A Game Design Philosophy

A long time ago I ran a game of Conspiracy X. It's got X Files vibes, horror, aliens, monsters ghosts, magic, psionics and of course conspiracies. I love that game. The rules had some crunch and on the surface a fair amount of detail.

By nature I am a bit of a tinkerer. Rules are representations of reality and I like my subjective reality to have rules that hold a mirror up to reality. So every now and again I find something wrong and often glaringly so. 

In my life I have been around firearms more than most. It was things like an MP5 being classed as a pistol made me think . It started with shotguns. Do I know that trying to shoot something with a shotgun at range is problematic. Anything more than about 40-45m is unlikely to hit (don't tell me about shotgun slugs). At shorter ranges than that damage is less significant. This game was showing a range bracket of double that. 

Sniper rifles were actually under powered. In scale, which was about 25mm to 1m, for the game. On tabletop a heavy sniper rifle could hit something on from the end to end of my 3m table. When I looked it up, not being a sniper, the range was more like the table, the garden, a small carpark, two footpaths, four lanes of road, another smaller garden and I estimated you could readily hit something in the back room of the house opposite. That wasn't even close to the record which would be around double that. 

The players were okay with this. It made sense to them. My guess is that it also helped that for the most part things got better for them. 

Having done some martial arts, I have some idea about fighting. Again, not an expert but I have done more than most. One of the rules said that you couldn't kick when you were on the ground. Having been knocked off my feet by a kick from someone on their back the week before, I changed the rules. This did not go down well even though it was true to reality.

It was after this that I changed to Savage Worlds. Unlike almost all games I have played in the past, SW has a lot less crunch. It has enough, but only enough to keep the rules working. Being a tinkerer I have found the need to add to it on occasion but I haven't really found the need to change it.

When all said and done it works. Sensible tactics, like using cover, still work and arguably works better. Combat, which could take hours in the other games I had run, took easily a quarter of the time. Everyone is still happy and we move on to the next thing.  It also works as a skirmish game. Which I may have mentioned in the past.

Now it's not everyone's favourite game. Amongst the none D&D it's fairly popular. So not as popular as it should be. In over two decades of running it I haven't had an argument about rules. Well maybe once. 

So in a roundabout way I am suggesting that simplicity is better. Personally I like a lot of crunch in theory but then I have to play it. Rules are generic enough that they can be used to for pretty much an era. It works. It fun to play (and fast and furious apparently). It makes for a calmer tabletop. 

Actually Ending The Start Of The Week (22)

So I got round to finishing last week's task. Starting at the beginning of the end. It makes sense to me. Under the circumstances.

This week is going to be about the Guards of Traitors Toll. Again. This should see the end of the plan. I have a half dozen knights to glue together to make the yellow team or some mercenaries. I might have to get some more if I am going to do the Baron's War force. For some reason I have ended up with another twenty two figures again. No real plan to it all. I'm just finishing off this part of the queue.

What I've finished is below. They are not bad but I am sure there are a few missing details.

I've been thinking about my daughter a lot today. I wonder about the future more now than ever. It was my best mate from school's birthday yesterday. He died back in 1990. Living, or rather dead, proof of what happens to someone riding a Suzuki bike into the back of a car. I don't want either end of that for her. In fairness I am pretty sure she will be fine.

Start Of The Week?

This really is a start of the week post. The day just got away from me. My plan for the week was pretty solid. Everything was ready to go. The minis were trimmed and are on textured bases and even primed. The only figures I have ready to go are the Trench Crusaders (I keep wanting to call it tench crusade, the war against the carp), the Soviets and the last of the Traitors Toll stuff. So it's looking like the way I am going.

I'm still finishing off last week's stuff. Again. But I am nearly done. Just a few bits and the skin. Finish the mini with a wash and a little titivation for the base.

So I ended up with less gladiators than I thought. I put one of the frames together. In my mind there were going to be about eighteen of them but I ended up with only eight and only four of them were actually gladiators. So this is not going to be a project. 

 

My plan to turn my daughter into a gamer took a massive step forward this week. I got both copies of Stuffed Fables. Ideal for the little one. Or do I hope. I have even bigger plans, but let's not get ahead of myself.

She decorates her hair with shoes and live yellow diamond shape buttercups daily. The computer mouse turned into a real grey mouse today. He collects the sounds of breaking glass inside tin cans. The sky was striped like a circus tent all day.

Let's Talk About Blogger

Yes, let's. I've been doing this thing for well over a decade now. I go through fits and starts but I have tried to keep it up. To an extent it gives me some sort of purpose. A bit trite but it is the truth.

I like to think that someone is actually reading it. It's nice to have some motivation and a bit of feedback. A nice number of hits always helps. So every now and again I check my stats.

If it isn't clear, about ten percent of my hits have happened in the last month. The traffic is wild. The last three months has about 15% of my total hits and about 20% over the last six months. Blogger is a little ambiguous about where the hits are coming from, in the form of referers, but 99% are from sources with less than seven hits. So picking a figure that is anywhere from about 40,000 to 100,000 different sites. There is a bulge in the middle of the stat line. 

For point of clarity during that peak I was posting every day and posting elsewhere to boost my stats. Right now it's a few times a week. Whilst I haven't done the numbers, I would estimate that the average is below that over the last six months.

