A Small But Vicious Dog

Over the last few months we've been exploring the world of Warhammer Fantasy Roleplay (3rd edition) from Fantasy Flight Games.  Described by the publisher as: "an new, exciting way to experience the popular Warhammer Fantasy setting... a grim world, constantly at war", I think WFRP 3e is an important game, albeit an imperfect one.  The following text contains my reflections of the game thus far.

Why WFRP?
There are many, many fantasy games on the market, so why does Warhammer have enduring appeal?  For me the answer is in several parts.  One part is nostalgia. For anyone who played the Warhammer Fantasy Battle, or earlier editions of the roleplaying game, WFRP is a familiar, well resolved, interesting fantasy setting, that contains most typical fantasy tropes alongside some tongue-in-cheek humour.

The second major appeal of the game has always been the idea that instead of playing a fledgling hero, you play a character just trying to get by.  Careers like Rat Catcher or Servant are the norm, and darkness is everywhere.  Perhaps the characters will survive the adventure and prosper, but they may simply end up mutilated, mentally scarred or diseased, trying desperately to get into a more respectable career.  If you favour a dark fantasy game, WFRP has always been a good choice.

Finally the game has always been well supported with a large range of sourcebooks and scenarios.  Some classic campaigns, like The Enemy Within are considered classics and extremely innovative for their time.

Pick a card, any card
The most striking difference between the 3rd edition of WFRP and it's predecessors, is the use of cards.  The bespoke card decks are used for the entirety of the options available to players during combat, reflecting wounds, insanities, diseases, madness, mutation, monsters and even in-game locations.

The cards are neat.  They take a lot of the load from the GM to manage the rules for the players, and make clear the potential outcomes for most results.  On the down side, the cards take up a lot of space during the game, and require careful management between sessions to prevent hours of searching later, and make second hand versions of the game a touch-and-go option.

It should be noted that, toward the end of the license, Fantasy Flight published a series of books which enable the game to be played without many of the cards previously required, and allowed players to plan career development at a glance (rather than scouring endless card decks).  The utility of these books make them an important addition to the smooth operation of the game.

Other innovations
There are several other neat elements of WFRP 3e.  The game is practically bursting with little innovations, such as the stance tracker, which tracks whether a character is more conservative or aggressive and allows you to swap dice in your pool accordingly, social combat rules, a descriptive range tracker, and overall party tension measure.  And of course, the special dice which so polarised gamers when the game was released.

Although many of these elements are not smoothly integrated, they are extremely innovative for a traditional system with such a long history.  For these reasons I think the game is important in the history of roleplaying game design, and many have been influential on subsequent designs.

Quirks and peculiarities
WFRP 3e is not without some eyebrow raising limitations.  For example, High Elves are included as a core character race, but widely marginalised in the settings for most of the scenarios written for the game.  In addition, no elf expansion was ever made limiting elf-specific career options.

The game was originally designed for just 4 players with card options to match.  These days this problem is easily resolved by finding the basic card summary online and printing one for each player.

While the materials included in the scenario and expansion boxes are beautiful, there's a criminal shortage of usable maps and the organisation of the scenario books is not always ideal.  Should the card decks become separated from the scenario books they are almost unplayable in some cases.

The party tension meter is a really nice idea, but unless your players are rigorous in staying in character, most bickering around a game table happens 'out-of-character' and punishing players for bickering in character actually works against a richer, more fully realised, game.

The bespoke dice mechanic is a nice way of randomising several possible outcomes in a single throw, but dice outcome cancelling each other out, means bigger pools (as the character advance their careers) complicate the resolution of this mechanic without any additional benefit.

Freeing careers from a tree-progression system and allowing an almost unlimited ability to pick up new cards means that players have a lot more options in terms of character development, but this also means players face a bewildering array of choices, especially when they start playing the game.

In summary
WFRP 3e is an eccentric game.  It is bursting full of ideas and neat tricks, but much of the way these work together at the table feels unfinished, and doesn't live up to their full potential.  Indeed, you might say that Fantasy Flight refined the system when it made Star Wars: Edge of the Empire and again for Genesys.

If you like the setting, and can get past the challenges inherent in the game collateral (bespoke dice and large numbers of cards) you'll find a surprising accessible system, that delivers a solid gaming experience, particularly for early-career characters.

