Jump to content

rleduc

Member
 View Profile  See their activity

  • Posts

    274

  • Joined

  • Last visited

 Content Type 

Blog Entries posted by rleduc

  1. rleduc
    In this morning stroll through Engadget I came across two stories that related to the science of Rubble and Ruin. When I wrote R&R I was trying to take modern science as seen from my perspective as a professional scientist and project to a near future where everything was cranked up to 11.

    For AI brains being used to “man” automated weapons systems I give you http://www.engadget.com/2011/01/13/darpas-msee-to-develop-new-mathematical-language-race-of-senti/.

    Of more interest to me, R&R has a “fantasy” element of nano-psionics. This was intended to represent some new discoveries coming out of the Second Global War that could not be predicted from our current vantage point – the idea being something like asking someone in 1910 to predict the atomic bomb. There were probably people thinking in terms of both big bombs and unlocking the power of the atoms, but I don’t think anyone had a clear idea of how it would be done. Likewise I don’t believe anything like nano-psionics will appear in our future, but I do believe there will be things we have yet to think of. Still, it was interesting to see that people are using tattoos of subdermal nano-particles to create biomonitors. See this link: http://www.engadget.com/2011/07/21/fluorescent-nanosensor-tattoo-monitors-glucose-under-the-iphone/
  2. rleduc
    Remember the good old days™ when you would get together with your buddies and game for eight to twelve hours a couple of times a week? Back then the BRP experience system worked great; you would get a bunch of checks and some of them would improve each adventure. Over the course of a few real months characters would be getting better at the skills they used often, and not so much for the rarely used ones. But now days, for a lot of us, family, work, and Real Life™ get in the way, we might be lucky to get three to four hours of game time a week. But, we would still like a character to improve in commonly used skills faster than rarely used ones, and faster if the character has a low percentage, slower for higher skill levels. And, we would like to see noticeable improvement in the characters over the course of a few months of play.

    To this end, the group I game with has been testing the following system for the last few weeks.

    Characters accumulate check in skills as usual, but when it is time for skills to improve, there is no roll to see if the skill goes up, instead all skills with checks improve, but the amount is determined by the skills current percent chance of success.

    If the current skill level is:


    1-30%, the skill improves by 1D8,
    31-60%, the skill improves by 1D6,
    61-90%, the skill improves by 1D4,
    91% + , the skill improves by 1

    Thus, after ten game sessions a PC who started with 90% in his or her main weapon will have likely improved to 100%, while a skill that is used (successfully) every other game and started at 25% will be around 46% or 47%. This gives noticeable improvement over the course of a ten week story arc, but not earth-shattering skill gains.
  4. rleduc
    I couldn’t help noticing how much this article (http://www.mercurynews.com/centralcoast/ci_12115324) matches the opening of Daybreak Tomorrow. Only now you have to imaging a larger area without intermittent landlines functioning – a situation with absolutely no reliable information about the problem.
  6. rleduc
    Last night I finished the draft layout of the monograph—there are a few small details that might move the page count, but it looks like it will be 126 pages (plus or minus 1).

    Chapter 2 of 5 is back from the editor, and I only have one small (250 word) text box to finish writing. Several blind play testers (and semi-blind—meaning people who have played in my games before) are looking at copies of earlier drafts.

    All the artwork is in.

    I hope to have it to Dustin in two weeks!
  7. rleduc

    Inspirations

    By rleduc,

    I’ve got the first three chapters out to two play-testers!

    I thought people might be interested in this – on the inside front cover of the monograph I have a small section called inspirations.

    Inspirations
    There are many different forms of post apocalyptic stories each with their own flavor. Rubble and Ruin focuses on only one vision of the future – the following stories most closely capture the feel of the Rubble and Ruin world:

    A Boy and His Dog (Film: 1975) or the original story by Harlan Ellison

    Le Dernier combat (Film: 1983) [if you haven’t seen this film, don’t worry that the film is in “French”, it contains almost no dialog.]

    Mad Max: Beyond Thunderdome (Film: 1985) [if you haven’t seen this movie, then this might not be the best game for you to play.]

    The Postman (Book: 1985, David Brin) [The movie version of this story removed all the cyborgs and artificial intelligence that are central to Rubble and Ruin.]

    Dhalgren (Book: 1974, Samuel Delany) [The social elements of this story greatly influenced the fluid gang-structure of the rubble, even though the autumnal city is very different from the one presented here.]
  8. rleduc
    Rubble and Ruin is getting better! I can say this because I am getting help where I need it the most. Puck from this forum has agreed to contribute some artwork – and it is great! (At least, I like it.) He has captured my image of rubble and ruin – wasted and formless scraps of our world inhabited by rough and tumble individuals. And he thinks he can get me a laser tank for the Bestiary! Maybe it’s just me, or maybe it is the fact that I am writing up “my game” but any game with robotic laser tanks in the bestiary can’t be all bad.

