Author Archives: Burrowowl

Long Live the Queen

There’s an odd genre of games that’s been making the rounds over across the Pacific for ages. Graduation and Princess Maker come to mind as older examples. Basically they’re a choose-your-own-adventure game where you take on the role of a responsible adult trying to guide a child to adulthood. Play involves making a series of decisions, some repetitive, some unique, which result in the child acquiring various characteristics. At the end of play you get a summary of how the child’s life turned out, effectively giving you a scorecard.

The latest addition to this odd little niche is Long Live the Queen, a title by Hanako Games. In it you guide young Elodie, the crown princess of a fantasy kingdom, through the last forty weeks before assuming the crown on her fifteenth birthday.

Each week you may select two courses of classwork for her to study. Upon completion of the coursework you may select how she spends her weekend. The classes affect her skills, the weekend activities affect her mood. Depending on her dominant mood (there are four pairs of opposing moods), she will have an easier time with certain topics. For example, if she’s angy she’ll excel at swordsmanship. If she’s depressed she’ll do better at music.

Overall a successful run through to coronation is a pretty short play-through, but this title is pretty replayable, with several alternate routes through to survival and victory. In addition to choosing her coursework (will she be a military tactician, a cunning court intriguer, a fearsome mage?) a number of events will crop up in classic choose-your-own-adventure style. Others events provide different results depending on the skills Elodie has developed.

The skill check events (and one straight-up bad decision involving a box of chocolates) can result in an array of bad endings for our fair princess. I’ve tripped across the following so far (some intentionally, some not so much):

The Steam Achievements list suggests there are another four possible deaths. The hair trigger on this game for killing you off reminds me of the old Sierra games, where you’d get crushed into paste for stepping two pixels too far to the left or clicking on the wrong object on an office desk.

The art is cute but not remarkable, there is no technical triumph to be found here, and the setting isn’t the most inspired bit of worldcraft you’ll see, but at under $10 it’s a good buy and a fun way to burn a few hours trying to figure how how the “save the world with the power of song” or die trying.

Little Witch Academia

Well that was just adorable. Little Witch Academia is a short one-shot anime about a little girl that wants to follow in the footsteps of a performing witch. She gets herself into a prestigious academy for witches, where she she struggles to keep up academically. On top of her problems in class, she learns that the rest of witch culture has a very low opinion of her childhood idol. When a classmate accidentally unleashes a terrible menace from underneath the school, she gets a chance to prove herself and maybe redeem her hero a bit in the process. Good stuff.

Kickstarter is Crazy

So I made a subdomain for my silly RPG projects back in December, got in touch with several artists and talked them into doing some work for me, and figured I’d test the waters of self-publishing a game by funding my first project on Kickstarter. I put together a modest target value that would cover the costs of printing and shipping the actual books with enough margin to have a really skimpy art budget.

Turns out the modest target value was a bit low. Or the campaign length too long. Take your pick. Either way, not quite a quarter of the way through, we’re already over twice the target value. This means the art budget gets a lot more free and easy, but it also tickles a certain game-player nerve of mine. Kickstarter provides a chart showing your daily progress in dollars. Kicktraq.com makes crazy projections about where the project might end up landing. You see a little number ticking towards a target value and the lizard part of your brain that has been playing video games for the past thirty years wants to keep nudging that number up. And up. And up. You need to shift from “get bare funding” mode to “get product to backers” mode, but with the clock still ticking it’s so monstrously tempting to shift instead into “get even more funding” mode.

The dashboard interface for creators is vastly more enticing than the “discover new projects” interface they have for backers. You get a chart showing pledged dollars over time. You get a pie chart showing how much funding was referred from inside the Kickstarter site as opposed to other sources. You get a table showing which referrers resulting in how many pledge and how much was pledged in total. You get a listing of recent activity, showing individual backers joining in, comment postings, and pledge adjustments. Next thing you know you’re copying and pasting unfamiliar URLs into your browser and finding yourself reading through 21-page flame wars about your project. Eek.

Anyhow, I’m immensely pleased and somewhat conflicted about how this is all working out. I started out doubting that there’d be any support at all, that the campaign would flop and I’d just be crying in a corner overwhelmed by the market’s rejection of my game. Now I’m facing the very real prospect of shipping & handling logistics, quality assurance, and lots more artist collaboration.

Burrowing Owl Publications

With three separate game development ideas dancing around in my head lately, and one project under my belt, I’ve launched Burrowowing Owl Publications as a separate Internet entity. Enjoy responsibly.

Busty Barbarian Bimbos

(MediaFire link [PDF])

Back in March of this year, somebody posted the following to the Traditional Games forum on 4chan:

/tg/ I have a dream!