Designer's Notes - Wicked Lies & Alibis

I recently launched a new game; Wicked Lies & Alibis, a whodunit roleplaying game set in the age of art deco.  I thought it might be interesting to briefly discuss how this game came about and the thinking behind some of the key design decisions that were made.

Inspiration
It all started when I was playtesting a new EPOCH scenario - Harvest - which was subsequently published in The Experiment Continues.  One of the suggested setups for the characters in the opening scene is that they are old friends who are travelling together to sprinkle the ashes of a recently deceased friend from the cliffs of her remote, coastal, hometown. This background served no purpose to the scenario beyond being a reason that the characters travel together to the town where the scenario begins

EPOCH is designed to encourage the players to construct interesting backstories for characters with a specific flashback mechanic.  As my playtest progressed the players began to focus on the story of the deceased friend, and created a Tarantinoesque story involving a drug-deal gone bad, double-crossing and finally death.  Each player used their flashback to show a different way in which the friend was badly injured during these escapades, but concluded with the friend being alive when they last saw them - implicating the other characters.

So engaging was this story of betrayal it came to compete with and even eclipse the scenario plot.  That led me to conclude that EPOCH worked pretty well to support this kind of a game. But what, I wondered, would a game that was explicitly designed to generate this kind of story look like?

I have always found it interesting that in most murder mystery stories the crime itself is fairly straightforward; the bulk of such stories are the lies, obfuscation and twists that the guilty, and not-guilty, weave in order to hide their secrets.  It seemed to me that there was a neat game experience to be had in recreating this kind of game for the tabletop, focussing on the human drama and secrets of the suspects, rather than the procedural aspects of following clues and deduction.

Characters
I started with character creation; EPOCH does a pretty good job of supporting the players to generate interesting concepts from a few card-based concepts which could be fleshed out in much greater detail over a single session, so I borrowed these mechanics - but there were a few tweaks I wanted to make.  For example, in the past I'd observed players complain they simply couldn't reconcile two randomly dealt character creation cards, and sometimes players would even agree to swap cards.  So, I decided it would be important to give the player several options so they could pick a combination of cards that suited them from the outset.  I also added a motive card which would have obvious importance for later in the game.

In EPOCH I suggest using a group relationship to help players establish an identity relative to one another.  For Wicked Lies & Albis I wanted this relationship to have a mechanical effect, so during the opening scenes each character can play a connection (which they specify) on another character, and both players look at each other’s secret motive and circumstance cards, binding them together in a way that enables them to help or incriminate one another later in the game.  During playtest this had the greatest impact when players established close relationships, particularly immediate family.  It also means that some characters might end up being heavily connected (and knowing a lot of other people’s secrets) which I think helps reflect the reality the way social groups actually work in real life.

The game itself is split into two parts.  The opening scenes serve to ease the players into their characters, and to interact in order to establish some basic relationships.  Another EPOCH device that I’ve slightly refined this is also where the GM does the scene setting and introduces the future victim, and at the conclusion, the means of their demise.

The System
The second part of the game is perhaps the real meat of the game experience.  I wanted the characters to be able to tell stories of the victim’s demise, and ultimately accuse each other – but I needed a way to balance the different skills and experience that players bring to the table, and create a story framework that was constrained enough that it could evolve over the course of the game, and where the key elements could be remembered by the players. 

My solution was to create a deck of accusation cards.  Each has an element that incriminates another character somewhat (for example the character has a violent temper or previously threatened to kill the victim), and a player draws three such cards in each of four rounds and choses one to play on another character at the table in order to incriminate them as the potential murderer.  Played cards remain on the table as a physical reminder of the story and where the weight of accusations sits. 

In the hands of some players these cards support the framing of a detailed flashback scene which culminates in an accusation; for others less interested in exercising narrative control, simply making the accusation across the table is sufficient.  There are also alibi cards that allow a player to cancel an accusation played on another character by providing an alibi, rather than making an accusation.

