children of the Stars, I anticipated one big outcome and several little outcomes. (And there was another outcome I hadn’t predicted!)

So for Messages from Callisto, I prepared a set of notes for each character based on the big outcome and briefings for the little outcomes. And between the games, I hurriedly stuffed character packets accordingly.

However, as the timeline goes on, that’s likely to become more complicated.

So I will probably provide the game as MS Word documents (rather than a pdf as I might normally do), and highlight the areas that need changing. (It’s that or provide different files for each option – along with really complicated instructions for assembling character packets.)

I am already taking the highlighter approach for The Stars our Destination as I am already writing different sections of the text changes for different outcomes.

To sum up

So:

• I want to keep the games in their own timelines. I want the in-game decisions to matter. So I’m unlikely to run them more than once at the same convention.
• I will make them available for others to run.
• The next game will be The Stars our Destination and is set on Rapa Nui. The title may change (but it’s unlikely). I hope to run that online in the first half of 2024 (Timeline 1), and then in person at Consequences (Timeline 2).
• I will probably run another game at Consequences, but whether that is episode 6 or something else, at this point I have no idea.
• I’m not sure when I’m going to start Timeline 3.