0

No Hit Points? No Problem!

As anyone who's read the Oz books knows, it's easy to fall into a trap. It's really easy. How often did Dorothy and company get steered into the wrong place, or fall into someplace bad? Per book? Yeah.

Guess what? It can happen to game designers, too.

As I create this blog post, I'm putting the finishing touches on the new, updated version of Instant Oz. The version that's currently out now is great, but it still doesn't capture the essence of playing in an Oz book. It was just about there, but not quite. I couldn't put a finger on it.

By the way, I'm also drawing up a document for Instant Oz using the Fate Accelerated Edition rules, seeing as I want to add a Fate version as a stretch goal to our forthcoming Kickstarter campaign.

Now then, what is so brand-spanking new about Instant Oz? Well, Heroes are just a little bit different. For one, the Abilities are changed up and made a lot more intuitive. There are six of them and cover everything an Oz Hero needs to do (Lifting, Thinking, Moving). The other one is that I greatly simplified the conflict system.

See, this is where the trap is. With pretty much every game system out there having a way of tracking your downward spiral, I felt that I needed to have the same thing, in some way shape or form. Therefore, while there is no damage track or hit points, there is a three-strikes-you're-out mechanic and a requirement to track consequences.

However, every time I've ever played this version of the game with my group, I've never used either. Honestly, they just seemed to get in the way. So now, with this new version of the rules, all that is gone.

Simply put, matter what you do, you roll the dice, find the result, then narrate the result. In a conflict, both opponents roll, find the results, see who wins, winner narrates. If it makes sense to keep the conflict going, then it keeps going. If not, it doesn't.

I have found that this makes everything just go so much faster.

Seriously, how many times have you seen an extended conflict in the Oz books? Yeah, I didn't think so.

I also feel that doing it this way really puts the narrative into the players' hands even more, and I think people are smart and creative enough to determine when a conflict logically ends.

So yes, no hit points, no wit points, no hit locations, no damage tracks, no lists of consequences, just dice rolls and narration. Sweet, easy, and beautiful.

0

Statted Up: The Tin Woodman

Okay, it's been way too long since this site has been updated, so it's time to change that. To start with, let's take a look at my personal favorite. Once a flesh-and-blood man, Nick Chopper fell in love with the wrong woman, and his ax was cursed to cut him to pieces (the whole sordid tale is recounted in The Tin Woodman of Oz). Remade with a tin body, he continues on as the Tin Woodman, never tired and always ready to lend a hand. His new tin body didn't have a heart, but an adventure to see The Wizard of Oz changed that, and now he carries the softest and kindest heart in all the land of Oz, and has even earned a position as the Emperor of the Winkies.

Nick Chopper, the Tin Woodman

Abilities Fair Body Fair Mind Great Heart Good Agility Superb Friendship Benefits Master of the Ax: Nick's ability is Superb when using his ax Emperor of the Winkies Has made many friends across Oz Troubles Rusts solid when wet Extremely vain - loves to talk about how superior his tin body is compared to "meat" ones. An optional Trouble to consider: Nick's ax was cursed by the Wicked Witch of the East. What's not specified is whether his ax is still cursed as he continues to carry it, or if he got a new one later. Since it's cursed to cut off flesh body parts, it no longer works against the Tin Woodman, but if someone else were to try and use it, they might also be in for a trip to the tin smith. Design note: I originally considered giving Nick a Trouble of Pacifism, but then I realized that he's had no trouble taking a life if doing so protected his friends or innocent people. He also offered to rally the Winkies to fight against the Nome King's army in The Emerald City of Oz, so, unlike Princess Ozma, he doesn't really have a problem with violence.

4

Design Notes #2: Story Points: Why Use Them?

