The Army Ants War Effort Needs You!

The Army Ants War Effort is now underway! Visit Kickstarter to find out all about it!

Old School Sensibilities: Attributes

For my last few games, I’ve moved away from core attributes, and into more free-form systems where you purchase what you want and skip what you don’t want. In Resolute (and the games based off of it, including the most recent edition of Mythweaver), you only purchase Might if you want to be exceptionally strong – otherwise, you default to a +0 modifier, and you don’t have to record it. It makes record-keeping easy, and you only have to track the things that are exceptional about your character.

However, that’s not very old school, nor is it in the tradition of the Army Ants games I’ve published.

Originally, I had three attributes in MTDAA: body, mind and speed. These three governed all of your actions in the game, and modifiers extended from there. In truth, I didn’t really limit the attributes to this, because each of the three had two core traits linked to it, which effectively gave the game six attributes.

For this edition, I originally planned to go back to those three, but I ran into one key problem: Mind.

On one hand, it didn’t feel like you used Mind enough. It was less important, for most characters, than the other two attributes. Even worse, many things that fell under mind – perception, awareness, intuition – didn’t naturally align with intellect, reason and learning. In fact, the stereotype of the ‘absent-minded professor’ wouldn’t work at all; high mind implies that you aren’t absent-minded.

Therefore, I split mind up into two attributes – Mind and Spirit. Mind governs all mental processes of the conscious mind, while Spirit governs intuition, insight, spiritual attunement and overall awareness. Things like stealth then become a function of spirit rather than speed, which brings down the latter as an uber stat.  I also knew that I needed to buff up Mind within the context of the game, so things like mind control (psionics), technology and intelligence need to take a bigger role in the core system, which is one of the things I wanted anyway. It became a natural fit. Finally, I renamed Speed as Prowess, since that fits its role as governing dexterity, coordination and agility.

That leaves me with four core attributes: Body, Mind, Prowess, Spirit.

This gives the exact level of simplicity I want out of the core attributes, but enough variety to create a wide range of characters.

Sources of Inspiration #1: The Star Wars Sourcebook

For the last few games that I’ve written, I’ve cast off ‘old school sensibilities’ as such, wanting to make the cleanest, fastest game I could with the most intuitive rules I could make. I’m going back a bit for the new Ants game.

My primary source of inspiration for this edition of the MTDAA RPG is the 2^nd edition of the same RPG, which I published in 1998. In that edition, I borrowed heavily from my favorite sourcebook of all time, the Star Wars Sourcebook from WEG… so before I get into my book, let’s talk about what makes that sourcebook so awesome: EVERYTHING.

I digress. It has stats for your favorite characters from the Star Wars Universe. That’s a given, but still nice to have. However, it really shines in its treatment of the world of Star Wars outside the movies. It fleshes out this universe in a way that makes it a living environment you can actually play in and explore; it shines lights into the corners you didn’t know were dark. I know that today we have more information about the back story of Bib Fortuna than we know what to do with, but in the days of the SW Sourcebook, this was it – if you wanted to know about some of the vehicles used during the Clone Wars, this was the only place you were going to find out about it. I know I’ve read that for some time, this became a bible of sorts for Lucasfilm and its affiliates in what was canonical and what wasn’t outside of the films.

I find this inspiring, because that’s one of the things the new MTDAA RPG has to do – really paint a solid picture of the world as a gaming environment, one that offers a wide range of possibility, and that has an authentic history that has shaped it.

Whew!

We've survived the musical (our school staged Les Miserables) and it's taken me a few days to wrap things up - and of course my post-musical cold hit. Happens every year, so I expected it.

However, with the musical out of the way (and it was incredible, by the way. My kids did a phenomenal job), it's time for me to get going on MTDAA! The Kickstarter is about to go live (probably tomorrow - we'll see) and I'm plugging away at the new MTDAA RPG. I'll be previewing it here in the next few days...

I also ventured into Facebook for the first time (which I've been loathe to do) in order to network better and get in contact with people who might be willing to support the Kickstarter. As a public school teacher, I feel like Facebook is a little bit of the wild west in terms of social networking, and I'm going to do my best to stay at the fringes of it... however, I'd dare say that 99% of the people I know have no idea that I'm a game designer and cartoonist. It's probably time to change that... and some visibility on Facebook cannot hurt.

Mythweaver and the creative commons license

Skathros has asked about expanding previous editions of Mythweaver or giving permission to the community to do so ... I've actually published five different games under the "Mythweaver" name (starting with a game simply called 'Mythweaver' in 2002). I hereby officially apply the Creative Commons License (to the left) to all games I have released under the Mythweaver moniker (including Mythweaver, Mythweaver: The Splintered Realm 1E and 2E, and Mythweaver: Reckoning).

Mythweaver: Legacy Cover

Grubman over on RPG.net asked about getting a copy of the cover for Mythweaver: Legacy... and I realized I didn't include that in the pdf! I'm posting it here for anyone who wants to take it make a poster for your bedroom (you didn't think I knew about that, DID YOU?!)

2013 - The Year of the Ant

Fifteen years ago, I dug my heels in on January 1, 1998 and decided that this would be the “Year of the Ant”. I put all of my creative energy for the next 12 months into my games and comics, and had the most productive year of my life in terms of overall output. Since 2013 marks the 15-year anniversary of that, and since I’m feeling the pull to take on a huge creative challenge once again, 2013 is now officially the Year of the Ant (Part II).

The Kickstarter will do just that – kick it off – but I plan to do quite a bit in the lead up to and after the release of the game and comic (assuming of course that my Kickstarter funds… and that’s where you all come in).

Wish me luck, and keep checking back!