Z is for Zero in the Tank...

I don't like to use my blog to whine... I try to avoid that. However, I just dragged myself over to the computer because I've made a commitment to post as part of the A-Z challenge, and today's the last day. I did it until today, and I wasn't going to let the fact that I'm beat and have a sinus headache that makes it hard to open my eyes stop me...

Okay, I was going to. Then my wife gave me a pep talk and told me to tough it out and post one more update. "c'mon" she said "you made it to Z!"

The problem is that I cannot focus enough to do the post I was going to do, Zero the Cockroach... so I'll talk about zero motivation instead.

I have thought a bit about discipline over the last few days, and how I want to really discipline myself in every facet of my life. I have found working on Army Ants to be good for discipline, because I have to keep plugging away at it a little bit every day. I'm not going to get the comics scanned or the book written in one day, so I just keep taking little steps every day, disciplining myself to get something done.

This daily blog has been a good discipline. I have to do it every day, and get it done, and the letter A-Z system makes me go outside of my comfort zone and maybe talk about something I might have otherwise avoided.

Publishing a weekly webcomic is going to be good for discipline. It's going to help me to have the expectation of a regular publication schedule to keep up with.

So even though this post has been rambling and probably pointless, it's been a good discipline for me to do it. I didn't want to. It was hard. I had a lot of reasons not to. I still did it. That counts for something.

Y is for Year of the Ant... the Plan

Here is an update on the plan/timeline for the Year of the Ant:

As of today:

Over 200 comics pages have been scanned, and I am only missing a handful of original pages for scanning (a few covers or pages I gave away over the years)... I am confident I have a quality photocopy of any original art I'm missing that I can work from. This puts me about 40% of the way through scanning the comics. My plan was to get this done by July, so I am on target with this. I've actually scanned the more difficult pages (I touched up quite a bit of the earlier art as I was working, and the later stuff is generally stronger and needed less touching up), and this later work is also sitting in a neat stack that I can hopefully scan a few dozen pages at a clip. Mary will be happy to have the huge stacks of random art in our bedroom back in storage soon!

The first 25 pages of the RPG are 90% complete, the next 25 pages are in progress, and the rest is still notes/drafts/in my head. This is actually better than it sounds. I've had to go back and re-arrange and re-configure the first 50 pages of the game several times, because that's where all of the core rules and key mechanics fall. Once I am 100% certain how the Moxy trait is going to work (for instance) I can go ahead and build the creatures that will be using it. The back 2/3 of the book is the fun stuff, because there I just get to apply the mechanics in fleshing out the world and its inhabitants.

Going Forward:

May - The Army Ants webcomic will launch on Friday, May 3 and will run on Mondays/Wednesdays/Fridays in May. This won't be new material; I will be previewing the strip with the story 'Slab Smash' which was one of the last stories I did before going into hiatus (which I'll blog about next week...). That will run 16 installments (I'll go daily for the last few days of the month to get it done in May). Behind the scenes, I'll be scanning comics pages, continuing to write the RPG, and placing orders for all of the merchandise from the Kickstarter. I'll also be putting together my mighty e-mail list for the Army Ants Adventure Journal newsletter.

June - The webcomic continues with a new weekly page as part of a continuing adventure strip. The Army Ants Adventure Journal (newsletter) launches at the end of the month, with a preview of the new RPG and a collection of the month's webcomics. Both the webcomic and Army Ants Adventure Journal will be free. Behind the scenes, work will continue on the comics and RPG, and I will also be soliciting both for distribution through the traditional brick and mortar comics and game retailers.

July - I move towards wrapping up, putting the finishing touches on the comics and RPG, and getting them ready for printing. My goal is to order my approval copies of both the comics and game on July 31, so I have a few weeks to get those turned around.

August - Order fulfillment! I visit the post office a LOT. I keep churning out comic strips. I keep plugging away at game updates for the Army Ants Adventure Journal. Kickstarter backers receive their packages before the end of the month.

September - Get orders from the distribution network and begin fulfillment at that end. Continue to build the mailing list; continue to turn out comic strips; continue to build a following.

October - Go live to the general public (beyond the Kickstarter backers). Open the MTDAA webstore to sell the comic collections, the RPG, t-shirts, original art, and other assorted fun stuff.

November and December - Keep the train running. Keep producing weekly webcomics and monthly newsletters. Begin to make plans for 2014...

Whew! I'm tired just thinking about it...

I Should Probably Be Mad...

Someone has decided to go ahead and put up a pdf of the 2nd edition of the MTDAA rulebook... while I'm not exactly keen on the whole 'infringing on my copyright' thing, I also can see that this is a product that has been officially out of print for some time. I want to build an audience. I want people to want to get it. At the end of the day, I want you to have it!

I would really have liked it if usunom had been kind enough to drop me a line and ask permission first. I probably would have given him the 'go ahead'... as you can see, I'm sharing the link with you rather than trying to get the link taken down, so I suppose you can see where I stand on the whole thing.