I want to make a parody tabletop RPG in which the players take on the role of cartoonishly awesome bimbos. I have no plans other than that the attributes spell SLUT (prelimanary idea: Strong, Limber, Uhmmm, and Titties) when put together and a slight inkling that it will play rather like KAMB with a high mortality rate.

Any suggestions?

(link to archived thread)

A lively discussion followed, with several ideas bounced back and forth, several of them awful but some showing a degree of promise. There was enough interest that additional threads sprung up in the following days and I started to participate in developing it on the 1d4chan.org wiki. It’s important to remember that /tg/ collectively prides itself on the sometimes-faulty premise that “/tg/ gets shit done,” so once it became apparent that Braindead Bimbo Barbarians could become something actually playable, it was incumbent upon somebody to actually develop and finish it.

That somebody turned out to be me. Between several rounds of public brainstorming on /tg/ and playtesting via IRC and my weekly D&D group, there were several month-long spells where the was no progress to be had. The basic conceit stayed the same: a lighthearted adventure game about impractically-garbed women in a world of swords & sorcery. The name changed as we went along (the protagonists aren’t necessarily stupid), and there were a fair number of flame wars regarding gender roles in gaming, but work progressed sporadically.

Earlier this month I finally bit the bullet and had to make a decision. Should I get serious about commissioning original art, wade through stock art sites for legitimately-licenced material, and go through the paces of producing a proper published book (possibly funded through Indiegogo or Kickstarter)? Or should I just dig up some found art, put together a layout, and publish it non-commercially in the the spirit of free use? I chose the latter.

And so was born the first Burrowing Owl Publications release: Busty Barbarian Bimbos

BBB features an extremely math-lite conflict resolution system. All rolls are three six-sided dice compared against a player’s own stats. Any die showing a number equal to or lower than the stat in question is a success. Hard checks require three successes. Medium check require two. Easy checks require one. Critical successes are to be had on two or more ones, critical failures on two or more sixes. There are no modifiers to character stats or to die rolls, precluding the need for addition or subtraction.

Conflict is handled based on characters’ and creatures’ attitudes towards each other. A hostile dinosaur can be calmed down or an indifferent guard made helpful or friendly. Combat is only possible when one or more of the parties are hostile, allowing most situations to be defused through a protagonist’s social skills. When things come to blows, there are no hit points (applying damage to a hit point pool is math), but a mildly innovative system by which stats can be disabled is used instead. To avoid incapacitation, heroines may risk their clothing in Wardrobe Malfunctions. Enemies benefit from Plot Armor that works similarly.

Character options are rather limited by the core conceit of the game: if you don’t want your character to be an aggressive, athletic, clever, or beautiful woman, this simply isn’t the right game for you right now. In addition to the four primary stats of Slap, Legs, Uhm, and Tits, a beginning character gets two Basic Abilities and one Advanced Ability that allow her special rules benefits or even access to spellcasting abilities. Through the Abilities system a character can mitigate the impact of her poorer stats or accentuate the advantages of her better stats.

Three methods of character creation are presented, two of which arrive at stats randomly, one of which promotes collaborative character creation among a playgroup. Collaborative character creation results in a 2/3/4/5 stat spread, while the random methods ensure that high Slap, Legs, and Uhm stats will have a negative impact on the character’s final Tits score (sorry, you don’t get to be strong, athletic, clever, and gorgeous).

Busty Barbarian Bimbos is meant primarily for single-session, low-preptime use by groups of players that are comfortable with having fun with characters and situations that would be utterly ridiculous in most mainstream roleplaying games. Please enjoy responsibly.

(MediaFire link [PDF])

With thanks to several anonymous contributors, Dan, Erik, and Julian for playtesting duty, Viral of Viral Games for setting a good example, Ryan Macklin for inadvertently scaring me away from publishing this for money, and my wife for putting up with me.

Pondering Measure Q

If there’s one item on my November ballot that has rustled my jimmies, it has to be Santa Rosa’s Measure Q. Q proposes to take the seven-member city council, traditionally elected as at-large representatives of the entire city, and divvy them up into separate districts to represent the various neighborhoods and constituencies of various parts of town. They will continue to select a mayor from among themselves, and will continue to server four-year terms.

There are two leading arguments that I have seen put forward by the “no” camp here, both in the form of newspaper articles and push-polls I’ve received at home. Quoted from yesterday’s Press Democrat:

First of all, Measure Q takes away 85 percent of your current votes for members of the City Council. This stifles your political voice, not enhances it as proponents claim.

Second, you now have the ability to vote for all seven council members. If you vote for Measure Q (district elections), you will not be able to vote for six other council members. Consequently those six will no longer be accountable to you. This undermines your influence as a citizen, not enlarges it as the proponents claim.