    Further, a very good friend of mine, and one of the original Rubble and Ruin players from back in the 1980’s has agreed to edit the manuscript. He is currently a English professor at one of the larger state universities in Thailand, and he is a longtime Runequest/C of C GM.

    I just thought the world should know.

    p.s. Four out of five chapters are written!
  9. rleduc
    Today I got word that R&R has been accepted! Let’s hope this goes well.

    I am currently looking for play testers – if you are interested, let me know!

    I have character generation finished – if you would like to make a few characters and let me know what you think, I would like to hear from you.

    Rich
  10. rleduc

    Dog Blog

    By rleduc,

    Dude, you wrote 1,000 words on normal dogs – are you some sort of dog-freak?

    Not really, I don’t even own a dog. But I have been running a reasonable realist PA game since the dawn of time (think more like ‘Alas Babylon’ and less like ‘Mad Max’), and one thing that has come out of thinking about the setting is that dogs would regain their old place as mans best friend. In my game the world slowly fell into dysfunction over about 15 years (long back-story for this) and then the game is set 20 years later – my preferred game-play involves normal people who find themselves in interesting (and dangerous) situations. These games, like many, escalate in power but during the early phases characters are doing things like sneaking into gang hideouts or escaping from evil overlords (“release the hounds”) and the like. To that end, I have found having a little more detail regarding dogs as very useful.

    In practice, the tracking and guard dogs see the most game play with the occasional attack dog used by an NPC. Guard dogs are easy to keep, and not to hard to train – they create a simple alarm system for watching your hideout. Likewise, if you can afford the time and energy, some tracking dogs are useful if you need to follow someone through the ruin. In practice, my games are too deadly for a PC to keep an attack dog very long – sooner or latter he will use it on someone with a pistol, or even a security robot and that is the end of the dog.
  11. rleduc

    Boring Blog

    By rleduc,

    I hate it when I make a character that has useless skills. I’m not talking about skills that I failed to make relevant, but rather skills that had no chance of ever coming up in play –particularly when the skill is one that the GM doesn’t believe in. To combat this problem in my own games, I always supply the players with a skill list during character generation that includes “every skill I will call for, unless the action is driven by a player”. By this I mean that left to my own devices, these are all the skills that I think the PCs could possibly need, and if you the player take anything else, the burden will be on you to make it relevant. I don’t see this as limiting the players, but rather helping them. Many players do not want to push the bounds of a setting, and for them they have a simple guide in the form of the skill list, meanwhile those players that do have a good idea have a tool to help focus character development.

    For example, one of my “cannon” fantasy worlds I have been running for the last two decades has all the action focused in a high mountainous region called the Highpass. Now hundreds of people have played in the dozens of different campaigns that I have run over the years in this world – and the action has never gone onto the high seas. When I run high seas adventures I usually have three of four different seamanship related skills (ship-handling, navigation, boating, etc.). From time to time someone will want to run a sailor who has made his way into the region – that’s cool – but I don’t want to penalize the player by forcing him to buy three or four skills that will never be used just to fill out his back-story. So instead, we invent one skill, Sailing, and he puts some points into it and then focuses his remaining development on those skills on the list that would be relevant for a sailor.

    Following from my habit of curating the skill list, if you are using professions they all need to be modified to reflect the available skills. Additionally, since I am usually gaming at university clubs or other large groups and didn’t really have a single group of players – until recently, my occupation required me to move every year or so -- I like to provide some additional documentation about the game; this makes it easier on everyone, and we can all get to the fun faster. To that end, I have created a “Game Template” file which is available in the upload section. This template lists all the skills and professions form the BRP Core rules. For each game that I start, I would take the template and fill in the required bits, remove any unused skills from both the main list and the professions and add any new skills. I though others might find this a labor saving tool so I have made it available for down loads.
  12. rleduc
    Hello,

    If anyone happens to read this, I thought I would use the blog-space to explain what I am doing in the download section. I have run a particular Post-Apocalyptic game reasonably regularly since about 1981. This is not to say I have run one continuous game, but rather I have run countless different campaigns with different mechanics and different groups of players but always keeping certain core elements of the world that I would adapt and (hopefully) improve over time. This has left me with hundreds of pages of hand written notes, and about a hundred or so of typed notes. Much of the time my world has been run as either Aftermath, homebrew BRP or with mechanics I wrote myself. With the release of a new “cannon” BRP I would like to convert my world solely to BRP – just so I can have a game that is run in mechanics that are currently in publication! In a perfect world I would organize all this and finish typing it up and propose to Chaosium that it be published as a manuscript. But since gaming is my hobby and not vocation, I am not sure I will have the time to do that properly, so instead I am writing up one section at a time (particularly the sections that I think will be useful to other players) and posting them as I go. To begin with I am writing the mechanics that I need for the world – detailed firearms rules, and my next posting will be “normal dogs”…

    I hope people find things they can use,

    Rich
×
×
  • Create New...