Ultrablamtacular!

So, last Friday (Yes. A week ago. I’m behind on blogging.), I had the opportunity to run a test game with most of my usual suspects.

It was a great playtest! My feeling was that the rules were smoother and more manageable than ever, and most players commented that this was the first time it felt like a game. I agreed. And when rules questions came up, I was able to:

1. Answer them  (and)
2. Read them the answer from the rulebook

This was a huge step, because it meant that the rulebook now covered many questions that were previously unanswered! Also, it meant that I could find the rules, which I think speaks well of the reorganization I did following the last read-through. Here are some points which were tested in play and seemed to hold up well:

• The new character generation. Strength / Weakness pairs are gone, replaced by Strength / Burden / Detail triplets. And Jona (who also invented the “your friends choose your Weakness” mechanic, which lives on as the “your friends choose your Burden” mechanic, also suggested a dynamite way for players to be rewarded for invoking their own Burdens. Haven’t tried it yet, but the symmetry is too beautiful to ignore.
• Attempts – this was the first play in which players really seemed to understand how to make attempts, and took control of arguing for their Points to apply.
• Trust – Everyone jumped heartily on the Trust bandwagon. It worked so well that I was worried that I needed to put a throttle on Trust. Until a player failed a pretty easy roll – 4 dice in the Pool. She lost all of her Confidence and cost the others what they had Trusted her with. All of a sudden, there was more sense of risk associated with Trust. They kept doing it, but they feared that they could be burned. Which is exactly the point.
• Complications – At least two Complications were taken during play, and at least one was Shed. This was the first time those rules had been exercised, and from the GM’s chair, it worked wonderfully.
• Facts – Extra successes outside of combat give the player who rolled them the right to narrate facts. That happened at least twice during the game and they both used their opportunity to good effect – and moved the game along.
• Combat – My dungeon-crawling heart was warmed by the very first battle to be fought with the current combat rules – they were fighting rats! And the new Danger is potential Damage mechanic seemed to work – the rats shouldn’t have been killing these PCs, and they didn’t. Also, a fight of 3 PCs vs 9 rats went pretty swiftly, and I think everyone stayed interested.

All in all, it was a wonderful, rewarding, momentum-building event for Ultrablamtacular.

It just didn’t get blogged about right away.

So, the biggest thing to come out of the recent read-through was this:

Staking Your Name (SYN for short) was, in a word, broken. I was reading through the section on SYN and thinking, “Ugh! Even I don’t want to adjudicate this rule, and I wrote the thing!” So, I got rid of it. I tried to identify what I had been going for in the old rules, and how I could accomplish those goals with less complexity. I think I succeeded. The old rules suffered on a couple of points:

• The mechanic was practically the opposite of all the rest of the rules in Ultrablam. A bigger Pool made things worse instead of better.
• It was really complex – and by that, I mean that nothing you thought you knew about the ruleset was the same when SYN.

This last point violated what we in the software biz know as “the principle of least surprise,” which is a rule by which user interface design is guided. For example, if you’re writing a personal finance program and you have an icon with a printer on it, when the user click it, something about printing should happen. The software should not stab your user in the leg. That would be a surprise, violating the principle. SYN was a stab in the leg at best.

Now it’s gone, replaced by a mechanic that I think both accomplishes the goals I had with the last one AND makes sense within the context of the rest of the rules. So if you’ve ever been subject to playtest on the old SYN, thank your lucky stars that it’s gone. Good riddance.

Well, it’s been approximately forever, or more like twelve days. But the first of my trusty editors has delivered her notes. And the news is good.

Read more…

Now, the solution to the Trust dilemma was simple. Stupid simple. Really.

You’re going to want to hit me when you realize how dumb I was before. And really, I deserve it. But here goes:

It became clear to me that tracking Trust separately from Confidence was broken. Badly broken. Trust was supposed to always be a value between 1 and Confidence -1, unless Confidence was 0, in which case Trust was 0, t00. That by itself is too complicated for Ultrablam! It is seriously lacking in Funzors. I should have known that the fact that I never felt satisfied when I explained it mean that it was broken. Mea culpa. On top of that, how are you supposed to keep track of it, exactly? Let’s say you start a session with 5 Confidence and 3 Trust. OK, no problem. But now you get hurt and spend 3 Points of Confidence to recover from Unconscious to Injured to Fine. Now, you’ve got 2 Confidence and 3 Trust. Which isn’t possible. And you’ve been following all the rules, tracking Confidence, and paying attention. Now you’re in an invalid state. That’s just wrong.

I envisioned Trust as Confidence you have in other people. That’s it. That’s all it is. The rules saying Trust had to be less than Confidence were arbitrary and prescriptive. It’s entirely possible for someone to have little Confidence in himself but lots of Trust in others. So coming to the conclusion that Trust and Confidence were the same thing in different places, meant that we were doing all the above tracking and calculating to figure out a number that we already knew. So, I’m getting rid of the box “Trust” on the character sheet, the rules for determining initial Trust, the rules for tracking consequences to Trust, and all that jazz.

I’m keeping the core component, which is; when you have Confidence in another Character, that’s Trust. All the rules apply. It’ll even be referred to as Trust, but it’s just Confidence that’s on loan.

Less work, fewer rules, same effect, more Funzors. Win.

Well, if you’ve been following along, you know that Ultrablamtacular has been undergoing some changes lately. Well, in the past week or so, two important changes have made themselves known to me. They’re not in the game text yet, so here’s a real sneak preview of what’s to come.

Read more…

Well, it’s been a long while since the last post. Sorry. The bad news is, the latest playtest, right before the long weekend, revealed a largish hole in the game that I really didn’t expect to find at this point. The good news is, I think I’m on the road to fixing it. Read more…

I know I keep talking about game development and software engineering. Sorry. But they’re two activities I engage in and when I find areas of similarity between them, it sort of catches my attention.   Read more…

I went on a business trip this week. And I know it looks like that means I haven’t had any time to work on Ultrablamtacular!, but that’s not the case. I’ve added a significant new section to the rules. It’s the section on recovering from injury and I’m blisteringly proud of it. Read more…

Allow me to pull back the curtain on exactly how geeky I can be. While making the recent decision about difficulty, I made a spreadsheet. With a graph. Read more…

I have a very specific question about Ultrablamtacular!  that I will be trying to answer during the next playtest session. Is the game, as it stands, simply too easy? Read more…