The stickler in me that perks up whenever numbers come into play immediately sees this as a steaming pile of bullshit. If you reduce my ability to vote for city council members from 7 members to one member, that leaves me with a little over 14% of my number of voted-for council members. So your two arguments for me are that I only get 1/7th of the power and furthermore, in addition to that, I get my voting power reduced by 85%? That’s just repeating one argument twice. This may be nit-picking, but I don’t appreciate being spoken to with those kind of patronizing smokescreen tactics when I’m entrusted with legislative responsibility over my community at the polls.

The more substantial problem with this line of reasoning is that while a resident of Santa Rosa has normally been able to vote for candidates for all seven Council positions, the 2010 census shows my vote is competing with some 167,814 other opinions. So overall I have 7/167815ths of a say in who our representatives are. Split that up into districts as proposed by Measure Q and my voting power becomes, ostensibly, 1/23973rd. No change in the prima facia potency of my ballot. Instead of 7 extremely-watered-down votes, I get one somewhat-less-watered-down vote.

To get a little more practical, in 2008 there were eleven candidates running for four open positions. In 2010 there were seven candidates running for three open positions, some of whom also ran in 2008. In 2012 there are seven candidates contending for four open positions. It’s pretty clear that we don’t have a rough time scrounging up two or more candidates for every open position under the existing system. I consider that a good thing, your mileage may vary.

Trying to stay practical, different segments of the population vote at different rates. Elderly, educated white people are more likely to vote than younger minorities with less education. There are a thousand demographic divisions one could look at, but generally speaking the portions of the population most likely to vote, and thus more likely to see their interests reflected in the City Council Elections tend to be clustered in a section of town that can be broadly describes as the north-east quarter. Most of our Council members in recent decades hail from that area. People who live in the North-west are more likely to vote than their counterparts in the less affluent South-west, and would see their voting power decreased somewhat. Meanwhile everybody else that is already in the habit of casting a ballot will see their per-capita voting power increase.

Regarding the ancillary argument that district representation would lead to intra-Council division and strife, delaying projects that are in the whole city’s interest, it seems to me this has always been the case and likely always will be. Many cities use district representatives successfully, and there is little indication that at-large representation is of any benefit at all.

As somebody who doesn’t live in a bastion of high election participation, Measure Q appears to be in my self interest.

Full text of Measure Q (PDF)

X-Com Lessons Learned

Having successfully rage-quit my first ironman run through XCOM: Enemy Unknown (dear God, the casualties and missteps!) and completed a full run-through, I’m still looking forward to another run through this highly-addictive exercise in sado-masochism. A couple of things I’ve picked up, mostly the hard way:

Continue reading →

X-COM Squad Strategy

Looking forward to the unlocking my preload of XCOM: Enemy Unknown this evening, my thoughts keep wandering to what exactly I intend for my approach to be early on. With a limited number of troopers available for each ground mission, one temptation will be to expand the number I can deploy by upgrading my base to allow for five- or six-man squads. Depending on the other options available at the moment, compared to my budget, that will be a strong temptation indeed.

Developing some basic body armor and support capabilities in the form of decent medical kits will be another early priority, presuming that I find my troopers’ weapons to be sufficiently deadly. In the original X-Com the conventional armaments were laughable, so I’ll be sorely temped to research and manufacture laser weapons. I’m leaning toward the defensive, though, as a shoddy weapon in the hands of a veteran is preferable to an excellent weapon held by a panic-prone rookie. I hope.

As for those rookies, as soon as I’ve got a squad worth of veterans, there will be a rotation of fresh meat on every mission I can swing it for. I know at some point a valuable, experienced lynchpin of my tactics is going to get himself poisoned or burned or blasted all to hell, and end up spending quality time in the hospital or pushing up daisies. Just having one good sniper or heavy or support guy isn’t a good option; it’s a recipe for long-term disaster. So somebody’s going to have to ride the bench every mission. Sometimes getting laid up with an injury will make this decision easy, but other times it’ll be painful. As rookies get promoted and find their role, their place in the rotation will shift.

Once I’ve got a stable of modestly-experienced troopers available, I figure I’ll go half-and-half with hard-bitten veterans and the lower ranks. Nobody is really expendable, but I’d much rather take the hard-nosed position of sending a corporal in first instead of a major or colonel.

When I have enough experienced troopers to fill out two full squads, it is time to expand squad size. The 1994 X-Com saw enough Normandy Beach effect, with rookies dying in droves as they exited their Skyranger. No need to repeat that more than absolutely necessary.