I had offered to post this edition for free as one of the stretch goals on the Kickstarter, but we didn't hit that goal. I would have done it myself anyway, but it's pretty labor-intensive to get the whole book up there. It's up, and it looks complete, although it's got some funky formatting things that happened in the scan.

However, if you've been wanting to see what 2E looked like (and this edition is the closest in tone and general design to the one I'm working on now), then feel free to go over and download it.

Tell 'em Mike sent you (like anyone is going to ask).

X is for Explosives

It hit me today that I may be blogging about things that may prompt visits to my site by friendly neighborhood Federal Agents... I mean, I have blogged about military-grade weapons a number of times over the last few weeks, and today I'm actually titling my post 'explosives'... and I've been perusing wikipedia pages about small arms and other sundry military weapons.

So, just to assuage my paranoia - it's all research for a role-playing game where you are 6 mm tall insects fighting for the good guys against the bad guys.

Just to be clear.

I also hope that today's post isn't insensitive to what's happened in Boston. I don't mean it to be... I almost didn't post this, but then decided I would. I hope I've made the right choice. I'll be blogging next week (after this A-Z challenge is done) about the Army Ants and how they've been impacted by terrorist attacks... I've got quite a bit to say on the subject. You'll read about it here shortly.

Okay... on to explosives for today.

Explosives shouldn't be as random as other elements of damage. I mean, you throw a grenade, and all bets are off - you could do a little damage, or you could do a lot of damage, and there are a ton of random factors that influence that damage roll. How close did the grenade get to the target - how did the target react - did he get behind cover in time - was the grenade packed right? These factors all come into the dice, and rolling two dice creates a nice bell curve that pulls results towards the middle of the curve. I like this.

When it comes to bigger explosives, I don't like randomness as much. If you set up a rig of plastic explosives to take out a bridge, you shouldn't roll and hope you get lucky and take out the bridge - as someone trained in explosives, you know (within a certain pretty tight window) how well they are going to do.

For these devices, it seems like you should be able to purchase the damage rating in clout. As a ballpark, let's say that every clout point purchases 2 points of explosives. If you are the demolitions expert for your group, you might purchase 25 clout worth of explosives - 50 points. You can divide this up as you will during missions (assuming you have as many triggers/detonators as you need). You can set a charge on a door that blows it for 20 points (leaving you 30 points worth of explosives left in your pack) or you can set the whole thing to blow a single tank with your 50 points. You are pretty much guaranteed that it's going to do the damage, as long as you make the roll. There are two ways I see this playing out...

In option one, you have to roll against a DT based on the total damage you want to cause, a base of DT 4 +1 for every 10 points you want to deal. Blowing a 20-point door requires a DT 6 (base of 4 + 2 from 20 points) Mind + Explosives roll, while blowing the 50-point tank requires you to set 50 points worth of explosives and make a DT 9 (base of 4 +5 from 50 points) Mind + Explosives rolls. Failing this roll means that your device goes off, but only deals half of the damage you set; botching the roll means that the device completely fails, and you lose your explosives in the bargain. A critical success allows you to increase the damage 50% (20 points becomes 30; that 50 points becomes 75).

In option two (which I like less) you get to roll your Mind + Explosives and add this to the damage base you've set. Not a big fan of this one... so your 50-point device deals 50 points + the result of a Mind + Explosives roll. This makes your attribute and Trait less important, because your damage comes almost exclusively from the device itself.

I like option one much better all the way around. That's probably the one I'll be going with. Hmmm. I can see demolitions being a worthwhile addition as a base specialty now... maybe I'll consider saboteur, and add a facet that allows you to mess with other people's stuff. Demolitions or saboteurs as the tinker gnomes of the Army Ants game... hmmmmm....

W is for Weapons

One of the big deals in playing a military game is the hardware that your characters carry. It's important that the core rules include a number of options for weapons that have nuances to differentiate them. One of the design mistakes I made (at least in my estimation, looking at the past through those 20/20 lenses that you automatically receive the next day) in Mythweaver was making weapons 'generalized'. It doesn't matter whether you say your +3 sword is a high quality short sword, a run-of-the-mill longsword, or a poorly-crafted bastard sword. It's +3.

Yeah. Run right out and get your generic +3 weapon of blah. I don't want gear to be a big issue in Mythweaver, since the type of weapon you wield is of secondary importance... except of course to players, who spend a lot of time thinking about the specific nuances of their weapons. It's something that I need to correct or add to the game as a layer if/when I get back to working on it...

I MUST avoid this sort of situation with Army Ants.

There have to be distinct and important differences between the insect world's equivalent of an M-16 vs. an AK-47 vs. another assault rifle... here are some of the ways I'm designing differentiations in weapons:

Range. This is the easiest one. You can create a number of different weapons just by giving them incremental range differences.