The key is that the accusations can fit any context that the players construct – for example we know the character of the actor has a violent temper because it has been narrated in an accusation that they assaulted a theatre critic who reviewed them poorly – now that we know the actor is violent and probably ambitious, so a further accusation might infer that perhaps the victim was preparing to fund their next theatrical outing and reneged at the last minute, or perhaps they were a beneficiary of the victim’s will and needed a cash injection to promote their career... As the accusations are played, we learn more about the character and their motive to murder.

So while the accusation cards provide elements of a story framework, the players are the ones who really shape the story.  Playing multiple accusations on a character allows players to build on one-another’s stories, and ultimately each is a vote for which of the emerging narratives is most compelling.  This is an unusual experience for the players as they begin the game with total autonomy over their character, but in the second part of the game, they give up some of this autonomy and gain a level of narrative power over other characters, while still remaining in the skin of their character. 

During this phase the GM takes a formal facilitation role through the NPC of the Great Detective, who already knows the identity of the murderer, but will only reveal this once the secrets of the key suspects, and their attempts to obfuscate the truth, have been laid bare.

Playtesting the game yielded a further element – players wanted to have the opportunity to respond immediately to accusation made against their character, by turning them back on their accuser.  So I added the Prime Suspect card (given to the character with the most accusations) which allows this to happen once per round, providing some disincentive to piling accusations on one character, while also providing a physical reminder of which character is soon to face charges for murder.  This all comes to a conclusion in a formal end scene, where each player provides a conclusion for their character.

Conclusion
So, how does this all work?  In my experience Wicked Lies & Alibis supports an almost entirely player-driven story experience, and balances interaction so that everyone at the table has a fairly equal degree of participation.  It manages this without needing a 10,000 word scenario or the threat of character elimination that is the modus operandi of EPOCH.  All the GM needs is a deck of cards, a one-page case summary and to have some idea about the Great Detective they want to portray.

That said, much like EPOCH, I imagine this won’t be a game for everyone, it’s pretty non-traditional, dispensing with attributes, skills and characteristics, and my perusal of relative sales status of DriveThruRPG titles suggests that while investigation is common in many popular RPGs, dedicated murder mystery RPGs don’t seem to have a huge following.  There’s also the need to assemble the deck, which is obviously a much higher bar to entry than simply grabbing your trusty dice and a pencil.

As always, it took much longer to pull together all the material I wanted to include than I initially imagined.  Following on from the example of EPOCH scenarios I wanted to offer some detailed facilitation notes to explain how to get the most from each phase of the game, and some summary materials to make the GM's life easy at the table (as a regular 'con GM I am a big advocate of simple reference sheets).  Then there is the historic context - I wanted to set this during the art deco period (mid 1920's- late 1930's) to parallel the 'golden age' of detective fiction, so I wanted to add a few historical details, but as this wouldn't be the focus of the game, I didn't want to get bogged down in this material, so I hit on the idea of introducing selected historical themes in the same way you'd introduce an NPC - some general details to enhance the flavour of the game.

So, that's a high-level overview of creating Wicked Lies & Alibis.  It makes it sound a much more orderly and planned experience than it actually was - at it's heart this is a game that evolved from a tabletop experience, and was refined through further gaming and experimentation.  

[Cross-Posted to Wicked Lies & Alibis]

Laying Your Cards on the Table

Given there has been some interest in the comments about the Print-on-Demand card deck for EPOCH, I thought I’d take a moment to discuss my experience of the process to this point. 

Why cards?  
Well, as you may have read in my post on the design philosophy for EPOCH (republished recently in the RPG review) I wanted EPOCH to be a highly focussed game and felt that using dice, and even the lightest mechanical touch to support them, risked diverting player interest from the character narrative at key moments in the game.  In terms of a resolution system, in a survival horror game, from a players view it seems reasonably to try and skew the odds in the favour of your character wherever possible – after all, the overall odds are likely to be tilted against your character, and in my experience of using systems, even comparatively simple and abstract systems like Gumshoe, or story based systems like Fiasco, some players will often want to optimise any odds or outcomes as a general principle, if presented the opportunity to do so.  This invariably results in players seeking out-of-character clarification across the table, or negotiating to try and ensure they have the best chances of success.  I’m certainly not against using dice, but for my game, where detailed characterisation over a single session is essential, I wanted a mechanic that better supported this approach.

