GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 4 – Saxon Armour’s – Ceorl & Oegn

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saxgroup1

So in the first mecha design post I used the MTS to design an average KA, the Sweord. In the second mecha design post I used the MTS to design a top of the line KA, the Pendragon. In this post I’m going to look at creating mecha from some of the other factions in the world, in this case the Saxons. I still havent entirely pinned down how the Saxons will work and what exactly they are yet so this may change a bit. However I’ll throw out a list of concept stuff for both the Saxons and their mecha and work from that. Continue reading…

GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court – Part 2 – Mecha Design – The Sweord

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groon

So as I mentioned back in Part 1 I’m planning to use Mekton Zeta for the giant robot portions of this game. By that I mean the combat and the mecha construction. Theres actually a (weirdly?) small number of dedicated giant robot/mecha rpg’s and Mekton Zeta is one of the oldest and in my opinion one of the best. A number of the more recent mecha games use systems where the attributes are defined narratively, e.g. I mentioned Camelot TRIGGER in the last post. It uses FATE so you have statistics for your robot like “Torso: Great armour”. Nothing wrong with that per se, it lets you quickly model the salient features and start playing. I actually have a lot of time for the FATE system and its various offshoots. But when it comes to giant robots, even if you’re talking about super robots, I like the feel of getting down to the nitty gritty, to the nuts and bolts, to complex systems and sub-systems and lots of numbers. Mekton Zeta’s mecha construction system is a nice middle ground between the fairly light system of something like FATE and the overly detailed/fiddly tech creation systems from something like the Silhouette Vehicle Creation System or T:TNE’s Fire, Fusion and Steel (basically I dont want to deal with complex forumlae). Continue reading…

Summer Lovin

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This is more or less the first week of my “summer holidays” (well more of a break while exams are on). So my plan for this week was to do nothing at all other than what I felt like (for those wits wondering what the difference is…shit theres no emoticon for giving someone the fingers). Which is going quite well. But my “at least one post a week” initiative has been working quite well for the last month or so, so I thought I’d throw up my tentative summer plans. I’d written a (hilariously) amusing line about what you can do when I inevitably fail. But fuck it. Maybe framing my endeavours like that isnt helping. So I’m going to keep it upbeat (Eye of the Tiger will be playing during the film version of this). Here is what I WILL get done this summer.

Programming

-> Finish Head First C# and The Programmers Guide to C# (June)
-> Get an alpha of Ave Imperator up and running (July & August)

Writing

-> From June 1st – August 31st write 1000 words a day (or 7000 a week if something unavoidable comes up)

Personal Life

-> Loose a minimum of 2 lbs a week from now until September (and hopefully after that as well)
-> Find a job (This isnt something I want to do but sadly need to do, hopefully my current contract gets renewed because I quite like working in the School of Business and with the Springboard Initiative. But I need money and as always I lamanet that that means finding a job).

I dont think these goals are impossible. To be honest, I think even objectively, I could achieve them easily enough. I’ve done so in the past. Its just a question of motivation. I cant really see my generally nihilistic outlook changing but I do want to just well, “put it over there”, I dont need to discard it I just dont want to be held down by it.

GIWTR 01 – A Mecha in King Arthur’s Court

Michael Leave a comment

What the fuck is GIWTR? I hear the world call out as the entirety of the internet voraciously consumes my latest blog post. Worry not gentle reader, the mysteries behind the acronym will be revealed in the very next sentence. It stands for “Games I want to run”. I’ve mentioned in the past how for some odd reason spending time playing/running rpg’s makes me feel weirdly guilty these days (still cant really decide what makes it stand out, its no more time consuming than my other pastimes) so thats one barrier to getting games off the ground. Though its largely a theoretical one as the main barrier is the geographic dispersal of my usual gaming group and our seeming inability to schedule a game. But I’m sick of thinking “Oh I’d like to run this game, oh but I wont get the chance or I should be thinking about something more productive”, fuck it, from now on I’m just going to throw up whatever ideas I have whenever I have them. I’m going to think about them as much as I want and spend as much time on them as I want. You hear me brain? Anyhow the idea I’m kicking around at the moment is a post-historical reskinning of the King Arthur mythos where plate armour and warhorse’s have been replaced with anachronistic pieces of super hi-technology, specifically big fucking robots. And not “Real robots”, no sir, “Super robots” all the way. Well perhaps not. Somewhere inbetween really. Functionally equivalent to real robots but treated in terms of technology as super robots would probably be the best (if slightly unweildy way) to put it. Continue reading…

Ave Imperator – Design Journal – 04 – Money Matters

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I’ve been focusing quite a bit on the mechanical nuts and bolts around the nitty gritty of gladiatorial combat. Which is clearly an important part of the game. However another important part of the game is running the ludus, i.e. playing as the lanista. This play is split into three main sections, the first is managing your gladiators, training them, keeping them sweet, buying new ones and so on. The second major part is the political or social end of things, making contacts, settings up bouts, trying to earn a bit more here and undercut a competing lanistae there (actually, as I’ll mention again, undercutting is more or less what you dont want to do). The third part is the day to day running of the ludus, insuring you have enough supplies and money to pay wages, make meals etc. Its this last part I’m going to talk about for a bit. Continue reading…

Dragons Crown – The end of Dwarfgate

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Spent far too long this week arguing on internet forums, which is like fighting sand, no ones really interested in discussion and will never be convinced to change their opinion. Its just arguing for arguing’s sake.For a niche game Dragon’s Crown has been quite prominent in the games media over the last week or two, the reactions have been mixed, even from the same website (e.g. compare the varying response on Penny Arcade between the comic, the positive comments from Mr Holkins and Krahulik and the negative article from Mr Kuchera). Though a lot of the commentary has been questioning the design of the sorceress characer (and to a certain extent the amazon). Continue reading…

What anime’s worth watching on Netflix

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If you’re looking for streaming anime I’d suggest Cruncyroll, even the free subscription has a fairly solid selection. There’s also Neon Alley which has a solid selection. Both of these also have simulcast stuff from the current season of anime in Japan. (Of course what I actually recommend is tweaking your media player setup to a ridiculously anal level and then only watching 1080p 10bit BD re-encodes). But for those of you who already have a Netflix subscription and want to know what to watch here is my (super brief) opinion on the anime available. Continue reading…

Ave Imperator – Design Journal – 03 – System Matters

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As I mentioned in the last post after fiddling with the core mechanic for The City I ended up re-assessing the system I was using for Ave Imperator. My original goal for the system was to have to be as “realistic” as possible. Which is somewhat of a silly goal, when people talk about realistic systems they generally mean a system with a decent level of verisimilitude. People want the system to “feel” real. Not necessarily fully simulate reality (because that would be both extremely complex and demanding and also runs the risk of being rather boring). To boil it down even further, all I really wanted was a combat system that felt fairly lethal, as when talking about rpg systems most people equate highly lethal or “gritty” combat with realism. The system I had was decent enough, as far as it went. It was a dice pool system that worked for the most part but had some odd probablity issues (mostly the weird scaling on the probability of success). It was also open to abuse in that attributes were much more useful than skills. Which wasnt really an issue per se as the player would never be manually generating any characters (more on that later). But after playing BRP for the first time in ages last week, and working on dice probability stuff for The City, I just couldnt leave the Ave Imperator system as it was. So I’ve come up with something new, and, I think anyway, better. At least in terms of combat its a bit more involved but also hopefully more fun. Continue reading…