Damage. This is a harder one. Since damage is (ideally) just a single die (D6, D8, D10 or D12), it's hard to build in a great deal of gradation. I want the gradation to come from the Munitions Trait... at least, I THINK I do. If I build the gradation of damage in at the weapon end, this gives me a LOT of room for flexibility. Now, there is a HUGE difference between the AK-47 that deals D8 damage, the M-16 that deals D8+1 and the FN FAL that deals D8+2 (in addition to the range differences I've already mentioned). Hmmmm. This then eliminates the Munitions trait altogether, which is a trait that I really like (because it replaces my old weapon tinkering rules and streamlines them). I like the idea that your insect soldier makes his weapon better just by virtue of his ability to maintain that weapon. There must be some other way to mirror this in the game...

Reliability. Basically, how often you botch with the weapon (it jams; it overheats; it needs oil; whatever that slows you down for a round). On an attack roll of 1, you automatically fail, and you have to roll a second time to see if you botch and your weapon requires some maintenance. If the second roll is also 1, you have to stop and fix your weapon for 1 round. The second die depends on the reliability of your weapon; a highly-reliable weapon lets you roll a D12, while a weapon prone to jams and requiring more maintenance (therefore also cheaper to get with Clout) may require you to roll a D6 or even a D4.

Clip size. This would be a factor in the grittier games only, so I'm not sure if this should be in the primary stat block for weapons. It could be included for 'informational purposes' in the high-adventure setting, but become an important factor in the more crunchy games.

I COULD bring back the weapon tinkering rules in some way, allowing you to mod your weapon in minor ways (shifting range, damage and reliability all up to one rating if you have the training). Let's brainstorm here...

Let's say that the AM-16 (the standard infantry assault rifle) has the following ratings:
Damage D8+1; Range 6; Reliability D8; Clout Cost 30

With Munitions, you get to improve different facets of your weapon, although you are capped at improving any one aspect no better than 2 shifts. So, with a trusty AM-16 and Munitions +4, you could improve your Damage to D8+3, your Range to 7 (out of a max of 8), and your Reliability to D10 (out of a max of D12). You effectively still have an AM-16, you just keep yours in such great condition that it out-performs the weapon of all of your allies.

Wow. I think I just solved this. Thanks for helping!

V is for Villains

While there are a number of ways to establish the tone, theme and style of a campaign, the quickest, most efficient and most memorable way may be through the primary villain you use. Piggy-backing on yesterday's post about play styles, you can look at villains and see how this inherently plays into establishing the tone for everything that follows. Here are three examples:

Grim-n-gritty. An embittered fly general wants to bring about the rebirth of the great Fly empires of the past. He has managed to pull a dozen petty warlords under his sway, has used a new street drug popular in the seedier cities such as the garbage can and throughout the junk yard to finance his re-emergence, and has actually recruited a ladybug double-agent to serve as his head of intelligence, giving him sudden knowledge, power and resources to build a military infrastructure quickly. The ants are sent to take part in urban warfare among gangs in the junk yard, hoping to infiltrate his network and hit him where it hurts, breaking down his economic supply lines and upsetting his intelligence network.

Medium (about where the comics fall). A cruel centipede warlord and master of the martial arts holds an underground contest (of the martial arts) to declare a champion of the underworld. His first prize in this contest is a batch of the elixir of life, which will heal even the most grievous of wounds, or bring a fallen ally back to life. The ants enter this contest to win the elixir for their queen, or to keep it from falling into the hands of an enemy.

Seat of your pants. A cybernetic amalgam of two great villains of the past - a powerful hornet commander and a cruel spider assassin - has been reborn through arcane magic. He has gone on a rampage, seeking revenge against all those who worked against him in either life, including the wasp empress, the ant queen, and the leaders of about ten different city states. He has built an army of cybernetic freaks that never sleep, cobbled from the dead and powered by mysticism, marching on an endless quest to ravage the backyard.

All three options belong in the game, but which one you select impacts almost every other choice you make. I write the comics and play the game in the middle setting myself, but I can easily see people adapting it towards either extreme without having to house rule much of it.

U is for Unlimited Ammo and Cartoon Physics

All entertainment requires some level of willing suspension of disbelief. You know as you watch a movie or read a book or play a game that none of this is really happening, but you allow your brain to enter a pretend world that operates under certain rules and abides by those rules - it has verisimilitude.

It's imperative that the core rules establish the level of disbelief expected. Games can feel disjointed if one player approaches the thing from the perspective of gritty, real-world simulation while another tries to blow a predator up like a balloon with a huge air pump.  The fact that you are playing 6 mm tall insects with machine guns throws authenticity right out the window.

However, two concepts help to reinforce this. First of all, you have unlimited ammo. It's no fun to track ammo, and there's nothing inherently useful in worrying about it, so you just don't. If you have a rifle or pistol, you also have enough ammo for it on your person at all times.

The other thing is carrying capacity and props. The props in the game/comic are big - if you've ever seen a pair of my binoculars, you know they are about half the size of an ant's head. Somehow, these magically get hidden in a tiny belt pouch, and pulled out again later. In essence, because the props are so large, every character carries a bag of holding. You have a satchel, and that satchel fits everything you would ever need for your adventures. These little details help to nudge the players and referee in the direction of dropping other 'real world' concepts in favor of flavor and fun.