EPOCH also uses cards to provide attributes and motivations to help with character creation, reveal plot elements as part of the Horror Track, tack the triggering of flashbacks and provide inspiration for players during the game if required.  In each case a randomly rolled table, supported by dice could have delivered these elements, but I felt that making each element available to the player (and GM) in the form of a card was a more elegant solution. 

Design 
Because EPOCH is a game which stresses player focus on characters I wanted the cards to be very simple, and allow the player to use their own creative abilities to fill in the detail.  For this reason, most of the original EPOCH cards were simple white rectangles with a black border, featuring a single word.  For the Outcome cards, which depict the injuries the characters suffer, I wanted to add a little extra element, blood spatter in quantities appropriate to the outcome seemed like a neat visual way of overlaying the degree of severity of each card. 

The basic cards I made for the early version of EPOCH were serviceable, if somewhat no frills.  However, I found that when my fellow EPOCH GM’s were printing them in preparation for Kapcon they frequently complained because the cards weren’t aligned to print double sided and assuming you want all possible card options for six players, you needed to cut out around 98 cards, which is almost 200 squares to cut when you do the card backs separately!

So I commissioned EPOCH artist Doug Royson to come up with some new art for the cards.  I knew that I wanted to try the print-on-demand card service offered via drivethrurpg, and therefore decided to make the new cards in the same format for both electronic and print versions.  To help the process I gave Doug the information sheet from Drivethrurpg which specified the size of the cards, and the need to create a bleed around the card (an area which the printer couldn’t guarantee 100% where the cut would be so should have no important text or images.

Doug delivered some amazing looking prototype cards.  We went back and forth a few times until we got a final product we were both happy with.  These were delivered as photoshop files of around 60-80 MB that I then used photoshop to create the entire deck.  Next I created the files for the digital product by laying these out using identical templates so they can be printed double sided (although I’ve found many printers have a tray feeder variance of anything from 2-10mm, and the bigger and fancier the printer you use, the more likely you are to find a low double side feeder variance). 

Printing 
I had thought doing the digital files was fairly laborious, as each card had to be resized and copied to a layout page and lined up with guidelines, but that was nothing compared with what was to come.  

•  Tip One: Create multiple versions of all your cards so that you always have master files for each step of the process you can revisit.  

 The first thing I realised was that while Doug’s cards were great he had made the bleed, the same as the border.  So, if I wanted a black border around the cards (and I did) I needed to create a new template, and paste the card in, effectively giving it a double border, half of which would be cut off during printing.

•  Tip Two: make sure you mark the bleed lines into your print documents and factor them in.

Next was the colour format of the cards.  Printers use CMYK (as opposed to RGB) because they are actually printing each colour separately, and in addition I needed to make sure the cards are not ‘over-inked’ meaning they had less than 238% total amongst the C,M, Y and K (the suggested mix is C 60%, M 40%, Y 40%, K 100%) .  A simple adjustment to make, but something to do early in the process to save hours of tedious clicking (apparently Acrobat can sometimes fix this easily - mine did not).

• Tip Three: check your colour settings.

Next I needed to resize the card as the deck would otherwise have been more than 2 GB and been unmanageable to upload to the printer.

• Tip Four: start with large, high res card files and convert them later, creating new print master files.

Finally it was time to collate the deck for printing.  The printer wants a single PDF, so I need to create a PDF which contains all of the cards, starting with the back of the first card in the deck.  This was pretty laborious, as the deck has 130 cards, so that’s 260 individual card files to add to one document.  This is particularly tricky when creating multiple versions of the same card, as it’s easy to lose track. One mistake and the card deck would be incorrect, and that’s on you – not the printer.

• Tip Five: Create the final file carefully, and double check everything.

You will also need to made sure the file is saved as the right kind of PDF (a PDF/X-1a:2001) in newer versions of Acrobat, or Acrobat that's fairly straightfoward (look under print management) but it can be trickier to find in older versions.  That’ll do for now.  Any questions?

The Proof of the Pudding

I just recieved the proof set of the EPOCH print-on-demand card deck and I have to say it is pretty fantastic!  For those who are interested I'm working with the good people at drivethrucards.com who have been extrmely helpful and easy to deal with.  Here are some early pictures of the proof deck.  Now, how soon can I schedule another EPOCH game?