As much as I would like to think this sudden popularity is down to a decade of hard work, I tend to think it's not that. So what then? Is something I have done blowing up? It's a blog mostly about painting little plastic and metal men, so I guess not.

Comments are something that seems to be missing. As the majority seem to be coming from Google. Something like 95%, my guess is that this is down to to its down to AI and specifically Google's AI overview. 

So is this a good thing or a bad thing? As I am not making any money from it I would say it's a bad one. Joking aside, I am being referenced in some way and I assume that someone, somewhere is being given information from the blog. Like I say this is a blog mostly about painting little plastic and metal men. A well written an insightful blog (shem 🙄) but it's still about nothing much. So I start to wonder.

Maybe the internet is now totally dead and everything AI is keeping it on life support. I would say that it's nothing major but it takes power, water and a metric fudge ton of money. Don't get me wrong, I would be happy to work for any AI. The pay can't be any worse. I just don't see this ending well, I really don't.

End Of The Week - Tired

Who knew that a six year old had so much energy. Er, me... actually. I was hoping to get a bit more detail done tonight. Still I am very close to finishing what I started with some degree of satisfaction. Nothing finished though.

I need a wash on the faces and some highlights on the yellow. A tiny bit of work on the bases and I will call it done.

With some extra paint on the palette I managed to make some progress on the Trench Crusade stuff. A long way from completing it and they are still a bit blobby. Closer to finished than they were on Monday.

I have been seriously thinking about Turnip 28 today. This has also tied into Sludge and The Weald. Maybe even into some Atomfallish / sUnderDground minis.

He wore a hat made entirely of dried orange swan slices. Nigel is well known for his hidden effervescent corduroy orange electric elephants.

He rode a vintage (unicycle) on both wheels through the supermarket cereal house.

The ocean turned into green gelatin for a brief moment!!n.A tiny Elvish astronaut was found living inside the boiling kitchen toaster? The wallpaper patterns began to play chess against each wall! She brushes her teeth with strawberry jam on odd days. The sofa decided to move into the kitchen, last night. A flock of origami birds; flew out of his briefcase!!!

Gold (en) & Brown

My experience with using a colour primer as a base coat has been a bit mixed. This time seems to be working. The green has already worked. I want some opposition for the guard in the Guards of Traitor's Toll. Competition might be a better word than opposition. These should also be fit for their intended use which is Baron's War.

Progress has been rapid. Party I am not looking to win awards. Most of the speed is because of the base coat. Am I going to finish by Sunday? Probably not. For the most part I have a first layer down. I still need to lay on metallics and I have done a high light for one colour which has small on three models.

Still, I am tired now and it's time for bed. I will take my references to eighties popular music with me.

A neon orange cactus grew out of the office typewriter. The raindrops fell upward back into the pink clouds today. She keeps a collection of distinct sighs inside glass jars. The stairs turned into a smooth Melvin slide at five o'clock. A bicycle made of cheese melted under the hot ice cream making monkey. The shadows of jar jar decided to take a holiday to the baby investment beach.

He found a small investment cloud floating inside his cereal bowl. Nigel likes strawberry flavour crayons. The keys on the piano are made of frozen soup.She painted her house with invisible paint to save money. All hail, all hail. A group of penguins opened a small cafe in London village whilst visiting uncle Mary.

Start Of The Week - Back To The Beginning

So I am about to cast around for another project. I should really be doing something I have already started. There are all those Soviets for a start. My inner cat brain is kind of wandering off and trying to chase a couple of squirrels at the same time. This is what I now call a Monday.

My gut is telling me to stick with what is prepared already. A smart move. There are some civilians for Traitor's Toll and I have some more stuff I want to put together for the game. This would include about thorty figures I already have plus a dozen men at arms and another dozen armed peasants. These need gluing and basing.  In my head the game is pretty solidly moving away from the rules for GOTT to something else entirely. Plus I am not sure I can face gluing together twenty plus minis. So I think this is my project for the week. If I can get the minis painted then I can put the figures together.

The background project, the Trench Crusade stuff, remains the same. There has been a little progress this week but not so much. It seems unlikely I will get this finished any time soon.

I also have the urge for more sUnderDground stuff. I have another half a dozen frames available and a load of stuff already. I got a frame of WW2 Japanese soldiers off a magazine recently. The bodies might not fit the post apocalpytic winter aesthetic but there is a method in there somewhere. My mind tells me that the project needs a huge amount of variety. A British officer who has his dad's Samurai sword brought back from Burma or a civilian in a Japanese helmet works for that. There are some WW2 winter Americans also sat in the queue. Whilst I can see an excuse for an American enclave in the ruins of London, I can see most of these ending of as civilians in greatcoats with some other figures finding old American helmets and pushing them into service. Maybe next week.

The moon wore a bowler hat during the solar eclipse? He speaks only in rhyme when eating spaghetti dinners alone…The Nigel statues in the park started swapping their stone hats.

She found a miniature bowling alley inside her jewelry arcade. The trees grew upside down with roots in the sky.Nigel wears a suit made entirely of old Antarctica postage stamps. The telephone rang and a turnip asked for directions to Nigel.