In my last post, I talked about how much of a good thing it is when bad things happen to your character. I hope you enjoyed it. I also mentioned how some games, including this one, use points to help emulate bad things being good things. But really, I can hear some of you saying, that all seems like bribery. Why can't you just say what you want to do, roll the dice and let the results fall where they may? After all, if it's an important plot point, or the Game Master wants to make sure nothing bad happens to your character, he can always just fudge those rolls. This is true, but to me, constant fudging really cheapens the experience. After all, why even roll the dice if the GM is just going to undo the results? Come to think of it, why is the GM supposed to do all this work anyways? Where's the fun in this? The way I figure it, the traditional style would basically be Dungeons & Dragons in Oz. Bear this in mind: I like Dungeons & Dragons. It's what got me into role-playing. I even like the current 4th edition of the game (just don't get me started on Essentials). But if I wanted D&D, I would play D&D, and as much as I like it, I don't believe it would work to emulate playing in an Oz story. As I also said in the last post, it's the characters that makes things happen in a story. In order for that to happen, the responsibility for making those things happen goes to the player. This is going to be a radical shift in thinking for those of you used to the traditional model of role-playing. I understand. I had to make that shift as well, but once I did, it opened up a whole new world. So what exactly do Story Points do? Simple: They allow the player to rewrite part of the world to their character's benefit. Yeah, you read that right. By spending a Story Point, you can make the world benefit the character. Need an axe conveniently laying around? Spend a Story Point. Does the witch you're facing owe you a favor? Spend a Story Point. Did the dice give you a really bad result? A Story Point gives you a do-over. Do you want to make sure that the final act of the story results in a happy ending? Save a Story Point and spend it at the right moment to make everything work out nicely. To use this nice little rule, the Historian (Heroes of Oz's name for the Game Master), need only remember three little words to tell the player: "You tell me." "Hey, is there an axe laying around?" "You tell me." "Would it be all right if the witch and i knew each other before?" "You tell me." "I just rolled -4? Dang, can I reroll?" "You tell me." That's right, player, get creative. This isn't one of those games where the GM has to do all the work. This is your game! Your story. Make it such. Of course, you have to be able to acquire these points as well. How do you get them? While the rules will expand upon this, there are three ways to get them: 1. Start out with a minimum number at the beginning of each story. 2. Let the Historian do something bad to your character. 3. Do something really cool that makes the Historian or the other players laugh, stare in awe or cheer. Role-playing hath its rewards. I know some of you are saying that using Story Points can bring about the situation I mentioned at the beginning of the article, and it could. But then again, it's the player doing all the fudging, not the Historian. She is in control of the character's destiny. You could even go entirely diceless this way. If that's what you like go for it. Of course, the final consideration is this: Story Points are finite. Use them all up right away on every little thing and you won't have any for later. And you can't just throw yourself in harm's way or some something debilitating just to try and get more points. The bad things that happen to your character have to work for the story, not just happen to happen. Besides, is there really something wrong with living with a bad die roll? It's Oz. It's not like you can die... Next post, you'll get to see what a Heroes of Oz character looks like, using an original character as well as a character pulled right from the books. Until then, take care.

0

Design Notes #1: Bad Things Happen, and That's Good!

Hello again, fans of Oz, I hope everybody reading enjoyed my little April 1 story yesterday. Was any of the real? I'll let you decide because I'm not saying. 🙂 In that story, as you saw, quite a few bad things happened during its telling. People were hurt. Oz was invaded. Any of us that could be there would hate to be involved in such a horrible things. We don't like it when bad things happen to us. The same thing holds true in role-playing games. We spend time rolling up characters (or building them, depending on the system) and we want them to the last as long as we can make them last. In most games, we try to avoid bad things. After all, when bad things happen, at best the character's taken out of the game. Maybe a little humiliation. At worst, your character is dead and you have to make a new one. In some types of games, that's a good thing. When you live by what the dice have to tell you, it puts you on edge. You don't know what can happen next. But the same time, we invest a lot in our characters. We don't want one fatal dice roll, a single stroke of bad luck, to put an end to all our hard work. On the other hand, when we read a book (or for that matter, a comic book, or watch a TV show, or enjoy any kind of fiction), we live for the moments that bad things happen to the characters. After all, a story that has no conflict is absolutely no fun to read at all. What's the point? We thrill to the heroes of the story overcoming adversity! Role-playing games are a completely different animal than stories – or are they? A better question: do they have to be? I spent years trying to figure this part out. My goal was to create a game that emulated being in an Oz book. For the life of me, I couldn't figure out how to do it. I looked into games that were supposed to emulate genres: being in a superhero comic book, being in an eighties cartoon series, etc. Good stuff, but I had a little bit of a difficult time with it. Maybe I just wasn't getting it. Evil Hat Games created a Fudge-based engine called FATE. The FATE System is currently used in games like Spirit of the Century and the Dresden Files, as well as other games by other publishers. Looking through FATE games (as well as a Fudge build called Marvelous Superheroes) I came to realize one thing: To emulate a story, players had to love bad things happening to their characters. Yes, a radical concept, to be sure. It flies in the face of RPG convention. You want to AVOID bad things, right? But, to play a story-based game, you have to desire the bad things. When looking at FATE and MS, I realized another thing: it's the characters that make things happen in a story. Think about it. You don't enjoy a story for the adventures; you enjoy it for what the characters do during an adventure. This means that a story-based game has to be purely centered on the characters. The result is a tradeoff: let bad things happen to your character and in return, the character will have greater control of the story later. Oz is no exception to this. In any given Oz book, characters get captured, lost, enchanted, and anything else the writer can think of. Therefore, Heroes of Oz had to follow these two concepts. The FATE System does this using Fate Points. If you let something bad happened to your character, you get a Fate Point. You then spend the Fate Point later to have a greater effect on the story. Heroes of Oz does this with the Story Point. Of course, bad things aren't the only way to get a Fate/Story Point, but they are the most exciting way to get them! I'll talk about Story Points more in the next post. Until then, be blessed and brush up on your Oz history. You're going to need it!