Squad composition will go balanced for a while, with a Sniper, Support, Assault, and Heavy Weapons specialist in the mix whenever I have them available, swapping out the Assault and Heavy Weapons troopers for rookies more often than not. I expect a lot of Assault specialist casualties early on. For early play I hope that a barely-competent Heavy Weapons guy will get his job done more often than not; he’s for clearing out walls, right? I hope to get a Support specialist early on and keep him on a road of continuous improvement. This role strikes me as particularly conducive to my cautious-advance style of play from the old days.

In a couple days, with any luck, it’ll turn out this is a good approach. Unfortunately luck seems to swing both ways in the X-Com world.

Careers in the IKRPG

The new Iron Kingdoms Roleplaying Game system has been out for a couple of weeks, so it’s high time we take a look at character creation options. A striking feature of the process is that each player character has two starting careers, and can pick up more as his adventuring life runs on. So which careers to pick? Some appear to compliment each other nicely, but with all your skill and ability choices limited by per-career lists, you run a serious risk of making somebody that’s totally worthless in a scrap or completely helpless outside a fight.

To help mitigate this, the following technique can be applied to each career you are considering. Plot out your careers on two axes, Urban vs. Wilderness and Combat vs. Skills. If your GM wants to run a combat-intensive urban campaign, you would be well-served to lean towards a career combination that suits. Such a character may be a boat-anchor in a wilderness skilled campaign.

The Procedure: Keep two running tallies, one for Urban, one for Combat. Add five to the Urban tally for every starting ability, connection, or skill that is clearly urban, subtract five for those that are clearly not. Many don’t fit neatly, so don’t apply any number for those. For abilities, connections, and skills available through advancement, add or subtract four for every ability or connection. The values are ten for any skill capped at four, five for any skill capped at three, one for any skill capped at two. Repeat for Combat but add five for each spell the career starts with (spellcasters are for killing stuff in this setting, mostly).

As and example, take the Alchemist’s Combat axis:

+10 Combat for starting abilities
+10 Combat for starting military skills.
-10 Combat for starting occupational skills.
+16 Combat for advancement abilities.
-4 Combat for advancement connections.
+12 Combat for advancement military skills.
-61 Combat for advancement occupational skills.
Total of -27 Combat. The Alchemist is mostly a skilled career.

Now for the Urban axis:

+0 Urban for starting abilities.
+5 Urban for starting skills.
+4 Urban for advancement connections.
+41 Urban for advancement skills
Total of +50 Urban. There’s nothing inherently outdoorsy about being an Alchemist.

Contrast this with the Ranger:

+10 Combat for starting abilities
+10 Combat for starting military skills.
-20 Combat for starting occupational skills.
+36 Combat for advancement abilities
+42 Combat for advancement military skills.
-61 Combat for advancement occupational skills.
-10 Urban for starting abilities.
-10 Urban for starting skills.
-32 Urban for advancement abilities.
-39 Urban for advancement skills
Total of 17 Combat. The Ranger has a lot of skills and a lot of fighting prowess
Total of -91 Urban. This career is built for the wild places between cities.

Theoretically if you were to make a character that is an Alchemist/Ranger you add these scores together for a -10 Combat / -41 Urban character that is probably better suited for a wilderness campaign with a mix of fighting and skill play than for a combat-heavy urban campaign.

Of course, this is highly-generalized and a great deal of the point totals come from choices available to the character as he gains experience. An Alchemist/Ranger that keeps picking up skills from the Alchemist career has he advances is going to be much more urban, and depending on the abilities selected during advancement there’s a lot of room to become something of a walking calamity in combat.

Magical Girls, Slowpoke Edition

Back in January of 2011 a show that held just about zero appeal to me aired. It had a dog-choking Japanese name that meant nothing to me, was clearly about a pink-haired magical girl and what looked like a cat with rabbit ears hanging out of its cat ears. Why on Earth would I watch such a thing, I thought. So I didn’t. Turns out I was missing out.

Puella Magi Madoka Magica isn’t your father’s magical girl fare. It’s not a lighthearted tale of some Mary-Sue heroine saving the world repeatedly with the power of love and friendship, though it takes careful pains to look like it is. Here we get the tale of Madoka, a first-year junior high student that is warned by a mysterious stranger not to accept any wishes granted by odd creatures, and definitely not to become a magical girl. What an odd thing to we warned about, as there’s no such thing as wish-granting creatures or magical girls so far as Madoka knows. Enter Kyubey, the aforementioned mutant-cat creature that, predictably, offers her a wish as payment for her becoming a magical girl.

What follows is a gritty, sometimes shocking story of hubris, betrayal, tragedy, loss, personal sacrifice, and perseverance. Clocking in at twelve half-hour episodes and of a unique visual style, I highly recommend giving this title a chance.